Letter-Sound Correspondence Acquisition in First Semester Russian

Abstract

Although teachers of first year Russian courses know that students often mistake letters of the Cyrillic alphabet for English letters when reading aloud and writing, no studies have documented which letters cause the most frequent misreadings, how long misreading persists, and what implications misreading has for student achievement. This semester-long study attempts to answer these questions by isolating the question of letter-sound correspondence from the larger questions of the students’ interlanguage phonology. The researchers found that ц, ё, ю, й, э consistently gave students difficulty. After 12 weeks (84 hours) of instruction, students had 93% accuracy in matching Cyrillic letters to their primary sound values. While this represents a high degree of accuracy by the end of the first semester, the researchers found that higher accuracy rates earlier in the semester (after 4 weeks [28 hours] of instruction) had a moderate positive correlation with success in the course (as measured by final grade), while high levels of gain in accuracy between the fourth and twelfth weeks of the semester showed moderate negative correlation with success in the course, suggesting that the earlier the students master letter-sound correspondences, the greater their chances for success in studying other features of the language.