Trilingual Education of Uyghur Children: Phonological Awareness, Language Acquisition and Literacy Development

Given the differences in the orthographic structure of the Uyghur, Chinese and English languages, this study used a mixed-method approach to systematically describe and analyze the phonological awareness of Uyghur bilingual children as English learners and its contributions to their trilingual literacy acquisition and development.

Focusing on the development of these learners’ phonological awareness in Uyghur, Chinese and English, this study explored the influences of Uyghur and Chinese learning on the formation of their English phonological awareness and the roles of different components of phonological awareness in their trilingual literacy development. Based on the characteristics of the phonetic structure in Uyghur, Chinese and English and the development of Uyghur children’s phonological awareness in these languages, a Chinese phonetic identification training and Uyghur-Chinese-English comprehensive phonetic training program (including intensive phoneme category contrast training and phonics training) was designed to explore whether such targeted phonetic identification training can effectively improve these children’s phonological awareness in Chinese and English and thus further promote their trilingual literacy development.

This book will appeal to researchers and students interested in the fields of psycholinguistics, language acquisition and multilingual education.

Wei Xiaobao is Professor at the East China University of Science and Technology. Currently, he is the Director of Institute of Foreign Languages, the Director of Cognitive Neurolinguistics Laboratory, and the research expert of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education. His research interests involve children’s literacy development, bilingual education, second language acquisition.