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Identifying dyslexia in multilingual students: can phonological awareness be assessed in the majority language?
Author(s) -
Miller Guron Louise,
Lundberg Ingvar
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9817.261006
Subject(s) - psychology , phonological awareness , phonology , vocabulary , reading (process) , linguistics , reading comprehension , first language , word recognition , language proficiency , pedagogy , philosophy
A study of 97 students from two schools in Göteborg, Sweden, examined reading proficiency and phonological skill using a comprehensive battery of group measures in the classroom. The sample comprised 38 monolingual native‐Swedish speakers, and 59 multilingual students for whom Swedish is an additional language. Students were administered tests of non‐verbal intelligence, vocabulary, reading comprehension, word recognition and non‐vocal phonological tasks. Two sub‐groups of 26 monolingual and 26 multilingual students, matched on non‐verbal intelligence, also participated in oral word and nonword reading tasks. No significant differences were found between language groups on the separate phonological subtests or the composite phonological score after controlling for non‐verbal intelligence in hierarchical regression analyses. The language groups were equally represented at the 20th percentile on both composite phonology and word reading measures. The composite phonological score was equally powerful for both language groups in predicting word recognition. The results of the present study suggest that, given sufficient exposure to the majority language, it is possible to assess a range of phonological skills among speakers of minority languages using the same battery of tasks as for native speakers.