Phonological awareness and learning to read in Afrikaans : the role of working memory

Abstract

Background Early literacy skills have a crucial influence on the reading abilities and overall academic success of a child during the school years. The development of phonological awareness skills starts in the pre-school years. While phonological awareness predicts later reading success, working memory is also vital in higher cognitive skills such as reading. Phoneme-grapheme association supports and improves the lexical representation of words in the memory. The phoneme-grapheme association rules in transparent orthographies are in general more predictable and more words can be accurately read at an early stage. Therefore, reading accuracy and fluency seem to develop more straightforwardly since the phoneme-grapheme association is less complicated. As yet, the researcher has come across no studies which explored the role of phonological awareness and working memory in Afrikaans with its transparent orthography. Purpose To explore and describe the role of working memory in the acquisition of phonological awareness skills and ultimately reading in Afrikaans, a language with a transparent orthography. Method A cross-sectional descriptive design with correlational components was used to obtain data from the participants, aged 7 years to 8 years 11 months. Thirty-five participants from five private schools with Afrikaans as language of learning and teaching (LoLT) were assessed. Results The participants employed phonetic decoding more than eidetic decoding. The word reading skills of the participants developed rapidly and exceeded regular expectations. An overall high reading rate was displayed by the participants, likely due to the transparent orthography of Afrikaans. A higher score for the reading comprehension test was obtained by participants who read the comprehension test fluently. Text reading fluency made a more significant contribution to the performance of the participants on the reading comprehension test than word reading fluency. The number memory reversed subtest was more challenging than number memory forward. Shorter words were recalled more easily than longer words. It was less challenging for the participants to recall an eight- to ten-word sentence than to recall a list of words. Visual spatial memory had no significant relationship to the decoding or reading comprehension skills of the participants. The rhyming production subtest was more challenging than the rhyming discrimination subtest. The impact of syllable awareness skills on the word decoding skills of the participants was not significant. The segmenting and blending scores exceeded the expected performance of the participants. The correlation coefficient between reading comprehension and WM was not statistically significant. The relationship between WM and reading skills seems to be the same in both opaque and transparent orthographies. The correlations of PA and PhA skills with the word reading skills of the participants were moderate in strength. A fairly strong correlation between reading comprehension and PA as well as PhA skills was, however, observed. Conclusion The fairly strong statistically significant correlation between word reading skills and WM supports reading development in the early phases. The reasoning behind this deduction is that children who cannot hold and manipulate information in memory will find phoneme-grapheme association difficult.

Keywords: Afrikaans, phonological awareness, reading, transparent orthographies, working memory.