Phonological Awareness of Persian Monolingual Children and Kurdish-Persian Bilingual Children

Abstract

Given the importance of phonological awareness in development of literacy skills, it is essential to consider the possible differences of phonological awareness (PA) among pre-school children to plan for training programs in these courses. For this purpose, two groups of pre-school children at the ages of 5- to 6- years old who were Kurdish-Persian bilinguals and Persian monolinguals were selected in order to investigate the possible differences among pre-school bilinguals and the monolinguals in terms of phonological awareness. Soleymani and Dastjerdi's (2002) Phonological Awareness Test was used as the instrument. Furthermore, application of the independent samples t-tests indicated a higher ability of Kurdish-Persian compared to the Persian monolingual pre-school children regarding some aspects of phonological awareness. Findings of the study could have implications for children second learning language, second language teachers and teacher trainers, task designers and curriculum developers to be more familiar with the factors influencing the phonological achievement.