Developing Assessment Procedures for Phonological Awareness for use with Panjabi-English Bilingual Children

Abstract

The links between phonological processing and literacy development have mainly been investigated in monolingual, English-speaking children and most tasks to assess phonological awareness have been devised in English. Increasing interest in phonological processing in children who speak languages other than English has helped lead to there cognition that phonological awareness is to a certain extent language-specific and dependent on the phonology of the language of assessment. Thus the development of tasks to measure phonological awareness must be sensitive to the phonology of the language concerned. This paper discusses the development of a battery of tasks which were used to assess phonological processing skills in Panjabi-English bilingual children in west Birmingham, U.K. The work is unusual among previous studies on phonological awareness in bilinguals in that we developed tasks to assess the children in both of their languages. Our results support the notion that at least some tasks of phonological awareness may be language-specific. Moreover we find that the results of phonological tasks for a particular language can be dependent on the task design and content, which in turn are constrained by the phonology of that language.

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