Children who receive their education in Wales are exposed to two very different languages: English, which has an opaque orthographic system, and Welsh, which has a transparent one. Children attending English-medium schools are introduced to basic Welsh vocabulary and phrases from the outset, but progress to studying Welsh as an L2 subject after age 7 and continue to do so up until the age of 16. Children in Welsh-medium schools are immersed in Welsh until the end of the Foundation Phase (age 7) and continue to receive their education primarily through the medium of Welsh, with English being taught as a subject only. At the same time, the majority of assessment tools are currently only available in English and are standardised on monolingual norms. These tools have been developed with the nuances of English in mind, and may not always be appropriate for use with bilinguals or appropriate to be adapted to fit other languages. In the Welsh-medium context, this challenges the notion of equality, particularly in relation to access to services for Welsh-speaking children who may require assessment and/or intervention in Welsh, and this can result in children not receiving the support they need until a later stage in their education.
Given that Welsh has a transparent orthography, and children attending Welsh-medium schools do not produce high volumes of writing in English, any ‘traditional’ markers of literacy difficulties, as manifested in English, may not appear in their Welsh. The studies presented in this thesis sought to explore potential markers of literacy difficulties in Welsh, with the aim of providing useful findings that could be used to support the future development of screening tests for Welsh-English bilingual children. Study 1 provides an error analysis of children’s written text on a 3-minute writing task in English and Welsh. Findings revealed interesting correlations between Welsh and English children’s performance on tests of reading ability and the errors made, particularly errors relating to phonological awareness. The study provided information about the types of errors made by bilingual Welsh-English children that warrant further investigation beyond this thesis.
4
Studies 2 and 3 explored areas of the Welsh language that require higher levels of phonological processing, namely mutation and plural morphology. Due to the absence of appropriate measures, novel tasks were created for these studies that measured children’s knowledge and application of Welsh plurals and mutation in the form of computer and paper based tasks related to writing, reading and oral ability. The studies yield interesting findings with regards to the relationship between reading ability, general phonological awareness abilities, and children’s scores on the mutation and plurals tasks and the ability of these tasks to predict levels of reading. Results suggest that pupils’ knowledge of Welsh mutation and plural morphology may be indicative of literacy abilities in the Welsh language, and may be useful structures to explore as potential language-specific items for the purpose of assessment in Welsh. However, further research is needed to determine which specific elements of these grammatical structures are the most effective markers.