ABSTRACT
This chapter concludes the book from the summary of research findings, revelations, limitations and implications for future research. The research reveals that Uyghur bilingual children excel in recognizing various phonological structures, underscoring the role of L2 phonology in L3 phonological acquisition. The psycholinguistic grain size theory explains children's literacy development well, though its influence on reading development varies due to native language phonology, Chinese pinyin acquisition and English reading and writing levels. These findings align with the L2 threshold hypothesis, and suggest that L2 proficiency boosts L3 metalinguistic awareness, influencing Uyghur children's Chinese phonological competence and literacy positively. The findings deepen the present understanding of the universality and diversity of the role of phonological awareness in children's reading and learning across languages, serving as important guidance for the design of targeted reading intervention programs for ethnic minority children. Future research can broaden research perspectives, including the impact of oral vocabulary size, morpheme, orthographic and prosodic awareness on literacy development, and examine diverse ethnic minority groups to further unveil the cross-language transfer in different phonological systems. Moreover, future studies are needed to clarify the role of tone discrimination in Chinese phonological awareness training for Uyghur children.
