A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Phonological awareness, or the ability to manipulate sounds, has been
found to be highly correlated with the acquisition of reading skills. This
awareness may be influenced by the orthography or language system in
which the child is learning to read. In addition, different aspects of
phonological awareness may also apply to different stages of reading
development. This study found that depth of orthography does not seem to
influence initial levels of phonological awareness. After two years of reading
instruction, readers of a transparent orthography are better at phoneme
segmentation and blending and reading nonwords than readers of an
opaque orthography. Afrikaans children appear to begin leading in an
alphabetic stage using a nonlexical strategy of grapheme-phoneme
conversion. English beginner readers seem to start reading using
predominantly a logographic strategy of visual word recognition. It also
seems that some levels of phonological awareness such as onset/rime
detection and syllable manipulation are acquired spontaneously by
prereaders of both languages, but that the manipulation of phonemic units
is dependent on the acquisition of literacy. The introduction of literacy
training and/or the maturation of the children's phonological systems results
in a change to a greater awareness of small phonemic units than larger
units. / AC2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/22831 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Cockcroft, Katherine Alexandra Sarah |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (143 leaves), application/pdf |
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