Effects of cross-language transfer on first-language phonological awareness and literacy skills in Chinese children receiving English instruction.

2010 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 712-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Chen ◽  
Fen Xu ◽  
Thien-Kim Nguyen ◽  
Guanglei Hong ◽  
Yun Wang
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
First Language ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Chinese Children ◽  
Language Transfer ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
English Instruction

scholarly journals Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Development of an Early Literacy App in Dhuwaya

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Gillian Wigglesworth ◽  
Melanie Wilkinson ◽  
Yalmay Yunupingu ◽  
Robyn Beecham ◽  
Jake Stockley
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
First Language ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Intercultural Development ◽  
Educational Challenges ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
Bilingual School ◽  
The Impact

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.

First language acquisition and teaching

AILA Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 78-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Child Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Folk Beliefs

“First language acquisition” commonly means the acquisition of a single language in childhood, regardless of the number of languages in a child’s natural environment. Language acquisition is variously viewed as predetermined, wondrous, a source of concern, and as developing through formal processes. “First language teaching” concerns schooling in the language that is intended to become the child’s first (or “main”) one. Mainstream teaching practices similarly take languages as formal objects, focusing on literacy skills, so-called phonological awareness, and other teaching about the language. This article gives a first overview of folk beliefs associated with language acquisition and teaching, highlighting whether and how they can guide applied linguists’ concerns about child language development and early pedagogical practices.

scholarly journals Predicting the development of early reading in Chinese–Dutch bilinguals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Yuan ◽  
Eliane Segers ◽  
Ludo Verhoeven
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Verbal Memory ◽  
Word Reading ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
Chinese Word ◽  
Mediation Analyses ◽  
Cross Language

AbstractThe relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second language (Dutch). In kindergarten, Chinese word reading was predicted by Chinese phonological awareness, and Dutch word reading was predicted by Dutch phonological awareness and letter knowledge. There was a robust autoregressive effect of word reading from kindergarten to first grade in both Chinese and Dutch. Follow-up mediation analyses further showed that both phonological awareness in Chinese and phonological awareness combined with letter knowledge in Dutch in kindergarten had an indirect effect on Grade 1 word reading via kindergarten word reading. Although cross-language correlation was found in word reading for bilingual children in kindergarten, Dutch word reading did not add to the prediction of Chinese word reading when Chinese precursor measures were taken into account.

scholarly journals Preschool predictors of learning to read and spell in an additional language: a two-wave longitudinal study in a multilingual context

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyril Wealer ◽  
Silke Fricke ◽  
Ariana Loff ◽  
Pascale M. J. Engel de Abreu
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
First Language ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Preschool Age ◽  
Rapid Automatized Naming ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Letter Sound ◽  
Reading And Spelling

AbstractThe study explores whether foundational skills of reading and spelling in preschool (age 5–6) predict literacy skills cross-linguistically in an additional language in Grade 1 (age 6–7). A sample of linguistically diverse preschool children completed tasks of phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, verbal-short term memory, rapid automatized naming, and lexical knowledge in the language of preschool instruction Luxembourgish. The children were followed-up in Grade 1 where literacy skills were assessed in the language of schooling, i.e., German, after five months of literacy instruction. German was a non-native language for all children. Longitudinal correlations confirm that individual differences in single word/pseudoword reading and spelling in German in Grade 1 can be predicted by all the foundational literacy skills that were assessed in Luxembourgish. Path analyses showed that phonological awareness in Luxembourgish emerged as the strongest unique predictor of Grade 1 literacy skills in German. The second unique preschool predictor of Grade 1 literacy skills was letter-sound knowledge. Results are consistent with the view that literacy development in an additional language builds upon similar building blocks as literacy acquisition in a first language, at least for languages that are typologically close. However, current findings suggest that respective contributions between predictors and literacy skills in children learning to read in an additional language may vary from patterns observed in studies with children acquiring literacy in their first language.

Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness.

1993 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aydin Y. Durgunoğlu ◽  
William E. Nagy ◽  
Barbara J. Hancin-Bhatt
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Language Transfer ◽  
Cross Language
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