Research in the area of phonological awareness and young children has shown that
phonological awareness skills are extremely important and positively correlated with the
development of spelling and reading abilities. There is limited research investigating
phonological awareness and spelling abilities in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)-learning
children. So far it has been found that the phonological awareness skills of ESL-learning
children are similar to those of native English-speaking children and they are also positively
related to spelling and reading skills. Previous research that has examined the advantages of
bilingual children over monolingual children has found that bilingual children develop skills of
metalinguistic awareness earlier than monolingual children. In other studies, skills from bilingual
children's first language have been found to transfer both positively and negatively to their
spelling in English. Differing results have been found with respect to the spelling abilities of
ESL-learning children and native English-speaking children. Some studies have found greater
spelling abilities for ESL-learning children whereas others have demonstrated lower or equal
abilities compared to native English-speaking children. In order to further examine the spelling
skills of ESL-learning children, this study was developed to address the following research
questions: (1) Are there significant differences in the number of spelling errors made by ESL-learning
children and children with English as their native language? (2) Are the errors
influenced by the sounds used (phonology) in the first language of the child? (3) Are the errors
influenced by the child's exposure to print and literacy activities? (4) Are the number of spelling
errors correlated with the child's degree of phonological awareness in English?
Participants in this study were three Vietnamese ESL-learning children and five monolingual
native English-speaking children. Three of the native English-speaking children were receiving
Speech-Language Pathology services. Tasks used in the study were an articulation evaluation, a letter identification task, three phonological awareness tasks, two reading tasks and two spelling
tasks. Background questionnaires were filled out by the children's parents to provide
information about home literacy experience. When interpreting the results it is important to
keep in mind that three of the monolingual English-speaking children were receiving speech and
language services and this could affect differences found between language groups. The results
indicated that by the end of grade one the three ESL-learning children outperformed their native
English-speaking peers on real word spelling and had fewer spelling errors. Moreover, the
phonology of the ESL-learning children's first language did not appear to influence errors in
their speech or spelling in English. Children who were read to at an earlier age and more often
performed better on non-word spelling. Those children with high spelling scores also had higher
reading levels. Finally, phoneme deletion and phoneme deletion and substitution were highly
correlated with real word spelling for both groups of children. These results lead to important
for future research in studies with children from different language backgrounds as well as
clinical importance to Speech-Language Pathologists. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/15719 |
Date | 11 1900 |
Creators | Vigue, Anna Marie |
Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
Format | 4456382 bytes, application/pdf |
Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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