The development of phonological awareness across different grade levels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0010/000635Keywords:
Phonological awareness, children, Arabic, orthographyAbstract
Over the past three decades, phonological awareness has emerged as one of the strongest predictors of reading. Although phonological awareness has been found to correlate with reading in cross-linguistic studies of Romance languages, much is still unknown about how phonological awareness is manifested in linguistically complex countries such as Morocco. This study examines how phonological awareness is developed during early literacy stages. To assess children’s phonological awareness, phoneme and syllable awareness tasks were administrated to 45 pupils. The results revealed that performance in syllable awareness tasks was higher than performance in phoneme awareness tasks across the three grades. The results are discussed in light of the Arabic orthography and the Moroccan educational system.
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