Phonological Awareness as the Foundation of Reading Acquisition in Students Reading in Transparent Orthography.

Vesela Milankov,Špela Golubović,Slavica Golubović,Tatjana Krstić

doi:10.3390/ijerph18105440

Abstract

Phonological skills have been found to be strongly related to early reading and writing development. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to examine the extent to which the development of phonological awareness facilitates reading acquisition in students learning to read a transparent orthography. Our research included 689 primary school students in first through third grade (Mean age 101.59 months, SD = 12,690). The assessment tools used to conduct this research include the Phonological Awareness Test and the Gray Oral Reading Test. According to the results from the present study, 13.7% of students have reading difficulties. Students with reading difficulties obtained low scores in phonological awareness within each subscale compared to students who do not have reading difficulties (p < 0.01). Components of phonological awareness which did not singled out as strongly related to early reading success include Phoneme Segmentation, Initial Phoneme Identification, and Syllable Merging. Thus, understanding the nature of the relationship between phonological awareness and reading should help effective program design that will be aimed at eliminating delayed development in children’s phonological awareness while they are still in preschool.

Highlights

IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
The results show that there is no significant difference in the overall index of oral reading (F = 0.45, p = 0.64) in relation to the class that students attend (Table 4)
Our research showed that the largest number of students who participated in the research had an average reading development

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. During their development, a large number of children do not experience difficulties in learning early literacy skills. A number of children struggle with reading challenges over a long period of time, whereas some of them do not even reach the expected level of these skills [1]. Orthographic transparency is an important factor influencing reading acquisition and refers to the relationship between written symbols—graphemes representing speech sounds—and phonemes. The research on alphabet writing systems indicates that in language, orthographic transparency is increasingly recognized as important when determining the degree of difficulties with learning to read. A transparent orthography has a simple one-to-one relationship while less transparent orthographies are those in which the relationship is more complex

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Conclusion