http://adl.aptik.or.id/default.aspx?tabID=61&id=168146&src=a
Characterising the Reading Development of Indonesian Children
Harwintha Y. Anjarningsih
Linguistics Department, Faculty of Humanities,
Universitas Indonesia
wintha_salyo@yahoo.com
To
characterise the reading development of Indonesian children, a tool is
currently developed. The tool builds on two important findings from previous
literature: that the depth of a language’s orthography influences reading
development (e.g., Seymore, Aro, & Erskine, 2003); and that
reading development proceeds in phases (e.g., Ehri, 2005). In
languages with deep orthography such as English, reading is made challenging by
irregular words, such as ‘pint,’ which cannot be decoded successfully just by
relying on phonological strategy. It does not work when children try to
assemble the words based on the Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion that can be found
in regular words, such as ‘mint.’ Furthermore,
in English, each grapheme or series of graphemes can be read differently
in different words. For example, the graphemes <c>
and <h> can be
read as /ʃ/ in the word ‘moustache,’ /t ʃ/ in the word ‘chair,’ and /k/ in the
word ‘choir.’ The work of Seymour, Aro, &
Erskine (2003)
shows that children reading English are not reading fluently about 50% of
familiar words by the end of the first school year. On the other hand, in languages with
transparent orthographies, such as Italian, children have become accurate and
fluent in reading simple, familiar words by the end of the first school year.
In terms of orthography, Indonesian is transparent, much like Italian. It is
interesting to ask how children’s reading proceeds in such a transparent
orthography which has not been extensively investigated. In this research
project, a tool that makes use of several variables of the written Indonesian
words is developed and tested to uncover its suitability and reliability for
nationwide application. One hundred disyllabic, frequent words (10,000 most
frequent words based on the IndonesianWac corpus) are read by the participants
and divided into four groups: (1) simple words; (2) words with diphthongs ; (3)
words with digraphs; and (4) words with consonant clusters. Two groups of
normally developing children have been tested: 16 pre-school children (mean
age=5 years; 7 months); 17 grade 1 children (mean age=7 years).
Answers are recorded digitally and written on answer sheets. Overall, by
keeping number of syllables constant, it is possible to assess how syllable
structure(s) affects the children’s reading development and how chronological
age affects reading development. Our
preliminary findings are: (1) at the pre-school stage, (a) all four groups of
words are difficult, (b) reading mistakes predominantly show visual
errors which still show 50% of the graphemes in the target
words,
and (c) digraphs and consonant clusters presented the most difficult challege
as evidenced by the percentages of mistakes made; (2) at the grade one level,
(a) simple words and words with diphthongs are less difficult to read, (b)
mistakes are also predominantly visual
, although to a much smaller extent than that of the
pre-schoolers, and
(c) digraphs and consonant clusters still present the most difficult challenge
at this level.
Reading Acquisition Reading
Development Reading
Disabilities Dyslexia
