5544V - Developing Heritage-Language Literacy Screening Tools: Assessing Phonological Awareness Skills in Urdu-English Simultaneous Bilingual Children

Bilingual children are disproportionately under-identified for language and reading difficulties at primary grade levels. This is due to limited heritage language assessment tools for bilingual children, and delayed pre-literacy screening. We developed an Urdu phonological awareness tele-screening tool to support bilingual children in North America, and globally. Such heritage-language screening tools are needed, due to the prevalence of bilinguals worldwide. We emphasize the importance of linguistic diversity in child language and literacy research, to represent languages - such as Urdu - that are commonly spoken worldwide but under-represented in research. The developed tool will enable clinicians and researchers to better support bilingual children, as well as further understandings of biliteracy development in linguistically-related languages such as Arabic and Farsi.