Phonological awareness and spelling abilities of Cantonese–English bilingual children

Abstract

The phonological awareness of 36 Cantonese–English bilingual children, aged between 3 and 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 and spelling. The only task differentiating monolingual and bilingual pre-school 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 and spoonerisms. Previous research on children learning two phonologically similar languages (e.g. 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; and literacy teaching strategies. It was concluded that each of these factors plays a role in determining the phonological awareness skills of bilingual children.