The Development of Reading in Early Bilingualism: Evidence from Turkish-Child L2 Learners of English

This study investigated the role of phonological awareness in the reading acquisition of Turkish-English successive bilingual children. Cross-language transfer, the relationship between phonological awareness and phonological memory and the effect of grade level on phonological awareness were also explored. The results confirmed the previous research which demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between phonological awareness and 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.