A Comparative Study of the Phonological Awareness of Pre-school Persian Monolingual and Turkish-Persian Bilingual Children

Abstract

Phonological awareness refers to the ability to conjecture and maneuver the phonemic segments of speech. Given the weight of phonological awareness in budding literacy skills, it is vital to focus more on its possible differences among pre-school children to plan for training programs in kindergartens. To this end, two groups of 30 Turkish-Persian bilingual and Persian monolingual pre-school children were chosen to explore whether pre-school bilinguals have any advantage over the monolinguals in terms of phonological awareness. In doing so, Soleymani and Dastjerdi’s Phonological Awareness Test (2002) was used. The independent samples t-tests revealed the advantage of pre-school Turkish-Persian over Persian monolingual children in some aspects of phonological awareness. The findings of the study may have implications for language education.