The development of phonological and reading skills in English and Afrikaans children

[摘要] Phonological awareness, or the ability to manipulate sounds, has beenfound to be highly correlated with the acquisition of reading skills. Thisawareness may be influenced by the orthography or language system inwhich the child is learning to read. In addition, different aspects ofphonological awareness may also apply to different stages of readingdevelopment. This study found that depth of orthography does not seem toinfluence initial levels of phonological awareness. After two years of readinginstruction, readers of a transparent orthography are better at phonemesegmentation and blending and reading nonwords than readers of anopaque orthography. Afrikaans children appear to begin leading in analphabetic stage using a nonlexical strategy of grapheme-phonemeconversion. English beginner readers seem to start reading usingpredominantly a logographic strategy of visual word recognition. It alsoseems that some levels of phonological awareness such as onset/rimedetection and syllable manipulation are acquired spontaneously byprereaders of both languages, but that the manipulation of phonemic unitsis dependent on the acquisition of literacy. The introduction of literacytraining and/or the maturation of the children's phonological systems resultsin a change to a greater awareness of small phonemic units than largerunits.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand