Predicting dual-language literacy attainment in Irish-English bilinguals: language-specific and language-universal contributions
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Barnes, Emily, Predicting dual-language literacy attainment in Irish-English bilinguals: language-specific and language-universal contributions, Trinity College Dublin.School of Linguistic Speech & Comm Sci, 2021Download Item:
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Abstract:
This thesis focuses on dual-language literacy attainment and has three main aims. The first is to examine various predictors of early literacy attainment in Irish and English – phonemic awareness, rapid automatised naming and verbal short-term memory – in new and native speakers of Irish. The second aim is to investigate the extent to which these abilities are language-universal, rather than language-specific. The third aim is to examine the nature of one of the predictors - phonemic awareness - in depth. Phonemic awareness is widely considered to be a language-universal skill in dual-language learners, however this thesis investigates whether there is an additional language-specific component to phonemic awareness. In addition, this thesis explores (i) the extent to which phonemic awareness is a purely phonological ability (ii) the phonemic contrasts which are inaccurately identified by early readers of Irish and English and (iii) whether these errors in phonemic awareness are reflected in the spelling errors made in each language. To achieve the aforementioned aims, a cross-sectional study was carried out with 345 children in Grade 1 (Junior Infants), Grade 2 (Senior Infants) and Grade 3 (First Class) during the 2018-2019 school year. The majority of these participants (n = 282) attended Gaelscoileanna and a smaller number (n = 63) attended Gaeltacht schools. Participants completed a battery of tasks in both Irish and English. The battery included two phonemic awareness tasks – one tapping a language-universal component and one tapping a language-specific component. It also included rapid automatised naming tasks, verbal-short term memory tasks, literacy tasks as well as a productive vocabulary task in Irish only. In relation to the predictors of literacy attainment, the findings indicate that the efficacy of the predictors differed in each language. Overall, they predicted more variance in Irish word reading (54%) and spelling (40%) than English word reading (49%) and spelling (36%). The findings also indicate that phonological, cognitive and literacy abilities comprise both language-specific and language-universal components. Spelling errors were found to be largely language-specific and reflect the phonological and orthographic challenges posed by each language. The implications of these findings are that (i) language-specific instruction is necessary in key areas, particularly in relation to the phonemic structure and grapheme-phoneme rules of each language, and (ii) literacy assessment should be carried out in each of a bilingual's languages.
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Irish Research Council (IRC)
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APPROVED
Author: Barnes, Emily
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Ni Chiarain, NeasaPublisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Linguistic Speech & Comm Sci. C.L.C.S.Type of material:
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