Abstract:

Mastery in reading requires some degree of meta-linguistic awareness that words are a blend of sub-lexical segments, the phonemes (Liberman, 1973). Research exploring literacy development in young children suggests that children in order to become competent readers and spellers among other things need to understand how a written symbol system represents their spoken language. Understanding how alphabetic systems represent spoken language refers to a metalinguistic ability, namely phonological awareness. It has been demonstrated by a large number of studies that phonological awareness is related to learning to read and spell (for reviews see Adams, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Additionally, it has been suggested that this relationship is causal and it exists even after intelligence, vocabulary and socioeconomic status have been controlled for (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Wagner, Torgesen & Rashotte, 1994).

The present study investigates the development of phonological awareness in Greek, explores the relationship between phonological awareness and reading and spelling and finally makes implications on the importance of phonological awareness training on literacy acquisition in an orthography which is transparent in terms of reading (Greek).

The sample consisted of 150 Greek-Cypriot primary school students. At the time of testing children were attending the first five grades of primary school; thirty students from each grade were recruited. Testing took place during the first academic semester (November-December). The participant’s ability on reading, spelling and phonological awareness (a phoneme segmentation task, a phoneme deletion task, a syllable segmentation task, a syllable deletion task and two spoonerisms tasks), as well as their non-verbal intelligence, mathematic ability and receptive vocabulary, were tested via a series of tasks administered individually or in small groups in a quiet room of the participants’ school.

The performance of young children on the phonological awareness tasks was highly satisfactory. The findings suggest that phonological awareness skills are strongly related to reading performance among beginning Greek readers and this relation continues to exist for a longer period of time than could be hypothesized for readers of a regular orthography based on findings by Wimmer (1996) or Landerl and Wimmer (2000) or for Greek speaking children (Porpodas, 1999). Given that there is a difference in performance between children on the phoneme manipulation tasks as well as a close relationship between reading and spelling and performance on phoneme manipulation it can be hypothesized that even though the nature of the Greek orthography facilitates the understanding of the phonemic structure of spoken Greek, systematic training in phonemic awareness is needed, especially for children at-risk for reading failure, to develop more fine phonological awareness skills. In addition, training children on the phoneme manipulation tasks should focus both on accuracy and on speed to perform segmental operations.

Keywords:

phonological awareness, greek language, reading, spelling, literacy development.