Bilingual learners may fail to notice even obvious cross-language cognates unless explicitly trained in language similarity awareness¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q1
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q1 i? The author argues that Kurdish bilinguals forfeit the cognate advantage if they receive no awareness training, citing similar findings by August et al. (2005). → Kasap 2018

Evidence¶

Kasap 2018¶

Kasap, S. (2018). The role of cognate English–Kurdish words in teaching English. African Educational Research Journal, 6(4): 213-217. https://doi.org/10.30918/AERJ.64.18.046

q1 · i? · causal · r1

Authors' interpretation in the discussion section, not a directly tested result; the article also cites August et al. (2005) reporting bilingual pupils "have not even noticed very obvious similarities" despite cognate advantages. No effect size is printed.

"one of the most important consequences of our work is that Kurdish bilinguals may not take advan tage of this important opportunity, if they have not been trained in awareness about similarity between Kurdish and English"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Kurdish-Turkish bilingual students given explicit cognate-awareness instruction showed a statistically significant pre-to-post-test vocabulary gain five weeks later — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Control groups without cognate-awareness instruction showed only slight pre-to-post-test differences, unlike the instructed study group — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Fluent bilingualism is linked to metalinguistic awareness of how the two languages relate — a broader claim this one bears on
• Preserving a bilingual student's heritage language supports rather than hinders English acquisition — related