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The phonological awareness relation to early reading in English for three groups of simultaneous bilingual children

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Abstract

Phonological awareness is critical for early reading acquisition across alphabetic as well as non-alphabetic languages. The grain size of phonological awareness varies with oral language structure and written orthography across languages. Phonological awareness’ grain size and contribution to reading for simultaneous biliterate children is currently unknown. In this study, we examine syllable, rime and phoneme level awareness for bilingual children with differences in structure of their known languages in order to investigate any potential cross-language effects of their ethnic language on English reading. For 612 Chinese and English, Malay and English, and Tamil and English speakers in kindergarten, different patterns emerged across the language groups with regard to the grain size of phonological awareness over a 2-year period. The patterns of phonological awareness levels in predicting early English reading skills also differed amongst these bilingual language groups. The role of vocabulary in the relation between phonological awareness and reading was not consistent, showing small moderating and mediating effects only in some instances.

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Notes

  1. CE, ME and TE notations are used rather than the hyphenated conventions because L1 and L2 languages are not categorically delineated in the context of the multilingual society of Singapore.

  2. Aksara encodes CV, CCV, CCVV, CVV, CCVV, and CCCVV as well as V and VV, where VV stands for a long vowel or a diphthong (Padakannaya & Mohanty, 2004, p. 9).

  3. The term ‘mother tongue’ is used in various curriculum and policy documents (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2011, 2013), and children are assigned to participate in classes in one of the three official languages, usually based on their ethnicity (hence, our use of the term ‘ethnic language’). This does not always reflect their dominant or home language (Cavallaro & Serwe, 2010).

  4. For example, /dru/ in ‘ondru’ combines the vowel for /u/ and the vowel for /r/, and could be considered a VV syllable glyph, but the other aksharas in this word represent single ‘phonemes’ for the vowel ‘n’ and the vowel ‘o’.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Education Research Funding Programme, National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Project No. OER 09/14RB. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of NIE. The authors would like to thank the participating children, parents and schools.

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  1. Centre for Research in Child Development, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore, 637616, Singapore

    Beth A. O’Brien, Malikka Begum Habib Mohamed, Nurul Taqiah Yussof & Siew Chin Ng

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  1. Beth A. O’Brien
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O’Brien, B.A., Mohamed, M.B.H., Yussof, N.T. et al. The phonological awareness relation to early reading in English for three groups of simultaneous bilingual children. Read Writ 32, 909–937 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9890-1

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