engleski

Letters or Sounds?

In today's modern world, the need for international education arises next to the well-established national educational systems. International schools around the world are typically attended by the children of the people who frequently move due to their work requirements, and they wish to provide their children with steady education in one language, preferably one of the lingua francas. Along with the language of education, such children also acquire or learn additional languages ; for instance, the language of the host country, or the foreign languages taught as a part of the school curriculum, which makes them multilingual. The way of introducing early literacy is rather important and it could influence the children’s further development because a well-developed language forms the basis for learning other, non-linguistic topics that belong to a considerable segment of school curricula. A large body of research endorses phonological sensitivity as the key factor in building early literacy, as well as reading comprehension. The main purpose of this presentation is to introduce the results of preliminary testing of the phonological sensitivity level among multilingual first graders attending an international school. The aim was to determine whether the students depended more on letters or on sounds while solving the tasks of sound analysis and synthesis in the early stages of reading in English. Since they had attended various school systems prior to forming this particular first grade, this group of students was specific for some other differences among them (e.g. their mother tongues, the languages they spoke, the countries they had lived in, etc.). The most valuable part of this research is in the individual approach to each student, and multifarious data collection, which facilitates an in-depth insight into the level of their phonological sensitivity at the beginning of the first grade.

early literacy, international school, multilingualism, phonological sensitivity

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