Study of Phonological Awareness Skills among Farsi Monolingual and Farsi-Arabic Bilingual Students in the Second Grade in Ahvaz

Bilingualism is a positive phenomenon that can result in students’ development and promote the fulfillment of their potentials. However, bilingualism may cause educational problems in literacy. The mounting evidence of a relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is impressive and raises the central question of the present study – i.e., is development of phonological awareness among monolingual and bilingual students equal? Fifty (25 girls, 25 boys) monolingual (Farsi-speaking) and 50 (25 girls, 25 boys) bilingual (Farsi-Arabic-speaking) students of the second grade primary school in Ahvaz participated in this study. They were selected randomly in multi-stages. Sampling was analytical cross-sectional in the first trimester of 2010-11 academic year. For the purpose of this study, we used phonological awareness test (Soleymani-Dastjerdi). The data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney U Test of SPSS software. The findings indicated that the differences of mean scores between monolingual and bilingual students in identifying words with same final phoneme, fractionated phoneme, naming and deleting initial phoneme, deleting middle phoneme, and naming and deleting final phoneme were significant (p≤0.05). The findings showed that phonological awareness among monolingual students was better than among bilingual students in Ahvaz. These results could be significant for to educational policymakers and require them paying more attention to the education of bilingual students.