Skills of phonological awareness in monolingual Farsi and bilingual Farsi-Arabic speaking in the Ahwaz city's first grade students

Phonological awareness is a component of language knowledge and there is a significant relationship with literacy. Language experiences are different between monolingual and bilingual individuals. Bilingualism influences on the development of linguistic and nonlinguistic skills. The aim of this study was to test the phonological awareness among monolingual Farsi and bilingual Farsi-Arabic speaking of the first grade students in Ahwaz. Fifty (25 girls, 25 boys) monolingual Farsi speaking and 50 (25 girls, 25 boys) bilingual Farsi-Arabic speaking from the first grade students in the primary schools in the city of Ahwaz were participating. We selected the samples randomly in multi-stages and cross-sectional in the first trimester of 2010 -11. In this survey, we used the Soleimani-Dastjerdi validated and reliable phonological awareness tool. We collected the data, T-Test values used and analyzed via SPSS software. The finding indicated that the differences of mean scores between monolingual and bilingual student in alliteration, rhyming and identifying first phoneme were not significant (p≥0.05); but there were difference of mean scores between two groups in identifying final phoneme, combining of phoneme, naming and deleted final phoneme were significant (p≤0.05). The findings indicated that phonological awareness among monolingual students was better than bilingual students. More extensive surveys are recommended to improve the knowledge about phonological awareness in bilingual children for implementing them more effective programming, education and treatment plans.