THE ROLE OF ORAL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY IN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS OF EARLY BILINGUALS

Abstract

The nature of a specific spoken language as well as its orthography and the close relation between these two characteristics may influence phonemic awareness development (Durgunoğlu & Öney, 1999). In this respect, oral language proficiency of bilingual and monolingual children appears to have an influence on enhancing their phonological awareness. One major aim of the present research is therefore to explore the link between the level of oral language development and that of phonological awareness of two Turkish-English bilingual children and one monolingual child with an average age of 3.5. The data for phonological awareness came from an initial phoneme identification, rhyme-detection, and phoneme detection task; for language proficiency, from a picture description or storytelling task. All tasks were performed in the children’s dominant language, which is the community language, Turkish. Results showed that oral proficiency level is not a good predictor of the development of phonological awareness.

Keywords

• Oral language proficiency, phonological awareness, mean length of utterance, phonological awareness tasks

THE ROLE OF ORAL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY IN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS OF EARLY BILINGUALS

Öz

Belirli bir dilin doğası ve onun imlası ve bu ikili arasındaki yakın ilişki sesbirimsel farkındalık gelişimini etkileyebilir (Durgunoğlu & Öney, 1999). Bu bağlamda, tek dilli ve iki dilli çocukların sözlü dil yeterliğinin onların fonolojik farkındalıklarının gelişiminde etkisi olduğu ortaya çıkmaktadır. Bu yüzden, bu çalışmanın başlıca amaçlarından bir tanesi ortalama yaşları 3.5 olan iki tane Türkçe ve İngilizceyi konuşan iki dilli çocuğun ve bir tane tek dilli çocuğun sözlü dil gelişimleri ve fonolojik farkındalıkları arasındaki ilişkiyi incelemektir. Fonolojik farkındalık için veri önses tanılama, kafiye algılama ve sesbirim algılama çalışmalarından; dil yeterliği için veri ise bir resim tanıtma veya hikaye anlatma çalışmasından gelmektedir. Bütün çalışmalar çocukların daha fazla hakim oldukları dilde, yani Türkçe olarak gerçekleştirilmiştir ki bu aynı zamanda topluluk dilidir. Sonuçlar göstermektedir ki sözlü dil yeterliği seviyesi fonolojik farkındalık gelişiminin iyi bir öngörücüsü değildir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Sözlü dil yeterliği, fonolojik farkındalık, ortalama sözce uzunluğu, fonolojik farkındalık çalışmaları

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