Makalah Harwintha untuk KOLITA 14, 2016

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