The development of reading in early bilingualism: evidence from Turkish-child L2 learners of English

Abstract

The present study investigates the role of phonological awareness in the reading acquisition of Turkish-English successive bilingual children. In addition to the relationship between reading and phonological awareness, cross-language transfer, the relationship between phonological awareness and phonological memory and the effect of grade level on phonological awareness are also explored. Although the relationship between phonological awareness and reading has been extensively investigated, the resources on bilingual reading acquisition are still limited and no previous study has investigated the relationship in Turkish-English bilingual children. Nine Turkish-English successive bilingual and a control group of nine monolingual English children participated in the study. The study was conducted in second, third and fourth grades, each grade level including three children in each language group. The participants were administered word reading, pseudoword reading, elision, segmenting words, segmenting nonwords, blending words, blending nonwords and memory for digits tasks in English. The participants were tested individually by the researcher in 40-minute sessions. The results confirmed the previous research which demonstrated that phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading in monolingual children. Bilingual data, on the other hand, did not present a significant relationship between phonological awareness and reading. Error analyses of nonword reading task revealed that Turkish-English bilingual children transfer phonological awareness skills from Turkish in order to decode English pseudowords, which was evident from their use of Turkish grapheme-phoneme correspondences and Turkish phonological rules. Compatible with the previous research, the present study indicated a significant relationship between phonological awareness and phonological memory of monolingual children. However, bilingual phonological memory did not appear to explain phonological awareness. The results also pointed out that neither bilingual nor monolingual phonological awareness significantly differ across grades.