The importance of phonological awareness for the development of early English reading skills among bilingual Singaporean kindergartners

Abstract

To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are all bilingual or early second-language (L2) learners of English and learn English reading through logographic (look-say) instruction. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners scored lower than mostly monolingual US norming groups on English vocabulary and PA but higher than US norms on English reading, confirming findings in other contexts that L2 learners of English can be successful at word-level reading despite low levels of oral proficiency. However, these findings challenge the hypothesis based on Seymour's dual foundations model of reading that learning an alphabetic language logographically slows reading acquisition. Despite a curriculum which did not teach sound–symbol correspondences for reading English, PA had a larger, statistically significant influence than vocabulary (also statistically significant) on English reading with both variables in a multilevel regression model, controlling for demographic factors. These findings highlight the importance of PA to English reading, even in bilingual and L2 learning children who were taught to read English logographically.