Effects of early English education on phonological awareness and language development of Taiwanese bilingual children

The present study investigated Mandarin-English bilingual children's phonological awareness skills, phonological development, and semantic abilities in Mandarin and English to determine the effects, if any, of early English education. The comparison of two non-cognate languages with different orthographies, phonological structures, morphological, and syntactic features provides a unique bilingual profile and alternative vantage point in the growing body of bilingual research.; Both experimental and ethnographic methods were included to provide a more complete understanding of the effects of early English education. In the statistical analyses, 24 Taiwanese preschoolers in an English-only kindergarten program were compared with 20 monolingual peers in a Chinese-language kindergarten. Comparable measures in English were designed or adopted to assess bilingual children's English skills.; The findings of the experimental study only partially supported the hypothesis that early bilingual experience helped to amplify Mandarin-English bilingual children's level of phonological awareness. Next, early English learning did not adversely affect the bilingual children's Mandarin phonological skills assessed on a single-word production test. Nonetheless, the bilingual children exhibited specific Mandarin-influenced phonological patterns in English. The results, however, confirmed the hypotheses that bilingual children have relatively smaller receptive and expressive vocabularies in Mandarin. Further descriptive vocabulary item analyses provided preliminary evidence for distributed bilingual vocabulary that may account for the observed disadvantage in bilingual vocabulary development.; Furthermore, the study did not identify significant correlations between oral language skills and phonological awareness abilities in Mandarin, either for bilinguals or monolinguals. Finally, the study revealed that phonological awareness in English is strongly related to and reliably predicted by phonological awareness in Mandarin and vice versa. Consistent with previous findings, however, no evidence indicates correlations or cross-language transfer in phonological skills and lexical-semantic abilities between Mandarin and English.; The analysis of one-month ethnographic classroom observation of five bilingual 4-year-olds, who just enrolled in the English-only kindergarten, showed that social, linguistic, and cognitive processes in both languages came into play and intricately interacted with one another even in the early stage of learning English as a second language.; Both the experimental and ethnographic findings have implications for bilingual research, education, and testing practice with bilingual children.