Recent studies on ESL learners' visual word recognition have reported that skills and processes developed in first language (Ll) orthography transfer to  visual word recognition processes in English. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the findings of ESL leamers'  visual word recognition studies in terms of ESL learner's phonological awareness, which is known to be related to reading development in L1. The paper first reviews the studies on L1 reading development in English speaking countries, providing a brief overview of notion of phonological awareness and its relations to reading development. It then illustrates cross-linguistic variations in development of phonological awareness by  comparing people of different L1 orthographical or phonological background. Further, it reviews findings on ESL learners' visual word recognition studies,  illustrating that ESL learners who have logographic L1 backgrounds tend to decode English printed word by whole word based strategy. Finally, the paper explores the possibilities to reinterpret the findings in terms of well-reported low level of phonemic awareness of people who have no alphabetic script in L1.  Implications for ESL education for Japanese speakers are discussed.

論文