Emergent Sound-Letter Correspondences in the Early Biliterate Writing Development of Simultaneous Bilingual Children

ABSTRACT

Using a psycholinguistic and a holistic bilingual perspective, this study examined the writing conceptualization progressions in Spanish and English of 16 simultaneous bilinguals from preschool through kindergarten. The children were enrolled in a bilingual early childhood program where literacy instruction was primarily in Spanish. We adapted a clinical method used in previous studies to examine the evolution of their biliterate writing, paying particular attention to whether children pass through a syllabic period as they begin to establish sound-letter relationships. Findings indicate that children’s writing in Spanish and English developed in parallel without one language lagging too far behind the other, despite not receiving formal literacy instruction in English. The simultaneous bilingual children in our sample did not seem to begin establishing sound-symbol correspondence through the construction of the syllabic hypothesis. Instead, some children demonstrated their emergent understanding of sound-letter relationships by representing the first sound of a word. The majority of the children, however, seemed to have discovered the relationship between sounds and letters by attending to both syllables and sounds within a word. Both the essence of being simultaneous bilingual and the literacy instructional methods teachers used may have prevented children from constructing the syllabic hypothesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual writing
• early biliteracy
• early childhood
• early literacy
• English language learners
• simultaneous bilingual children

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Adriana Alvarez for her work on various aspects of this study, especially on writing tasks design and data collection. We also want to thank the preschool teachers Teresa Trujillo and Noemi Perez-Medinzov as well as the kindergarten teachers Nelia Carrasco and María Sipion for welcoming us into their classrooms and providing us with helpful insights into their writing curriculum and their students’ writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Simultaneous bilinguals are children who are in the process of learning two or more languages concurrently from a young age; however, proficiency in each language depends on their needs and opportunities to use either language at home, school, or in the community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Professional Development (NPD) grant through the the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) [grant number T365Z20015].