Multilingual Children Can Read – But Not Necessarily in Every Language

Table of Contents

What teachers need to know about reading development across writing systems

For teachers, literacy specialists and education professionals working with multilingual learners.

Consider an eight-year-old child in your classroom that speaks Arabic at home and Dutch at school. He can participate confidently in Dutch discussions and can read a Dutch story independently. He writes sentences, answers comprehension questions and perhaps even reads chapter books.
Now you ask him to read a short text in Arabic and he struggles. Perhaps he reads very slowly. perhaps he knows some letters but cannot combine them fluently or he can recognize familiar words but cannot read an unfamiliar sentence. Maybe he can speak Arabic perfectly well but hardly read it at all.
What we certainly should not assume is: “He is eight. He should be able to read his home language.” and also not: “He speaks Arabic, so he must be able to read Arabic.”

To understand a multilingual child's reading development, we need to consider not only the language and its writing system, but also the learner's actual experience with literacy in that language.
This is where the concept of entry point becomes useful. Rather than starting with assumptions based on age or spoken language proficiency, we need to establish where the learner is in their particular literacy trajectory. The differences between writing systems help explain why this matters.

Every teacher knows that speaking and reading are different forms of language experience. What teachers of multilinguals need to consider is that learning to read is not the same process in every language.

Reading is not simply “transferring literacy” from one language to another

When children learn to read, they have to discover how their writing system represents language. In some writing systems, this means learning relatively systematic relationships between letters and sounds. In others, children have to learn syllabic symbols, or they learn characters that carry information about meaning and pronunciation. Sometimes the challenge is not primarily the writing system at all.
Some literacy skills transfer across languages, but that transfer does not eliminate the need to learn the specific features of a new writing system and language.
Arabic, for example, adds another important dimension: the language children speak at home may differ considerably from the literary variety they encounter in books and at school

Simply asking whether the child can read, is not enough. It is more important to find out what this child can read, in which language, in which writing system, and with what previous experience.

1. Dutch: learning to decode an alphabetic system

Dutch uses the Latin alphabet. For beginning readers, one of the important tasks is to establish connections between written symbols and speech sounds and then combine these into words. A beginning reader learns to move from something like: b – oo – m → boom

Because Dutch has relatively consistent letter–sound correspondences, children can often develop accurate basic decoding relatively quickly once formal reading instruction begins. However, individual progress varies, and decoding accuracy is only one component of reading development.

Research comparing reading acquisition across languages has repeatedly shown that children learning relatively transparent alphabetic orthographies tend to achieve high levels of basic decoding accuracy earlier than children learning deeper orthographies such as English.

But there is an important distinction here: Decoding a word is not the same as understanding a text.
A Dutch child may learn to decode school, vriend, regen or vergeten quite efficiently, but this does not mean that the child automatically has the vocabulary, background knowledge, morphology, inferencing skills and reading experience needed to understand increasingly complex school texts.
So even in Dutch, reading development does not simply end when a child can “sound out words”.

2. Vietnamese: alphabetic – but visually richer than Dutch

Vietnamese is also written with a Latin-based alphabet. At first glance, this might suggest that learning to read Vietnamese should look very similar to learning to read Dutch, and there is indeed an important similarity: Vietnamese has a highly transparent orthography.
Children learn systematic relationships between written symbols and sounds.
But Vietnamese adds another layer: tone is represented orthographically through diacritics, alongside vowel distinctions and combinations.

Consider the Vietnamese syllable ma. Depending on the tone and diacritics, forms such as ma, má, mà, mả, mã and mạ represent different words or meanings. For example, ma can mean “ghost,” while má can mean “cheek” or “mother” in some varieties of Vietnamese.

The tone marks and other diacritics are integral to the written word. They are not optional decorations: they convey linguistic information and can distinguish words. Children therefore need to attend closely to the complete visual configuration of the written syllable, not simply recognise its letters.

Research with Vietnamese children in Vietnam has found that after one year of formal reading instruction, children can already show very high levels of word-reading accuracy. At the same time, reading unfamiliar words and understanding connected text remain more variable. This gives us an important insight: rapid decoding does not mean that all aspects of literacy have developed equally rapidly.

3. Korean: an alphabet – but not a linear-looking one

Korean provides another fascinating example. Hangul is an alphabetic writing system, but its letters are arranged into syllable blocks. Instead of seeing a sequence of letters written linearly, children encounter visual units that represent syllables.

For example: 한 (han) contains the consonant ㅎ (h), the vowel ㅏ (a) and the final consonant ㄴ (n), arranged together in one syllable block.
This means that Korean children have to learn both:

the individual graphic units, and
how those units are organized into syllable blocks.

Research on Korean reading development shows that the importance of different orthographic units changes as children become more experienced readers. Early readers rely strongly on smaller units, while word-level processing becomes increasingly important with development.

So even when two languages both use an alphabet, the reading experience can be quite different.

“It uses an alphabet” is therefore not enough information for a teacher.

4. Chinese: learning to recognize and organize characters

Chinese is fundamentally different from the alphabetic examples above. Chinese characters represent morphemes and syllables rather than individual phonemes in the way alphabetic writing systems do.
When learning to read Chinese, children do not learn a small inventory of letters and then simply combine them to generate the majority of words. Instead, they gradually build a large repertoire of written characters and learn how these are structured.

Many characters contain semantic and phonetic components that provide useful information, but these cues are not equivalent to the straightforward letter–sound correspondences found in a transparent alphabetic system which changes the nature of early reading.

One familiar example is 明 (míng), meaning “bright.” It combines 日 (rì, sun) and 月 (yuè, moon). The components provide a useful illustration of how the structure of a character can contribute to its interpretation. However, not all Chinese characters are constructed in this way, and components do not always provide a transparent clue to a character's meaning or pronunciation.

Children who learn how to reach Chinese develop:

visual-orthographic knowledge,
knowledge of character structure,
phonological awareness at the syllable level,
morphological awareness,
semantic knowledge,
and increasingly sophisticated knowledge of how characters and words work together.

Research shows that the relative importance of these skills changes over development. In the early stages, orthographic awareness plays a particularly important role. As children become more experienced readers, morphological awareness becomes increasingly important.
The learning does not stop after the first year or two: Chinese literacy is cumulative. Children continue to encounter new characters, compounds, idioms and increasingly specialized vocabulary throughout primary and secondary education.
This is why it would be misleading to say simply: “Chinese children learn to read later.” They learn different components of literacy over a much longer developmental trajectory.

5. Japanese: one language, several writing systems

Japanese makes the situation even more interesting. Children learn to read using several scripts: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
Hiragana is a highly consistent syllabic/moraic script. Children can therefore establish relatively systematic relationships between symbols and pronunciation.
Japanese children often begin acquiring kana even before formal primary-school literacy instruction. Kanji is different. A kanji character carries morphological and semantic information, and a single character can have different readings depending on the word and context.
The different scripts are visible in ordinary Japanese writing. For example, the word sakura (cherry blossom) can be written in Hiragana as さくら, in Katakana as サクラ, or with Kanji as 桜. These forms do not represent three different spoken languages. They illustrate different ways of representing the same word in writing, although the choice of script can affect its conventional use and nuance in context.
So a Japanese child is effectively developing literacy through different kinds of written representation within the same language, which is reflected in the educational sequence. Children first develop familiarity with Hiragana and then progressively acquire Kanji.

Under Japan's curriculum allocation, pupils learn 80 new Kanji in Grade 1, 160 in Grade 2 and 200 in Grade 3. These are the numbers introduced at each grade, not cumulative totals. This means that a Japanese child in Grade 1 may already read Kana quite confidently while still having a relatively small and developing repertoire of Kanji. This distinction is crucial.
If we give the child a text containing only Hiragana, we might conclude: “This child reads Japanese.” If we give the same child a text containing unfamiliar Kanji, the conclusion might look very different.
The child has not suddenly become a poor reader. The reading task has changed.

6. Arabic: where script and language both matter

Arabic is particularly important for teachers working with multilingual children because there are two different issues to consider simultaneously.
1) The writing system.
2) The relationship between spoken and written Arabic.

Arabic is an alphabetic script written from right to left where short vowels are generally not represented in ordinary written Arabic. Beginning readers are therefore often introduced to fully or partially vowelled texts, where diacritical marks make the pronunciation more explicit.

For example, كَتَبَ (kataba, “he wrote”) includes short-vowel marks that help the reader identify its pronunciation. In ordinary unvowelled writing, the same consonantal sequence appears as كتب. The reader must rely more heavily on knowledge of Arabic vocabulary, morphology and context to interpret it correctly.
This illustrates why a child's ability to read a fully vowelled Arabic text does not necessarily predict how easily they will read an unvowelled text.
A beginning reader may encounter a word with the information needed to reconstruct its pronunciation, whereas an experienced reader encounters the same consonantal structure without all the vowels and has to use:

lexical knowledge,
morphology,
syntax,
semantics,
and context

to determine how it should be read.

So Arabic literacy involves a developmental shift from a relatively transparent form of the script towards a much less explicitly marked form.

There is also another issue. Many Arabic-speaking children grow up speaking a regional variety of Arabic at home and encounter Modern Standard Arabic primarily through formal education, books and media. This diglossic situation means that children need to learn to read in a language variety that is not identical to the language variety used in everyday family interaction, which has enormous implications for multilingual education.

For example, a child who uses Egyptian Arabic at home might use إيه (ēh) when asking “what?”, but encounter ماذا (mādhā) in a Modern Standard Arabic text. The child is not simply learning to decode written symbols; they are also developing familiarity with vocabulary and structures that may differ from those used in everyday family communication.

***

Coming back to the eight-year-old Arabic-speaking child in a Dutch school: the child has had several years of daily experience with spoken Arabic but how much experience has he had with reading Arabic?

Perhaps:

Arabic is used extensively in conversation at home.
Parents do not regularly read Arabic books with him.
He attended a Dutch primary school from age four.
His formal literacy instruction has been almost entirely in Dutch.
He has learned to decode Dutch words, read stories, write sentences and complete school assignments.
He has had little systematic instruction in Arabic literacy.

Now we ask him to read an Arabic text. His performance may be considerably below his Dutch reading performance, which is not surprising.
It is exactly what we would expect from his literacy history. With regards to Arabic, we may also need to ask: What variety of Arabic is this text written in?
A child can have strong spoken competence in a home variety and still have considerably less experience with the literary variety used in written texts.
Therefore having Arabic as home language does not tell us how much Arabic literacy he should be expected to have.

7. Greek: decoding may be relatively easy; spelling takes longer

Greek uses an alphabetic writing system and is relatively regular for reading. Children can therefore develop accurate decoding relatively efficiently. But reading and spelling do not develop in exactly the same way.
Greek contains several different ways of representing the same sound. The sound /i/, for example, can be represented by several different spellings, including ι, η, υ, ει and οι. For example, the words σπίτι (house), μήλο (apple), λύκος (wolf), είναι (is/are) and φίλοι (friends) contain this sound, but represent it in different ways in writing. A child may learn to recognise and pronounce these words correctly when reading, yet still need considerable practice to remember which spelling is required when writing them independently.

Consequently, a child may be able to read a word correctly without yet being able to spell it correctly. This is an important reminder for teachers:

Reading and writing are related skills – but they are not mirror images of each other. A child's ability to decode a written word can be considerably ahead of their ability to reproduce its correct orthographic form.

8. Indic writing systems: neither “alphabet” nor “characters”

Languages such as Hindi use writing systems that are sometimes described as syllabic alphabets or abugidas.
Devanagari, used to write Hindi and several other languages, illustrates this difference clearly. A consonant such as क represents ka, with an inherent vowel /ə/ (schwa). When another vowel is required, the written form changes.

For example:

क = ka
का = kā
कि = ki
कु = ku

Notice that the vowel sign in कि is placed to the left of the consonant, even though it is pronounced after the consonant in the syllable. The visual arrangement therefore does not always follow the left-to-right sequence that a learner familiar with Latin script might expect.

For a child accustomed to Latin script, the visual logic can therefore be unfamiliar. Children need to learn not only the consonant and vowel correspondences, but also how these elements combine visually to represent syllables.
At the same time, this does not mean that children learning Devanagari are simply “slower readers”. They are learning a different mapping between speech and writing.

Therefore the relevant question is not: “How many months does this script take?” but: “What does the child need to learn in order to become an efficient reader in this writing system?”

What teachers should expect

Multilingual children do not necessarily develop oral language, reading and writing skills at the same rate in all their languages. Their literacy profiles may look very different depending on their language use, educational experiences and opportunities to learn to read and write.

Consider these hypothetical examples:

Language	Oral language	Reading	Writing
Dutch	Very strong	Strong	Strong
Arabic	Very strong	Emerging	Emerging
English	Moderate	Moderate	Emerging
Chinese	Limited oral use	Very limited	Very limited

Or:

Language	Oral language	Reading	Writing
Vietnamese	Strong	Strong	Moderate
Dutch	Very strong	Very strong	Very strong
Chinese	Some comprehension	Emerging	Minimal

These profiles illustrate why we cannot infer a child's reading ability from their spoken language proficiency alone. A child may speak a language confidently but have little experience reading it. Another child may have developed substantial reading skills in a language they use less often in conversation.

Such differences are not inherently abnormal. They need to be understood in the context of each child's language and literacy experiences.

The important question is not whether a child's skills are equally developed across languages, but what the child has learned, what they have had opportunities to learn, and what they need next.

The entry point matters

There is another question we often overlook when we talk about multilingual children's literacy: Where is this child entering the literacy process?

A child's chronological age tells us when they were born. It does not tell us where they are in the process of learning to read and write a particular language. An eight-year-old may have been reading Dutch for three years but may be encountering written Arabic for the first time.
A nine-year-old may be able to read Chinese characters because they have attended Chinese-language school since the age of four, while another nine-year-old who speaks Chinese at home may only recognize a small number of characters.

A child who has recently begun learning Japanese may already know the Latin alphabet and therefore have considerable experience with print, but still be at the beginning of their learning of Hiragana, Katakana or Kanji.

This is why I find that the entry point of a learner is more useful than age-based expectations.
The entry point is the point at which we meet the child in their actual learning trajectory. That entry point is shaped by much more than age:

what the child already knows orally;
which languages they use and with whom;
which writing systems they have encountered;
whether they have received formal literacy instruction;
how much reading and writing they have done;
which variety of the language they know;
and what kind of literacy practices are part of their everyday life.

This also means that entry point is not the same as language level. A child may have an advanced oral repertoire in Arabic and still have a beginning literacy entry point in Arabic.
Another child may have limited spoken Chinese but an advanced reading repertoire because they have received several years of formal Chinese literacy instruction.

So, instead of asking “What should a nine-year-old be able to read?” it would be better to focus on what this child's entry point is into reading this particular language.

Identifying the entry point helps us establish realistic expectations, recognise what the child already knows, and determine what they need to learn next. It also helps us decide what kind of support is appropriate.

The next step is to examine the child's actual abilities and literacy experience rather than relying on age, home language or general impressions of proficiency.

Age gives us a number. The entry point gives us a starting place.

To understand a multilingual child's learning trajectory, it is useful to distinguish between three related concepts: entry repertoire, entry level and entry point.

Entry repertoire refers to what the child brings to the learning situation: languages, literacy experiences, strategies, knowledge and communicative resources.
Entry level describes what the child can currently do in a particular language or literacy task.
Entry point is where we choose to begin teaching or providing support, based on what we know about the child's existing knowledge, skills and learning needs.

These three are related, but they are not interchangeable.

For example: a nine-year-old Arabic-speaking child in a Dutch school

Entry repertoire: Rich spoken Arabic, strong Dutch literacy, knowledge of books and print, and perhaps some knowledge of Arabic letters.
Entry level in Arabic literacy: Beginning reader.
Entry point for support: The child may need support with Arabic decoding and with the relationship between spoken and written Arabic, building on what they already know rather than treating them as a learner with no relevant prior knowledge.

Linguistic and literacy entry points

The concept of an entry point can be applied to different aspects of learning. Two distinctions are particularly useful when working with multilingual learners.

The linguistic entry point concerns the knowledge a learner can draw on from their existing language repertoire when learning a new language feature. For example, a learner's experience with consonant length in one language may provide a useful starting point for understanding consonant length in another.

The literacy entry point concerns a learner's existing experience and skills in reading and writing a particular language, as well as the opportunities they have had to develop those skills. A child may speak a language confidently but have had little or no formal literacy instruction in it. Another child may have extensive reading experience in a language they rarely use in conversation.

These two entry points can inform one another, but they are not the same. Linguistic knowledge can provide resources for literacy development, yet speaking a language does not necessarily mean knowing how to read or write it.

For teachers, the practical task is therefore to investigate both what the learner brings to the learning situation and what they can currently do.

The key question is not simply how old the child is, which language they speak at home, or what level they appear to have. It is where they are in their actual learning trajectory – and what they already know that can help them take the next step.

Assessing a child’s literacy: five questions to ask

Once we understand the child's entry point, we can investigate their literacy development more systematically. The following questions can help teachers distinguish between different abilities and identify appropriate next steps. In my trainings and workshops, I help teachers and other educators formulate prompts that are tailored to the individual learners and their specific situations.

What can the child do orally in this language?

What literacy instruction has the child received?

What can the child decode?

What can the child understand when reading?

What can the child write?

These questions help us distinguish between oral proficiency, decoding, reading comprehension and writing. These abilities are related, but they do not necessarily develop at the same rate. Understanding a child's experience in each area can help teachers identify an appropriate starting point and consider what support may be needed next.

Script familiarity is not the same as reading ability

A child who knows the Latin alphabet does not automatically know how to read every language written with it. Similarly, a child who reads Dutch can not automatically read french or Vietnamese fluently, and a child who reads Arabic cannot necessarily transfer all of that literacy directly to Dutch.

There can be cross-linguistic transfer. Phonological awareness, metalinguistic awareness, familiarity with print and reading comprehension strategies can support literacy development across languages.

However, transfer does not mean that reading ability transfers automatically. Children still need to learn how a particular language represents spoken language in writing, including the conventions and structures specific to that language.

Reading is a developmental trajectory

Reading is not a single ability that a child either has or does not have. Development involves learning to recognise written forms, decode words, read fluently, understand connected text and eventually engage with increasingly complex academic language.

The trajectory can look different across languages and writing systems. A Japanese child may read Hiragana confidently while still developing their knowledge of Kanji. An Arabic-speaking child may read fully vowelled texts more easily than unvowelled ones. A child learning Chinese may recognise many characters while still developing the vocabulary needed to understand complex texts.

These differences are not contradictory. They reflect different stages and demands within a child's literacy development.

What teachers need to know

Before deciding that a multilingual child is behind in a language, ask three questions:

- What language?
Which language variety are we assessing, and what does the child know orally?

- What writing system?
What does the child need to learn to read and write in this particular system?

- What literacy experience?
What opportunities has the child had to develop reading and writing in this language?

The answers can change how we interpret a child's performance and what support we provide.

A multilingual child may be an advanced reader in one language and a beginning reader in another. The difference may reflect their educational history, opportunities for literacy development, language knowledge and the demands of the writing system.

Especially when working with multilingual children, we should assess what they have learned – not what we assume they should already know.

Exploring multilingual literacy in practice

Would you like to explore these questions in more depth in your own educational context? I welcome enquiries from teachers, schools and education professionals interested in individual consultations, professional development sessions, workshops or webinars on multilingualism, language development and literacy across languages.

Please get in touch to discuss your questions or explore what might be useful for your team.

⇒ When you work with multilingual learners, how do you find out what they have already learned to read and write in their different languages?

A special thank you goes to the parents who helped me with the examples for this article:
Eman (Arabic), Mei (Chinese), Maria (Greek), Umi (Japanese), Ha-eun (Korean), Linh (Vietnamese).