Literacy Language Phonological Awareness in Bilingual students with Intellectual Disabilities

The purpose of this research was to survey the phonological awareness skills level among the bilingual students with educable intellectual disabilities and their peers with chronological and mental age groups.

The sample was selected from the bilingual (Azari- Farsi) students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in Tabriz and Urmia. The final sample included 25 people from every group (n: 75). Four tasks were administered to evaluate phonological awareness skills: initial phoneme, phoneme dissecting, and phoneme synthesis and rhyme recognition tests.

The results revealed that concerning all phonological awareness skills, there were meaningful statistical differences among the intellectually disabled students and their matched chronological group, and that, the participants in the second group had done better. The comparison between the functions of intellectually disabled, with their mental age matched group, indicated that; except for the initial phoneme recognition indicator, concerning the three other skills, the normal students had done better.

The total results suggest that the intellectually disabled students, in comparison with matched chronological and mental age groups had done their phonological awareness skills weaker, that the reason for this difference can be probably related, form one way, to the natural difference in recognition function, and from the other way, can be related to the lameness and postponed growth in this group.