The English phonological awareness skills of 5;0–6;0-year-old Polish–English, Portuguese–English bilingual speakers and English monolingual children

Abstract

Previous research on bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) abilities is contradictory. Some studies suggest that bilinguals are advantaged compared to monolinguals, benefiting literacy acquisition. Other research indicates that any advantage in PA skills is transient, influenced by language learning context, proficiency in both languages, and the language pair being acquired. This study compared the English PA skills of two groups of bilingual children and a monolingual English-speaking group matched for age, gender, and social class. The 54 participants were 5 to 6 years old, in their first or second year of school. There were 18 children speaking Polish–English, 18 children speaking Portuguese–English and 18 English-speaking monolingual children. Their letter knowledge, syllable, onset–rime, and phoneme awareness were assessed using subtests from standardized assessments plus one task specifically designed for this study. Parents of bilingual children completed a questionnaire about their child's language background and language use. The three groups did not differ on tasks assessing syllable awareness, identification of word initial sounds or letter knowledge. The results of tasks assessing alliteration, rhyme, and phoneme awareness indicated that typically developing English-speaking monolingual children performed better than matched typically developing bilingual children. The monolinguals and the Polish-English bilinguals performed equally well on the rhyme detection task. The language use questionnaire responses provided insight into factors affecting the results. It was concluded that no bilingual advantage for PA was apparent in the bilingual populations studied. These results suggest that bilingual children are likely to initially find English literacy difficult.

Keywords:

• Phonological awareness
• Bilingualism
• Literacy
• Children

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the children, their parents, and educators for their participation: Mel Collins and Paul Butcher, Peterborough Education Services; primary school teachers, Cherry Hinton Children's Centre, and the Cambridge Polish Complementary School.