Predictors of word‐level literacy amongst Grade 3 children in five diverse languages

Abstract

Groups of Grade 3 children were tested on measures of word-level literacy and undertook tasks that required the ability to associate sounds with letter sequences and that involved visual, auditory and phonological-processing skills. These groups came from different language backgrounds in which the language of instruction was Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian or Portuguese. Similar measures were used across the groups, with tests being adapted to be appropriate for the language of the children. Findings indicated that measures of decoding and phonological-processing skills were good predictors of word reading and spelling among Arabic- and English-speaking children, but were less able to predict variability in these same early literacy skills among Chinese- and Hungarian-speaking children, and were better at predicting variability in Portuguese word reading than spelling. Results were discussed with reference to the relative transparency of the script and issues of dyslexia assessment across languages. Overall, the findings argue for the need to take account of features of the orthography used to represent a language when developing assessment procedures for a particular language and that assessment of word-level literacy skills and a phonological perspective of dyslexia may not be universally applicable across all language contexts.

Desempenho ortográfico de escolares do 2º ao 5º ano do ensino público

“…This is due to children committing writing appropriation "errors" during the apprenticeship until, progressively, dominate the spelling system in a securer way (2,8,18) . one (9) . The two refer that both the phonological processes and the spelling ones are important to the writing apprenticeship, because the standard of phoneme-grapheme conversion can be learned with the increase of the exposition to the frequency of the occurrence and the use of the spelling annotations.…”

“…Some authors (8,9) concluded both the phonological processes and the spelling ones are important to the writing apprenticeship. In their researches, they observed that the standard of letters in new words of higher frequency were learned more easily, as the phonological standards that occurred with higher frequency in words were also related to letters more quickly.…”

Desempenho ortográfico de escolares do 2º ao 5º ano do ensino particular

“…Some authors 8,9 concluded that both the spelling and phonological processes are important for learning of writing, when in their research observed that the patterns of letters in new words more frequently were more easily learned, as well as the phonological patterns that occurred more often in words were also related to the letters more quickly.…”

Desempenho de escolares em consciência fonológica, nomeação rápida, leitura e escrita

“…These components, ie, phonological working memory and access to mental lexicon enable the processing and organization of language. Likewise, they are requested by the central executive component in carrying out any task, including phonological awareness and phoneme-grapheme association [11][12][13].…”