The effect of school training on skills of phonological awareness in bilingual Lak-Farsi speaking 6 year old children

Development of phonological awareness is essential for literacy and it is a vigorous predictor of reading. Meanwhile, bilingualism is a factor that affects cognitive and language skills and consequently reading and writing skills, thus it seems necessary to do more studies to understand the effect of this social factor on educational performance. Considering the prevalence of bilingualism in Iran, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of school training on phonological awareness of Lak-Farsi bilingual 6 year old children. The current study is a quasi-experimental study using a descriptive analytic method. Participants were 30 bilingual six-year-old lak-farsi speaking children randomly selected from among the children who took part in the elementary school entrance measurement project in Noorabad and Aleshtar city. In the current survey, we used the Soleimani-Dastjerdi validated phonological awareness tool. The children’s performances were evaluated again after three months. The findings indicated that the differences of the mean scores between test-retest were significant in all the skills (p≤0.001). The differences between test-retest scores emphasized the importance of school training for bilingual children. Due to the interconnection between phonological awareness and literacy, authorities should seriously support the training programs for bilingual children in kindergartens and preschools.