Phonological awareness in biliterates of alphasyllabic and alphabetic orthography

Abstract

Majority of the literature focused on the effect of L1 on the acquisition of L2 in most of the language aspects, but it is not possible to elude the influence of L2 on L1 processing especially young learners. As in the present study, learning Arabic along with Malayalam can be bewildering for children as Arabic has an alphabetic based orthography which is divergent from alpha syllabic Malayalam. Hence, this present study aimed to understand the phonological awareness in biliterates in comparison to monoliterates.
Forty participants were selected for the study. Among that, twenty participants were formally trained in both alpha syllabic (Malayalam) and alphabetic (Arabic) orthography were selected as a part of an academic curriculum with a minimum duration of three years. Another group of 20 children were trained only in Malayalam orthography (Alpha syllabic). Tasks included in the present study were phoneme isolation (initial and final), phoneme blending, phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation.
Based on the descriptive and inferential statistics, it was evident that L2 orthography had no effect on L1 phonological awareness. Additionally, this study demonstrated that word composition complexity had no discernible impact on either the monoliterate (children who were trained only in alphasyllabic orthography) or biliterate (children who were trained in both alphasyllabic and alphabetic orthography) groups.
The present study shows that teaching entirely different languages from the native language cannot induce any adverse effect on the L1 orthography of the child. This information can be useful for the curriculum development for school-going children and be applicable to the assessment and treatment of bilingual children with reading difficulties.