Emergent literacy of 5-year-old Estonian- and Russian-speaking Estonian children: What subskills are behind the differences?
Emergent literacy of 5-year-old Estonian- and Russian-speaking Estonian children: What subskills are behind the differences?

Summary/Abstract: In 2018, the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) was conducted in Estonia, England, and the United States (OECD 2020a). The present study focuses on emergent literacy and examines the effects of language and gender on five-year-old Estonian children’s test performance in different subskills of emergent literacy. The sample comprised of the test performance of 1611 Estonian-speaking and 444 Russian-speaking children who attended kindergartens in which Estonian and Russian were the language of instruction, respectively. Children’s vocabulary, sentence and narrative comprehension, and phonological awareness were assessed. The results indicated the main effect of language on the majority of the subskills, reflecting better test performance among Russian-speaking children compared to their Estonian-speaking peers. In addition, girls performed significantly better than boys on most of the tasks.

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