Chinese-Portuguese bilingual’s phonological awareness: annotations

Resumo

Economic and trade cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries have increased, as consequence more universities began offering Portuguese courses and the demand of Portuguese/Chinese bilinguals increased in China. However, the principal focus is mostly on areas such as grammar, translation and literature; also in terms of research, those areas are preferred, leaving for second place important linguistic aspects of Portuguese language. This study aims to identify some of the characteristics of the development of European Portuguese’s phonological awareness of Chinese speakers. By conducting different tests, we are able to highlight some of the characteristics and most common difficulties presented by Chinese speakers learning Portuguese. Furthermore, one present some suggestions in order to help both teachers and students overcoming some obstacles. On our study, we gathered data from 40 informants (average age 18-23 years) answers to the surveys and tasks covering the three types of phonological awareness. The more evident characteristics of phonological awareness development by Chinese speakers, include: 1) third-year subjects performance is better than first-year’s; 2) Phoneme awareness is slightly inferior to the syllable awareness; 3) Third-year students present better results on syllable awareness performance then in phonemic; 5) the pair [p, b] discrimination is the most difficult. According to the characteristics of phonological awareness development and learning habits of Chinese speakers, it is desirable to explore methodologies that combine games, tests, activities that may dynamically stimulate and mature phonological awareness.

Keywords: Portuguese as a foreign language; phonological awareness; Chinese speakers.