Bidirectional Transfer of Phonological Awareness Between Cantonese and English: An Intervention Study

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Phonological and Morphological Instruction for Diverse Learners

Abstract

This randomised controlled trial examined bidirectional transfer of phonological awareness between Cantonese (tonal, non-alphabetic L1) and English (alphabetic L2), addressing how colonial legacies influence contemporary bilingual education. We randomly assigned 162 Hong Kong kindergarteners to English PA training, Cantonese PA training, or control conditions. Using psychometrically equivalent measures assessing rhyme, initial phoneme, and final phoneme awareness, results demonstrated both experimental groups significantly outperformed controls on PA measures in both languages. Effect sizes exceeded d=1.0 across conditions, indicating robust bidirectional cross-linguistic transfer. These findings provide causal evidence that PA constitutes a language-general cognitive mechanism transferable between typologically distant languages. Results challenge language-specific theoretical models and support pedagogical approaches that leverage multilingual children's complete linguistic repertoires for literacy development.

Author

• Yu Wing Chan, Yew Chung College of Early Childhood Education