PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

This study investigated whether the cross-language relations of children’s phonological awareness skills influenced their first- (L1: Chinese), second- (L2: English) and third- language (L3: Malay) early reading ability. A battery of tests was designed to measure children’s phonological awareness and reading ability. Three tasks of phonological awareness and two tasks of reading were administered in Chinese, English and Malay languages. The tasks that assessed phonological awareness skills included deletion, blending and segmentation of sound, and two early reading tasks included word and sentence reading. One-hundred and fifty (150) Chinese-speaking children participated in this study. These participants were Year 1 students from six national Chinese primary schools in Malaysia. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data. Results revealed that there was no skill transfer from L1 to L2 and L3 due to orthography differences. Cross-language transfer was found in L3 phonological awareness which strongly predicted L1, L2 and L3 early reading ability.