Abstract
Early numeracy and literacy skills are all the knowledge that children acquire spontaneously and independently before entering school and beginning formal learning. This knowledge is essential and forms the basis for the acquisition of reading and arithmetic in school. A bilingual child is a child who is fluent in two languages, as opposed to a monolingual child who is exposed to only one language. Bilingualism has been found to affect verbal and mathematical abilities in children, but only a few studies have focused on the early numeracy and literacy skills of preschoolers. This study examined the connection between early numeracy and literacy skills and among monolingual children as compared to bilingual children in preschool. Three hundred and two children aged 5–6years old were recruited from 74 kindergartens. Participants were divided into two groups: 151 monolingual children who spoke and were exposed to only one language (Hebrew) and 151 bilingual children who spoke and were exposed to two languages (the bilingual children spoke different languages). Monolingual children performed better than the bilingual children in most of the literacy tasks, except for phonological awareness, in which no differences were found between the groups. In addition, in the early numeracy tasks, a difference was found only in the task, which included linguistic knowledge, number knowledge, and counting tasks, in which the monolingual children performed better. Furthermore, stronger correlations were found between the early numeracy and literacy skills among the monolingual group compared to the bilingual group. The study findings stress the importance of strengthening linguistic abilities, such as vocabulary expansion in kindergarten among populations in which more than one language is spoken. Supporting these abilities can reduce the gap between bilingual children and their monolingual classmates before entering school.
Highlights
BilingualismMost children around the world are exposed to more than one language
All literacy measures included in the factor analysis yielded three major factors: oral language knowledge accounted for 28.67% of the variance, phonological awareness accounted for 21.63%, and alphabetic and orthographic knowledge accounted
Significant differences were found between monolingual children and bilingual children in the measures of orthography, F(1,211) = 21.49, p < 0.05
Summary
Most children around the world are exposed to more than one language. Bilingualism or multilingualism develops from learning two languages simultaneously or from initial learning of one language to which another language is added (McCardle and Hoff, 2006). There are many ways to acquire two languages: different contexts, Early Literacy and Numeracy Skills different ages, simultaneous acquisition of two languages or in sequence, and different language pairs. It is important to carefully characterize the language learning of infants and children in order to clearly understand and describe the differences in bilingual development. Identifying a profile of bilinguals that is different from monolinguals may help in tailoring their learning to help them gain needed skills, such as developing literacy in both languages (McCardle and Hoff, 2006)
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