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Learning to read in an orthographically very shallow language may seem easy. However, for adults who are non-literate in their first language (L1), have no experience of formal education, and have to acquire literacy in a new language (L2), learning to read at all can be a formidable task. In this article, the results of a case study of the outcome of the first 10 months of Finnish literacy training for five immigrant women (24–45 years of age) are presented. Relationships are sought between the participants' achieved reading skills, their oral receptive vocabulary, their knowledge of letters, their phonological working memory and their visual memory. The results of the study show that even when grapheme-phoneme correspondences are quite regular, mere knowledge of the letters is not enough to trigger their ability to blend sounds. Vocabulary skills are necessary for functional reading but may be difficult to acquire if the phonological working memory is poor. Deficiencies in learners' mental representations of word patterns make it difficult for them to connect strings of letters to words. A good visual memory may help with vocabulary acquisition but this too first requires cracking the alphabetic code. The main conclusion of this first study of Finnish L2 literacy acquisition by non-literate adults is that multiple pedagogical approaches are required to accommodate the needs of these learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-assisted training of Finnish phonemic length was conducted with 7-year-old Russian-speaking second-language learners of Finnish. Phonemic length plays a different role in these two languages. The training included game activities with two- and three-syllable word and pseudo-word minimal pairs with prototypical vowel durations. The lowest accuracy scores were recorded for two-syllable words. Accuracy scores were higher for the minimal pairs with larger rather than smaller differences in duration. Accuracy scores were lower for long duration than for short duration. The ability to identify quantity degree was generalized to stimuli used in the identification test in two of the children. Ideas for improving the game are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]