Phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and literacy development in Indonesian beginner readers and spellers

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEATHER WINSKEL ◽  
VIVILIA WIDJAJA
Keyword(s):  
Grain Size ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Developmental Stage ◽  
Literacy Development ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Variable Nature ◽  
Early Acquisition ◽  
Phonological Unit ◽  
Reading And Spelling

The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllable is a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered to children in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate that the phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabic affixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependent on developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the language and its orthography.

scholarly journals Grain size in script and teaching: Literacy acquisition in Ge'ez and Latin

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
YONAS MESFUN ASFAHA ◽  
JEANNE KURVERS ◽  
SJAAK KROON
Keyword(s):  
Grain Size ◽  
Word Reading ◽  
Literacy Acquisition ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Reading And Spelling ◽  
Phonological Units

ABSTRACTThe study investigated reading in four African languages that use either syllabic Ge'ez (Tigrinya and Tigre languages) or alphabetic Latin scripts (Kunama and Saho). A sample of 385 Grade 1 children were given letter knowledge, word reading, and spelling tasks to investigate differences at the script and language levels. Results showed that the syllable based Ge'ez script was easier to learn than the phoneme-based Latin despite the bigger number of basic units in Ge'ez. Moreover, the syllable based teaching of alphabetic Saho produced better results than alphabetic teaching of Kunama. These findings are discussed using the psycholinguistic grain size theory. The outcomes confirm the importance of the availability of phonological units in learning to read.

Facilitating Phoneme Awareness Development in 3- and 4-Year-Old Children With Speech Impairment

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail T. Gillon
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Longitudinal Design ◽  
Phoneme Awareness ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
Speech Impairment ◽  
Early Literacy Development ◽  
Reading And Spelling

Purpose: This study investigated the phonological awareness and early literacy development of 12 children who presented at 3 years of age with moderate or severe speech impairment. The children’s response to early intervention that included specific activities to facilitate phoneme awareness and letter knowledge, in addition to improving speech intelligibility, was examined. Method: Using a 3-year longitudinal design, the children’s development in phonological awareness was monitored and compared to that of a group of 19 children without speech impairment. During the monitoring period from 3 to 5 years of age, the children with speech impairment received, on average, 25.5 intervention sessions. At 6 years of age, the children’s performance on phonological awareness, reading, and spelling measures was also compared to that of the 19 children without impairment as well as to a matched control group of children with speech impairment who had not received any specific instruction in phonological awareness. Results: The results indicated that (a) phoneme awareness can be stimulated in children with speech impairment as young as 3 and 4 years of age, (b) facilitating phoneme awareness development can be achieved concurrently with improvement in speech intelligibility, and (c) enhancing phoneme awareness and letter knowledge during the preschool years is associated with successful early reading and spelling experiences for children with speech impairment. Clinical Implications: The data provide evidence to support the clinical practice of integrating activities to develop phoneme awareness and letter knowledge into therapy for 3- and 4-year-old children with moderate or severe speech impairment.

What do Children Do when they Fail to Count Phonemes?

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 757-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Emile Gombert
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Beginning Readers ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
New Words ◽  
Phonological Unit

An analysis of children's responses in phoneme counting tasks provides a way of accessing their conception of the smallest phonological unit. Thus, in order to understand the development of phonological awareness, the types of errors children make in these tasks were analysed. A group of 5to 6-year-olds (preliterate), a group of 6to 7-year-olds (grade 1), a group of 7to 8-year-olds (grade 2), and a group of 6to 7-year-olds who, after 4 months of learning to read, were unable to decode new words were presented a task that involved counting phonemes in words and nonwords. In addition to description of the emergence of the ability to focus on phonemic segments, our interest was in analysing the incorrect responses, including the possible types of segmentation as a function of the pronunciation of the items. Nonliterate subjects (preliterate children or nonreaders from grade 1) counted syllables; the beginning readers (grade 1) often failed to analyse the onset or the rime of the syllables into phonemes. Therefore, they appeared to be using an analysis that was intermediate between onset-rime segments and phonemes. The older children (grade 2) tended to count letters as opposed to phonemes, producing more than one tap for a digraph.

Effects of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Intervention Principles in Emergent Literacy in Children at Risk of Developmental Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Study

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Turid Helland ◽  
Tomas Tjus ◽  
Marit Hovden ◽  
Sonja Ofte ◽  
Mikael Heimann
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Working Memory ◽  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Risk Group ◽  
Verbal Learning ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
Children At Risk ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Reading And Spelling

This longitudinal study focused on the effects of two different principles of intervention in children at risk of developing dyslexia from 5 to 8 years old. The children were selected on the basis of a background questionnaire given to parents and preschool teachers, with cognitive and functional magnetic resonance imaging results substantiating group differences in neuropsychological processes associated with phonology, orthography, and phoneme—grapheme correspondence (i.e., alphabetic principle). The two principles of intervention were bottom-up (BU), “from sound to meaning”, and top-down (TD), “from meaning to sound.” Thus, four subgroups were established: risk/BU, risk/TD, control/BU, and control/TD. Computer-based training took place for 2 months every spring, and cognitive assessments were performed each fall of the project period. Measures of preliteracy skills for reading and spelling were phonological awareness, working memory, verbal learning, and letter knowledge. Literacy skills were assessed by word reading and spelling. At project end the control group scored significantly above age norm, whereas the risk group scored within the norm. In the at-risk group, training based on the BU principle had the strongest effects on phonological awareness and working memory scores, whereas training based on the TD principle had the strongest effects on verbal learning, letter knowledge, and literacy scores. It was concluded that appropriate, specific, data-based intervention starting in preschool can mitigate literacy impairment and that interventions should contain BU training for preliteracy skills and TD training for literacy training.

Foundations of early literacy among Arabic-speaking pre-school children

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Hanadi Abu Ahmad ◽  
David L. Share
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
School Children ◽  
Letter Knowledge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Phoneme Perception ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Phonological Unit

Abstract The present study aimed to shed light on (i) the most accessible phonological unit and (ii) the nature of letter knowledge among native Arabic-speaking preschool children living in Israel. One hundred and sixty-seven children were assessed on phonological awareness with initial and final isolation tasks as well as knowledge of the standard names and sounds of Arabic letters. Children’s responses in these tasks were categorized in accordance with the phonological unit that the child supplied. Regarding phonological unit accessibility, the novel finding of this study was the prevalence of a tri-phonemic /ʔεC/ unit that begins with the prefix /ʔε-/ and ends with the target (consonantal) phoneme which we have termed the “demi-phoneme” (e.g., /ʔεs/ for the consonant /s/). Awareness of the consonant–vowel unit was the next most prevalent unit followed lastly by the “smallest unit” – the phoneme. It appears that the demi-phoneme functions as a psycholinguistic aid to facilitate phoneme perception and pronunciation (as proposed by the 8th-century scholar – Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi) and both phoneme and demi-phoneme responses are underpinned by the same knowledge. With regard to letter knowledge, the standard name for Arabic letters was the preferred response and letter sounds were retrieved as a demi-phoneme unit.

scholarly journals Preschool predictors of learning to read and spell in an additional language: a two-wave longitudinal study in a multilingual context

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyril Wealer ◽  
Silke Fricke ◽  
Ariana Loff ◽  
Pascale M. J. Engel de Abreu
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
First Language ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Preschool Age ◽  
Rapid Automatized Naming ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Letter Sound ◽  
Reading And Spelling

AbstractThe study explores whether foundational skills of reading and spelling in preschool (age 5–6) predict literacy skills cross-linguistically in an additional language in Grade 1 (age 6–7). A sample of linguistically diverse preschool children completed tasks of phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, verbal-short term memory, rapid automatized naming, and lexical knowledge in the language of preschool instruction Luxembourgish. The children were followed-up in Grade 1 where literacy skills were assessed in the language of schooling, i.e., German, after five months of literacy instruction. German was a non-native language for all children. Longitudinal correlations confirm that individual differences in single word/pseudoword reading and spelling in German in Grade 1 can be predicted by all the foundational literacy skills that were assessed in Luxembourgish. Path analyses showed that phonological awareness in Luxembourgish emerged as the strongest unique predictor of Grade 1 literacy skills in German. The second unique preschool predictor of Grade 1 literacy skills was letter-sound knowledge. Results are consistent with the view that literacy development in an additional language builds upon similar building blocks as literacy acquisition in a first language, at least for languages that are typologically close. However, current findings suggest that respective contributions between predictors and literacy skills in children learning to read in an additional language may vary from patterns observed in studies with children acquiring literacy in their first language.

The impact of language on the relationships between phonological awareness and word reading in different orthographies: A test of the psycholinguistic grain size theory in bilinguals

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 1083-1115 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO ◽  
ADRIAN PASQUARELLA ◽  
XI CHEN ◽  
GLORIA RAMIREZ
Keyword(s):  
Grain Size ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Reading Skills ◽  
Word Reading ◽  
First Language ◽  
Phonological Sensitivity ◽  
English Reading ◽  
Syllable Onset ◽  
Different Orthographies ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTThe relationships among first language (L1) and second language (L2) phonological awareness and reading skills were examined in English L2 learners with a variety of L1s, specifically Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (maximum N = 252). Longitudinal and concurrent relations between word reading and subcomponents of phonological awareness (i.e., syllable, onset-rime, phoneme, and, where applicable, tone awareness) were examined in kindergarten and first and second grades. The relationships between reading and specific subcomponents of phonological awareness were associated with the orthography being read, English or the L1. Phonological awareness subcomponents related to English reading were generally similar for the three English L2 groups, despite differences in the orthographies of learners’ native language. The findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory with regard to links between phonological sensitivity and the sound–symbol correspondences used to read the specific languages.

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