Phonological awareness in multilingual Chinese children

1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan J. Rickard Liow ◽  
Kenneth K. L. Poon

ABSTRACTPhonological awareness has been shown to be important for early literacy development in unilingual readers of English. We investigated its impact in English and Mandarin for 57 multilingual pupils whose language backgrounds were English, Chinese (Mandarin/dialect), or Bahasa Indonesia, using a homophone decision task, an English lexicality spelling test, and a Hanyu Pinyin (romanised Mandarin) spelling test. All three groups of pupils were studying English and Mandarin in the same school, and so, somewhat unusually, the influence of their language background (especially script exposure) could be seen in the absence of differences in teaching strategies. In English, the results showed that a relationship between script exposure and phonological awareness develops in line with the orthographic depth hypothesis (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987). The Bahasa Indonesia group exhibited the highest levels of alphabetic phonological awareness, followed by the English group and then the Chinese group. In Mandarin, the pupils' performance on the Hanyu Pinyin spelling test suggested that tonal phonological awareness is relatively independent of alphabetic phonological awareness. It seems that language background can influence the nature and development of phonological awareness, and that this in turn may affect children's strategies for the subsequent acquisition of a second (or third) written language.

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail T. Gillon

Purpose: This study investigated the phonological awareness and early literacy development of 12 children who presented at 3 years of age with moderate or severe speech impairment. The children’s response to early intervention that included specific activities to facilitate phoneme awareness and letter knowledge, in addition to improving speech intelligibility, was examined. Method: Using a 3-year longitudinal design, the children’s development in phonological awareness was monitored and compared to that of a group of 19 children without speech impairment. During the monitoring period from 3 to 5 years of age, the children with speech impairment received, on average, 25.5 intervention sessions. At 6 years of age, the children’s performance on phonological awareness, reading, and spelling measures was also compared to that of the 19 children without impairment as well as to a matched control group of children with speech impairment who had not received any specific instruction in phonological awareness. Results: The results indicated that (a) phoneme awareness can be stimulated in children with speech impairment as young as 3 and 4 years of age, (b) facilitating phoneme awareness development can be achieved concurrently with improvement in speech intelligibility, and (c) enhancing phoneme awareness and letter knowledge during the preschool years is associated with successful early reading and spelling experiences for children with speech impairment. Clinical Implications: The data provide evidence to support the clinical practice of integrating activities to develop phoneme awareness and letter knowledge into therapy for 3- and 4-year-old children with moderate or severe speech impairment.


1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Chris Pratt ◽  
Alison F. Garton

In this paper we wish to put forward the argument that when one is considering the development of literacy in children, it is essential to consider both spoken and written language within the same integrated perspective. We also intend to argue that examining literacy from this perspective implies educators must meet the challenge of avoiding major discontinuities of experience for children. Further, given the large individual differences in children's development, we argue that the actual age of school entry is of little inportance. Of far greater importance is the provision of educational programmes that take account of the different experiences of individual children.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Runnion ◽  
Shelley Gray

PurposeChildren with hearing loss may not reach the same level of reading proficiency as their peers with typical development. Audiologists and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have important roles to play in preventing this problem early in children's development. In this tutorial, we aim to communicate how the habilitation practices of audiologists and intervention services of SLPs can support early literacy skill development in children with hearing loss.MethodWe describe key findings from peer-reviewed research articles to provide a review of early literacy skill development, to explain the relationship between early literacy skills and conventional reading skills, and to highlight findings from early literacy skill intervention studies that included children with hearing loss who use spoken language. We conclude with a hypothetical case study to illustrate how audiologists and SLPs can support early literacy acquisition in children with hearing loss.ConclusionFindings from studies of young children with hearing loss suggest that a promising approach to improving reading outcomes is to provide explicit early literacy instruction and intervention.


Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Gillian Wigglesworth ◽  
Melanie Wilkinson ◽  
Yalmay Yunupingu ◽  
Robyn Beecham ◽  
Jake Stockley

Phonological awareness is a skill which is crucial in learning to read. In this paper, we report on the challenges encountered while developing a digital application (app) for teaching phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Dhuwaya. Dhuwaya is a Yolŋu language variety spoken in Yirrkala and surrounding areas in East Arnhem Land. Dhuwaya is the first language of the children who attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya and English are the languages of instruction. Dhuwaya and English have different phonemic inventories and different alphabets. The Dhuwaya alphabet is based on Roman alphabet symbols and has 31 graphemes (compared to 26 in English). The app was designed to teach children how to segment and blend syllables and phonemes and to identify common words as well as suffixes used in the language. However, the development was not straightforward, and the impact of the linguistic, cultural and educational challenges could not have been predicted. Amongst these was the inherent variation in the language, including glottal stops, the pronunciation of stops, the focus on syllables as a decoding strategy for literacy development and challenges of finding one-syllable words such as those initially used with English-speaking children. Another challenge was identifying culturally appropriate images which the children could relate to and which were not copyrighted. In this paper, we discuss these plus a range of other issues that emerged, identifying how these problems were addressed and resolved by the interdisciplinary and intercultural team.


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