Empirically Based Research on English and Farsi Literacy

Abstract

Reading literacy as the outstanding subfield in second language acquisition has influenced teaching and assessment; however, literacy program in the L1 along with second or foreign languages requires further research in an EFL situation. Thus, the current study aims to focus on learning Farsi as the first language, and English as the second language of 15 random sampled first grade elementary participants. In order to observe the rate of success in each language, three features which are number of pauses (Robinson, Ting & Unwin 1995), false starts and repetitions (Skehan & Foster 1999) were analyzed so as to have a thick description, and to reach saturation. The obtained results show that there is no relationship between these three features in pairs except false starts and repetitions in English pretest and posttest, which is to some extent strong. Among three stated features, in English pretest the number of pauses and in posttest the number of false starts received the highest mean scores which indicate participants’ problems in English Language learning. Therefore, it is worth noting the importance of developing first language reading literacy and then to promote the second language at first grade of elementary school.

Keywords: False Start; Pause; Reading Literacy; Repetition; Sandwich Model