Pre-literacy Development: Bilinguals at Risk

Evidence indicates that many monolingual preschool children in the U.S. do not receive a sufficient amount of early language input needed to develop subsequent literacy skills. The situation is potentially more complex for the bilingual child whose linguistic input is split between at least two languages. In this paper we report results from two studies. In the first, we tested 18 bilingual PolishEnglish speaking children (4;7-6;11) on the acquisition of three types of restricted relative clauses in Polish and English. The results indicate that the patterns of syntactic development for these relative clauses in the bilingual children differ from their monolingual counterparts in either language. In the second study, we tested 27 bilingual children (6;2-8;5) on their phonological awareness skills in both Polish and English. Results of this study indicate that certain subsets of Polish-English bilinguals tested are at risk in either or both languages for development of subsequent literacy skills. This paper will discuss the results in terms of the development of school curricula needed to meet the literacy demands of both monolingual and bilingual children. 1 University of Warsaw, Poland 2 Harvard Graduate School of Education 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology