Discusses three areas of development that have been shown to be fundamental to the acquisition of literacy: experience with stories and book reading, concepts of print, and phonological awareness. Research is reviewed in each area, comparing the development of these skills by bilingual and monolingual children. Research has been contradictory…

Examined the understanding of general correspondences between print and language and specific correspondences in alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages on the part of monolingual (English) and bilingual (French-English, Chinese-English) 4- and 5-year-olds. Bilingual children understood the general symbolic representation of print better than…

Examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, while others have found either no difference between the groups or monolingual…

Three studies that examine the development of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual children K-2. In the first study, monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well on a complex task requiring phoneme substitution. The second replicated these results and demonstrated a significant role for the language of literacy…

Four groups of children in first grade were compared on early literacy tasks. Children in three of the groups were bilingual, each group representing a different combination of language and writing system, and children in the fourth group were monolingual speakers of English. All the bilingual children used both languages daily and were learning…