There is a dynamic relationship between oral and reading skills in bilingual development. The current study investigated bilingual English-Chinese childrens knowledge of first (L1) and second language (L2) to determine the nature of transfer of literacy skills between two non-cognate languages. The study showed that language, orthographic, motivational, and environmental factors affected literacy development in English and Chinese. Quantitative analysis, using parallel measures, showed that despite differences in language (non- cognates) and orthography (alphabetic vs. non-...