Development of an application to test young L2 learners’ phonological awareness autonomously

Abstract

[EN] Phonological Awareness (PA) plays a crucial role in L1 and L2 reading acquisition and L2 pronunciation, but its relation to L2 listening has been studied to a lesser degree. In order to study the relationship between the development of PA as a meta-skill and the use of a foreign language app targeting listening skills for young learners, a reliable test was needed. The goal of this study was to design a PA test in English and in French, to be administered on tablets, taken by French children autonomously (without the need for one-on-one administration) and assessed automatically. This requires the tasks to be transformed into selected response tasks to be automatically scorable. In order for instructions to be comprehensible to young learners, they must be carefully scripted, illustrated and contextualized (in our case, with a family of monsters enjoying words starting or ending with certain sounds).The application was tested with 65 intact classes of 1st graders (6-7 years old) learning English in France, whose schools participated in a larger project focused on L1 French reading fluency and L2 English listening comprehension. It proved to be usable and reliable. Further validity studies are planned.