Supporting emergent bilingual children's literacy development simultaneously in Turkish and English languages: a focus on phonological awareness of 3 and 4 years old children

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate how early childhood educators and parents support emergent bilingual children's emergent biliteracy skills in Turkish and English, in particular, their phonological awareness (PA) in the two languages. Having socio-cultural lenses, an embedded single case study using ethnographic tools was conducted. A bilingual classroom was selected in a private bilingual nursery located in London, England. In this classroom, the children were 3 or 4 years old and most of them had emergent bilingualism in Turkish/English languages. It was found that the classroom and the families did not provide equal learning opportunities for emergent bilingual children to develop their dual literacy skills simultaneously, since the English early years framework requires all children from linguistically diverse backgrounds to achieve literacy skills in English only. However, thanks to the children's enquiries in their literacy learning process, the educators’ informative responses overlap between phoneme-letter correspondence in English and Turkish and universality of PA activities across languages, the educators and the parents taught Turkish PA skills. These findings yielded important practical implications that educators and families can apply for teaching dual literacy skills to emergent bilingual children.