The Future of Education

The ability to read and write fluently could be seen as a vital skill for anyone who wishes to be a competent, valuable and competitive member of today’s society. With regard to learners learning to read and write in a second language, this is a mammoth task, especially in an opaque orthography such as English where the correspondence between the phonemes and graphemes is not highly predictable. This has clear implications for many South African English second language learners (L2) who attempt to become proficient in reading and spelling because they cannot always rely on their knowledge of sound-letter correspondence when reading or writing new words. Researchers have argued that second-language learners could possibly benefit from being taught via alternative approaches such as orthographic strategies. These strategies emphasise the visual nature of a task and allow children to form mental orthographic images (MOI) of words or visual representations of words which, one could argue, might be more beneficial when learning the reading and spelling of English words. Emanating from the above, the researcher hypothesised that the utilisation of mental orthographic imagery was an appropriate lens through which to investigate whether L2 learners could significantly improve their reading and spelling skills, i.e. via the implementation of an alternative route to phonological processing, namely the orthographic route, and more specifically via the application of visual imagery. Post-test results confirmed the results of previous research that argues for the interactive nature of different cognitive and linguistic systems as learners were systematically guided to store visual orthographic images of words in their long-term lexicons. Moreover, the results have shown that L2 learners in the experimental group (n = 44) significantly outperformed L2 learners in the control group (n = 44) whose intervention involved phonological awareness (and coding) to improve their reading and spelling development. Against this background, the findings of this study look promising and have shown that learners can be systematically guided to apply visual imagery to successfully store and retrieve mental images of words from their output lexicons. Moreover, results from the present study could play an important role in directing research into this under-researched aspect of L2 literacy development within the South African and international education contexts. 

Keywords: English second language learners, learning disabilities, reading and spelling development, visual imagery as cognitive strategy.