This thesis comprised an investigation of literacy development and literacy difficulties in the context of bilingualism involving 479s ix to thirteen year old children bilingual in two languages The children in this study were required to learn literacy in two writing systems namely Filipino and English.' Me context of concurrent earning and a bilingual background provided a unique context for studying biliteracy development and difficulties. Additionally variations in the orthographio complexity between e two scripts( Filipino is transparent, whilst English is complex) allowed an assessment of current cross-language perspective ins literacy difficulties. The main aim of the research was to investigate cognitive and linguistic factors that are related to literacy difficulties in a bilingual population. This was achieved via two additional ims:i e, to understand the development of, and the skills involved in , literacy acquisition. This required assessment of the impact of processes within and between the languages of literacy. 'Me results in dicate that the predominant theories on literacy developmengte nerated on the basiso f monolingual English-speaking cohortd o not explain literacyp rocesses amongt he bilingual-biliterate children in this study. Although predictions base do n these theories found some support in the English based data, the were inconsistent with the data produced by the same children in Filipino. The second main conclusion asserttsh at the central processing hypothesis and the script dependent hypothesis are complementary explanations of bilingual reading. Although development seems to progressa t different rates underlyings kills in literacys how a high degree of crosslanguage interdependence Finally, in examining literacy difficulties a mongth e children in this study, it was found that group c omparisondsi d not provides ufficientb asisto characterise ingle word literacy difficulties Howevert he analysiys of single cases indicated different manifestations of literacy difficulties across the two languages These findings1 )indicate that illiteracy resents a fundamentally different context in which to investigate and assess literacy difficulties2, ) highlight the importance of assessments in all languages of literacy and3 ) demonstrate the need to assesm sore than single word processing deficits, particularly when dealing with a highly transparent writing system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:248026 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Ocampo, Dina |
| Publisher | University of Surrey |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/2817/ |
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