Preliterate phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Turkish

Selma Babayiğit,Rhona Stainthorp

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2007.00350.x

Abstract

The role of preschool phonological awareness in early reading and spelling skills was investigated in the transparent orthography of Turkish. Fifty‐six preschool children (mean age=5.6 years) were followed into Grade 2 (mean age=7.6 years). While preschool phonological awareness failed to make any reliable contribution to future reading skills, it was the strongest longitudinal correlate of spelling skills measured at the end of Grades 1 and 2. Overall findings suggested that phonological awareness may be differentially related to reading and spelling, and that spelling is a more sensitive index of phonological processing skills. In this study, verbal short‐term memory emerged as the most powerful and consistent longitudinal correlate of reading speed. This finding raised important questions about the component processes of reading speed, and the role of memory and morphosyntactic skills in an agglutinative and transparent orthography such as Turkish.

Highlights

The role of preschool phonological awareness in early reading and spelling skills was investigated in the transparent orthography of Turkish
Orthographic transparency clearly shapes the observed relationship between phonological awareness and literacy skills
The unreliable relationships between phonological awareness and reading observed in this study should be evaluated in the light of methodological limitations that did not allow us to obtain reliable measures of explicit phoneme awareness and reading accuracy skills

Summary

Introduction

The role of preschool phonological awareness in early reading and spelling skills was investigated in the transparent orthography of Turkish. Whilst preschool phonological awareness failed to make any reliable contribution to future reading skills, it was the strongest longitudinal correlate of spelling skills measured at the end of grades 1 and 2. Overall findings suggested that phonological awareness may be differentially related to reading and spelling and that spelling is a more sensitive index of phonological processing skills. Verbal short-term memory emerged as the most powerful and consistent longitudinal correlate of reading speed. This finding raised important questions about the component processes of reading speed, and the role of memory and morpho-syntactic skills in an agglutinative and transparent orthography such as Turkish. I) Lack of systematic control for other important predictors such as existing literacy skills and letter knowledge; ii) The tendency to focus on a limited or single measure of phonological awareness skills when evidence suggests that different phonological awareness measures might be differentially related to literacy skills (e.g., Muter, Hulme, & Snowling, 1998)

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Discussion

Conclusion