TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hagen, Alexa von
A1  - Kohnen, Saskia
A1  - Stadie, Nicole
T1  - Foreign language attainment of children/adolescents with poor literacy skills: a systematic review and meta-analysis
T2  - Educational psychology review
N2  - This systematic review investigated how successful children/adolescents with poor literacy skills learn a foreign language compared with their peers with typical literacy skills. Moreover, we explored whether specific characteristics related to participants, foreign language instruction, and assessment moderated scores on foreign language tests in this population. Overall, 16 studies with a total of 968 participants (poor reader/spellers: n = 404; control participants: n = 564) met eligibility criteria. Only studies focusing on English as a foreign language were available. Available data allowed for meta-analyses on 10 different measures of foreign language attainment. In addition to standard mean differences (SMDs), we computed natural logarithms of the ratio of coefficients of variation (CVRs) to capture individual variability between participant groups. Significant between-study heterogeneity, which could not be explained by moderator analyses, limited the interpretation of results. Although children/adolescents with poor literacy skills on average showed lower scores on foreign language phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and reading comprehension measures, their performance varied significantly more than that of control participants. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent group differences between the foreign language scores of children/adolescents with poor and typical literacy skills are representative of individual poor readers/spellers. Taken together, our results indicate that foreign language skills in children/adolescents with poor literacy skills are highly variable. We discuss the limitations of past research that can guide future steps toward a better understanding of individual differences in foreign language attainment of children/adolescents with poor literacy skills.
KW  - Poor literacy
KW  - Dyslexia
KW  - Foreign language
KW  - Bilingualism
KW  - Meta-analysis
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63678
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-636781
SN  - 1573-336X
N1  - Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL. The work presented in this manuscript was carried out as part of Alexa von Hagen’s PhD candidature in the Erasmus Mundus joint International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain (IDEALAB) and was funded by the European Commission within the action nr. 2015-1603/001-001-EMJD (Framework Partnership Agreement 2012–2025).
N1  - Institut: Psychologie
VL  - 33.2020
IS  - 2
SP  - 459
EP  - 488
PB  - Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
CY  - Dordrecht [u.a.]
ER  -