Abstract
With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.
Highlights
Our understanding of dyslexia has grown in the past decades, in many nonEnglish speaking parts of the world, the concept and study of dyslexia is still in its infancy (Lee, 2008)
Spelling (OCT) correlates with both reading measures, writing to dictation, Test Rekenen (TTR), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and language grades, while writing correlates with reading fluency, Orthographic choice task (OCT), TTR, phoneme deletion, RAN, and both language and math grades
The aim of the present study was to develop a comprehensive test battery that would allow the assessment of reading acquisition and the early detection of reading difficulties in beginner learners of Standard Indonesian (SI)
Summary
Our understanding of dyslexia has grown in the past decades, in many nonEnglish speaking parts of the world, the concept and study of dyslexia is still in its infancy (Lee, 2008). For about 23 million Indonesians nationwide SI is their primary language, while for over 140 million others SI is their second language (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2013). Most of these first language SI-speakers live in larger cities
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