Phonological Awareness of Malaysian Bilingual Children

Abstract

The interest in children developing literacy contributes to the increasing studies on phonological awareness. In relation to this, this paper discussed the performance on phonological awareness tasks of Malaysian bilingual children across groups. The findings from one aspect of a wider study which involved two groups of bilingual children (N=20: 10 bilingual good readers; 10 bilingual poor readers) are presented. The participants were administered tasks of phonological awareness in Bahasa Melayu and English. The results showed that there are differences in terms of performance between groups. The bilingual poor readers showed lower performance than the bilingual good readers on tasks of phonological awareness. The results also showed that there is a similar pattern in terms of performance on tasks across languages for both groups. The impact of phonological awareness on the participants’ performance is highlighted.