Phonological awareness and spelling abilities of Cantonese–English bilingual children

Abstract

The phonological awareness of 36 Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged between 3 & 10 years, was compared with matched monolingual English-speaking children. A battery of phonological awareness tasks was used that assessed syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, phoneme awareness, reading & spelling. The only task differentiating monolingual & bilingual preschool children was rhyme awareness, the monolingual children performing better than the bilingual children. A comparison of the school-age children indicated that the monolingual children performed better in terms of number of plausible spelling errors, nonword spelling, nonword reading, visual rhyme recognition, phoneme manipulation & spoonerisms. Previous research on children learning two phonologically similar languages (eg, English-French, Italian-English) has reported that bilingual children have superior phonological awareness. The conflicting findings reported are discussed in terms of the following factors: spoken phonological structure; type of orthography; & literacy teaching strategies. It was concluded that each of these factors plays a role in determining the phonological awareness skills of bilingual children. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 43 References. Adapted from the source document