What Aspects of Phonological Awareness Predict Later Reading Skills in a Shallow Orthography? The Case of Kinyarwanda

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The importance of phonological awareness in understanding reading development can hardly be overstated. Phonological awareness has been seen as a key to unlocking the complex process by which children learn the relationship between spoken and written words. Findings across a wide range of studies have shown that phonological awareness and – in particular, phonemic awareness – is essential to learning to read in English. There is growing evidence, however, that linguistic and orthographic features of different languages affect the relationship between phonological awareness and children’s reading development. In this paper, I use a fixed effects approach to examine what aspects of phonological awareness are predictive of later reading skills in a shallow orthography. Employing longitudinal reading data from one district of Rwanda, my study tests the assumptions about the importance of phonemic awareness in Kinyarwanda, a highly syllabic, Bantu language. Results from my analysis suggest that syllabic awareness is a better predictor of later reading skills than phonemic awareness among Kinyarwanda-speaking children. These findings deepen our understanding of the various linguistic and orthographic aspects of reading – knowledge that can be used to improve our ability to support students on the path to becoming literate.

Type of resource	text
Date created	July 2017

Author	Kim, Joseph

Subject	phonological awareness
Subject	reading skills
Subject	orthography
Subject	Kinyarwanda
Subject	Stanford Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Title Stanford Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/yd691hd2273

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Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education Master's Monographs

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