October 31, 2019
Venue: Ponderosa Commons Oak House, Multipurpose Room PCOH 2012Everybody welcome! No need to RSVP.
This event will take place at the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
LLED Research Seminar Series: Cognitive Retroactive Transfer of Language Skills among Bilingual Readers
Dr. Salim Abu Rabia, Professor, University of Haifa, Israel
This talk will discuss the concept “Transfer of Skills” and suggests a better way to test it under experimental research design. This study examined the effects of an English intervention program helping struggling readers improve their reading and writing skills in English as a foreign language (FL). Transferring linguistic skills from L2/FL to L1 is termed “Cognitive Retroactive Transfer”.
Tests were administered to the experimental and control groups to assess orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, syntax awareness, reading accuracy and reading comprehension in Arabic and English. The experimental group received an intervention program in English, but not in Arabic or Hebrew the first language of the readers, and the assessments were administered before and after the intervention.
The findings indicated a significant improvement in most of the experimental group’s linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in both Arabic (Hebrew) and English after the English intervention program. The results will be discussed in relation to the “transfer of language skills” and the implications for learning and teaching.
Salim Abu Rabia is professor at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. He obtained his PhD from The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education affiliated to the University of Toronto (1993). His research interests are: Reading and language learning, cross-cultural reading and learning, reading in different orthographies, social and cognitive aspects of language learning, intervention programs among at-risk populations.
