Bilingualism at School: Effect on the Acquisition of Literacy*

This chapter is mainly about phonological awareness, which is awareness of distinctive speech sounds and syllables. It talks about a study whose purpose was to determine how reading and phonological awareness developed for bilingual children whose two languages were based on different systems and to discover the connection between reading and phonological awareness in each of their languages. The participants were 57 first-grade children who were just beginning to receive formal instruction in reading. All the children were Chinese–English bilinguals, and like those in the last study, used Cantonese at home with their families and in their communities and English at school and with friends. It was found that phonological awareness is more rooted in general cognitive abilities and reading is more dependent on language specific variables that may not be shared if reading takes place in different systems.