Emergent Literacy Profiling in Malayalam–English Bilinguals

Abstract

Background: Emergent literacy skills are the skills, knowledge and attitude children develop prior to conventional literacy skills. The present study profiled the emergent literacy skills of Malayalam –English bilingual preschool children in both languages. The study also aimed to investigate the cross-linguistic transfer of emergent literacy skills in these children. Method and research instruments used: In the current study, cross-sectional descriptive research design was employed. The study was conducted in four different phases. In the first phase, a survey was conducted on teachers and parents of preschool children to select children with uniform literacy environment. Three questionnaires were used as a research instrument for the survey. In the second phase, the profile was developed to examine bilingual emergent literacy (Pro-BEL). Pro-BEL was administered on 90 preschool children selected from the survey. Thirty participants each from PKG, LKG and UKG were selected. All the participants were native speakers of Malayalam attending preschool with English as a medium of instruction. The data obtained on Pro-BEL was subjected to statistical analyses. Results and discussion: A developmental progression of emergent literacy skills was seen across Grades. However, a significant difference between English and Malayalam was observed across Grades on oral language and print but not on phonological awareness in LKG and UKG. In general, the performance of participants in UKG was significantly better than those in LKG and PKG on all the tasks. Further, on discriminant function analysis, participants from PKG and LKG did not show a distinct difference in their emergent literacy skills but those from UKG showed a clear distinction on all the variables under study except on phoneme awareness. Cross-linguistic correlation of emergent literacy skills supported the premise that phonological awareness is a language universal aspect while print knowledge and oral language are language specific skills. Influence of the nature of language and script on emergent literacy acquisition was further supported by the differential loading pattern of variables in English and Malayalam in the principal component analysis. In view of language and script specificity observed for certain variables, an attempt was made to develop a model for emergent literacy skills in Malayalam- English bilinguals using structural equation modeling (SEM). The fit indices obtained on SEM were within the recommended values for English, but the indices obtained for Malayalam did not conform with those recommended for English. The findings suggest that the emergent literacy models developed for native speakers of English do not apply for Malayalam- English bilinguals. The doctoral study emphasizes the need for exploring emergent literacy skills in different languages and scripts and also in bilinguals who use different language pairs for a clearer understanding of the mechanisms and processes involved in the acquisition of emergent literacy skills.