A Critical Review of Research on LTH and LIH

A Critical Review of Research on LTH and LIH

Lee, Seongwon. 2004. A critical review of research on LIH and LTH. The British & American language Literature. 20-1. 53-65. As English education for young students has received more attention compared with Korean education, educators are getting concerned about the unbalanced education between the subjects of English and Korean. Many experts in the field of language education believe that the subjects' first language plays a more important role in acquiring a second language than many expect. It is about time that the importance of first language in learning a second language be investigated. The study thus attempted to synthesize and evaluate studies that dealt with the relationship between L1 and L2 especially in the area of reading. The question whether second language reading is a language problem or a reading problem has captured attention of second/foreign language reading researchers. Researchers tried to answer this question based on two contradicting hypotheses: the linguistic threshold hypothesis (LTH) and the linguistic interdependency hypothesis (LlH). LTH states that the readers have to possess a certain amount of grammatical/linguistic knowledge in order to engage their first language reading skills. On the other hand, LIH states that reading performance in a second language is largely shared with reading ability in a first language. Studies supporting the LTH, LIH, and both LTH and LIH are discussed and evaluated.