Phonological features of Yazghulami : A field study

Yazghulami is a South-East Iranian language spoken in the Pamir area of Tajikistan by about 9000 people. This study gives an account of the phonology of the language by describing contrastive segments and their distribution and realizations, as well as describing suprasegmental features such as syllable structure and stress patterns. Field research was carried out in a community of Yazghulami speakers in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, by recording, transcribing and annotating spoken language. Yazghulami is analyzed as having 8 vowel phonemes of which one pair contrasts in length, and 36 consonant phonemes with a considerable display of palatal, velar and uvular phonemes, of which a set of three labialized plosives and three labialized fricatives is found. The syllable structure of Yazghulami allows for clusters of no more than two consonants in the onset and two in the coda; clusters in both positions do not occur in one and the same syllable. The stress generally falls on the last syllable of a word, although when nouns are inflected with suffixes, the stress instead falls on the last syllable of the stem. With these results, a foundation for further efforts to develop and increase the status of this endangered language is laid.

Special Education Teachers’ Narratives on Literacy Support for Bilingual Students with Dyslexia in Swedish Compulsory Schools

The aim of the study is to investigate how special education teachers talk about their teaching in relation to bilingual students with dyslexia within Swedish compulsory schools. Data consist of transcripts from in-depth interviews with 15 special education teachers. According to the teacher narratives, the special education services appeared to be biased against bilingual students, as the support provided to bilingual students with dyslexia was revealed to be more or less the same as that provided to monolingual Swedish-speaking students with dyslexia. This bias is discussed in relation to the notion of difference blindness as well as in relation to practical constraints. Nevertheless, the teachers strongly advocated collaborative work with mother tongue teachers in order to facilitate dyslexia identification in bilingual students and to gain a more comprehensive picture of their language and literacy competencies, which is a desire that contrasts and contests a pedagogical monolingual master model within special education services.