Phonological awareness, letter knowledge and literacy development in Indonesian beginner readers and spellers

The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllable is a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered to children in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate that the phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabic affixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependent on developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the language and its orthography. Recently, there has been much debate about the grain size of orthography– phonology correspondences that are initially used by children when learning to read and spell (e.g., Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003; Hulme et al., 2002; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Cross-linguistic research has indicated that the level of phonological awareness initially used in reading and spelling is influenced by the orthography to be learned and the phonology of the spoken language corresponding to that orthography (Goswami, 1999). A considerable amount of research has been conducted on literacy development in Indo-European languages, but much less research has been conducted on Asian languages. Indonesian provides an interesting case study as it uses the same Latin-based alphabetic script as English, but in contrast has a high degree of orthographic transparency and the syllable is a highly salient unit, as it is both multisyllabic and has clear syllable boundaries. In the current study, the phonological grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian was investigated. © 2007 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/07 $12.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 24 Winskel & Widjaja: Phonological awareness in Indonesian children INDONESIAN LANGUAGE AND ITS ORTHOGRAPHY Indonesian was decreed as the national language in 1928, and the adoption of the present Latin-based alphabetic orthography dates only from 1972 (Prentice, 1987; Sneddon, 2003). Indonesian is part of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, which also includes languages such as Tagalog and Tongan. It is a standardized dialect of the Malay language. The spelling and grammar of Indonesian has undergone several readjustments before arriving at its present form, which is now taught and used at schools in Indonesia (Sneddon, 2003; Tim Penyusun Kamus Pusat Bahasa, 2001). Indonesian is spoken most extensively in urban areas, and less so in the rural parts of Indonesia where local or regional languages are predominantly spoken. The alphabet used in Indonesian overlaps with 25 letters of the English alphabet; “x” is only used in loan words. Furthermore, there is a correspondence between the names of letters and the sounds that they make in words in Indonesian. Indonesian is a highly transparent language with almost a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes except for the letter “e,” which has two phonemic forms “@” and “e,” and the grapheme–phoneme relationship is also transparent (Prentice, 1987). Indonesian has five pure vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and only three diphthongs written as “ai,” “au,” “oi” and few consonant clusters (Moeliono & Dardjowidjojo, 1988; Pusat Bahasa Departemen Pendidikan Nasional, 2003). The syllable is a salient unit in Indonesian, as it is predominantly biand multisyllabic, and monosyllabic forms are infrequent. Furthermore, it has a simple syllable structure and clear syllable boundaries. Most syllables have the following structure: consonant–vowel (CV), CVC, or CVCC; but CVV, CCV, VC, V, and VCC are also possible (Prentice, 1987). With regard to pronunciation of words, the allocation of stress in each word is relatively regular, with stress on either the penultimate or the final syllable of the word (Goedemans & Zanten, 2000; Gomez & Reason, 2002). Indonesian has a rich transparent system of morphemes or affixations. It has about 25 derivational affixes (Prentice, 1987). Colloquial spoken Indonesian often uses nonaffixed forms. Affixes serve at least one semantic function, and vary depending on the word class of the stem. For example, the stem word makan (to eat) becomes makani (devour), termakan (to be eaten), makanan (food), and pemakan (eater). There are irregularities, however, in how some affixes are spelled, as they change depending on the context. Indonesian children need to be able to read and understand affixes early, as many instructions in worksheets and exercise books are written in this form. Affixes are in general formally taught in Grade 3 upward. The salience of the syllable in Indonesian is reflected in the teaching method adopted, which predominantly consists of teaching children the correspondences between whole spoken and written syllables rather than the correspondence between letters and phonemes. Reading instruction emphasizes the learning of syllables, chunking or segmenting, and blending. The course of the teaching of reading usually progresses according to the following pattern. Students are first introduced to the alphabet; subsequently, they are instructed to rehearse sets of syllables with a simple pattern of C and V. For example, students learn the combination of the Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 25 Winskel & Widjaja: Phonological awareness in Indonesian children letters b + a, b + i, b + u, b + e, and b + o then produce the syllables ba, bi, bu, be, and bo. Then they rehearse these syllables and mix the syllables to form a word, such as i + bu becomes “ibu” (mother). The teaching of the CV syllabic pattern is then followed by the CVC syllabic pattern and more complex CV combinations (Dewi, 2003). The reading instruction is very similar to the instruction used in other syllable-prominent languages, for example, Bahasa Malaysia and Brazillian Portuguese (Cardoso-Martins, 1995; Gomez & Reason, 2002; Liow & Lee, 2004). BACKGROUND LITERATURE Phonological awareness, the child’s awareness that spoken words can be broken down or manipulated into smaller units of sound, is one of the critical skills in the acquisition of reading in an alphabetic orthography (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985). Furthermore, children who are having difficulties in learning how to read and write often have difficulties in phonological awareness tasks (Hansen & Bowey, 1994; Snowling, Goulandris, Bowlby, & Howell, 1986). An awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes appears to develop prior to reading instruction, whereas an awareness of phonemes takes time to develop, and develops in conjunction with learning to read an alphabetic orthography as grapheme information helps with this process (Goswami, 1999). The units that are the best predictors of reading depend on the developmental stage of the children being studied. Prior to reading when children are 3 or 4 years old, larger grain sizes, syllables, and rimes predict reading, whereas when children begin to learn to read and spell at 5 or 6 years, phonemes are found to be robust predictors of reading and spelling in alphabetic orthographies (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993; Caravolas & Bruck, 1993; Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2001; CardosoMartins, 1995; Goswami, 2002; Hulme et al., 2002; Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987). Subsequently, as reading proficiency increases, single grapheme–phoneme decoding appears to be augmented by processing of larger multigrapheme units. English children in their second year of primary school are more sensitive to the frequencies of rime structures than children in their first year (Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 2000). Moreover, morphological awareness has been found to be a good predictor of reading and spelling in older English children (Carlisle, 1995; Treiman & Cassar, 1996). In sum, it appears that more proficient readers are able to operate at different grain sizes depending on the demands and nature of the literacy task and the characteristics of the particular orthography (Goswami et al., 2003). In addition, children’s knowledge of the letters of the alphabet has been found to be a robust predictor of reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1991; Cardoso-Martins, 1995; Foulin, 2005) and of initial spelling achievement (Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1997; Shatil, Share & Levin, 2000). Letter knowledge plays an important role, as it appears that letter–name knowledge helps children connect print to speech and acquire the alphabetic principle, that is, that written graphemes stand for phonemes in speech (Treiman, Tincoff, & Richmond-Welty, 1996). This effect is enhanced in languages such as Turkish where letter names and letter sounds correspond to a much greater extent than English, as the names of the letters Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 26 Winskel & Widjaja: Phonological awareness in Indonesian children contain the phoneme that the letter typically represents, which facilitates learner’s access to phoneme–grapheme correspondence rules (Öney & Durgunoğlu, 1997). In English, a relatively deep alphabetic orthography, there has been much debate about what grain size beginner readers initially use, whether beginners start with whole words followed by phonemes or intermediate subsyllabic units such as onsets and rimes (e.g., Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 2000; Treiman & Zukowski, 1996; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). It has been proposed that children initially adopt a whole word lexical approach in learning to read in English (Frith, 1985). Stuart and Coltheart (1988) found that reading errors made by English beginning readers involved reading one word for another and substituting visually similar words for the target word, which gives evidence for the use of a lexical (whole-word) reading strategy. In contrast, in German, a relatively transparent language, children’s errors in lexical reading are mostly nonwords that share letter-sound correspondences with the target sounds, which indicate that German beginning readers are using a sublexical, phonemic route (Wimmer & Hummer, 1990). In addition, it has been found that German children use a similar sublexical approach in reading familiar and nonwords, whereas English children appear to use different strategies, that is, a lexical approach initially for reading words and a sublexical approach when reading nonwords (Wimmer & Goswami, 1994). In addition, the performance of German first grade children in nonword reading correlated highly with their reading of familiar words, whereas it was nonsignificant in English children, which confirms that a similar approach is used by German beginning readers to read both nonwords and familiar words (Wimmer & Goswami, 1994). This suggests that German beginner readers due to the transparency of the orthography have ready access to grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules, whereas English beginning readers due to the inconsistency or irregularity of the orthography use a lexical strategy initially for word recognition (Goswami et al., 2003). In English, researchers have also found a strong connection between rhyming ability and early reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). It has been speculated that the reason for this is that there is a relatively high degree of spelling–sound consistency at the level of the rime, whereas English graphemes can be pronounced in multiple ways and their pronunciation can be spelled in multiple ways (Goswami, 2002; Treiman, Mullennix, & Bijeljac-Babic, 1995). This has not been observed to such a great extent in more orthographically transparent languages (Goswami, 1999, 2000; Wimmer & Goswami, 1994) and in multisyllabic languages where the unit rime corresponds to a segment larger than the syllable (Cardoso-Martins, 1995). Recent research on Asian orthographies has highlighted the syllable as an important unit of processing, and deemphasized the degree of prominence of the phoneme in these languages. Research investigating children acquiring Kannada, a semisyllabic Indo-Dravidian script, indicates that the optimal unit for beginners is the syllable, although more proficient readers and spellers can also manipulate phonemes (Padakannaya, Rekka, Vaid, & Joshi, 2002). Research on spelling in Malaysian children has found that even though the language is very predictable at the phoneme–grapheme level, early spelling tends to be based on encoding at the syllable and morpheme rather than the phoneme level (Liow & Lee, 2004). Liow and Lee (2004) suggest that as syllables are such salient units and receive Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 27 Winskel & Widjaja: Phonological awareness in Indonesian children equal stress in Malaysian, children can pick up sizable reading–spelling units without accessing grapheme–phoneme correspondences. It is important to note in relation to the present study that Malaysian and Indonesian are variants of the same language and the major differences between Indonesian and Malaysian are lexical rather than grammatical (Prentice, 1987). In other languages where the syllable is a salient unit, it has also been found that the syllable plays a significant role in reading acquisition; for example, in Portuguese, a multisyllabic language, the syllable is a salient and clearly distinct phonological unit for beginner readers, and it has been found that both syllabic awareness and phoneme awareness significantly predict reading (CardosoMartins, 1995). In Spanish, another syllable prominent language with clear syllable boundaries, syllabic awareness has also been found to be an important predictor of reading ability (Carillo, 1994; Jimenéz González & del Rosarion Ortiz González, 2000). The unit size that reading instruction focuses on has been found to affect phonological awareness development (Goswami, 2002). Cardoso-Martins (2001) investigated the grain size Brazilian children use when learning to read Portuguese after receiving instruction through two different reading approaches: a phonics approach, and a whole word followed by a syllabic approach. She found that children learning to read via the phonics approach relied on a phonetic cue strategy from the beginning of learning to read, whereas children learning to read by the whole-word approach could not read any unfamiliar words or pseudowords after 3 months of reading instruction, and most reading errors were due to refusals to read the pseudowords. She concluded that children do not begin at the grapheme–phoneme level unless explicitly instructed at this level. Hence, children learning to read relatively transparent orthographies do not necessarily access and utilize phoneme–grapheme correspondence rules if the unit focused on during reading instruction does not match that level and focuses on a different grain size. There are shared representations that underlie both the reading and spelling acquisition process (Curtin, Manis, & Seidenberg, 2001; Holmes & Carruthers, 1998), and similar predictors for reading and spelling have been found in different orthographies; for example, in both Turkish and German, relatively transparent orthographies, letter knowledge and phonemic awareness have been found to be significant predictors of both spelling and reading (Öney & Durgunoğlu, 1997; Wimmer & Hummer, 1990). Researchers have suggested that spelling tasks reveal more about a child’s phonological knowledge than reading does, as greater awareness of orthographic units are required than in the reading process (Alcock & Ngorosho, 2003; Lennox & Siegel, 1993). In English, children can read more words than they can spell (Treiman, 1997), whereas in more transparent orthographies such as Italian and Spanish, children can spell most of the words that they can read, and can even spell words they cannot read (Borzone de Manrique & Signorini, 1994; Thorstad, 1991). Based on previous research and the characteristics of Indonesian, a number of predictions can be made. As there is a close correspondence between the names of letters and the sounds the letters make in words in Indonesian, it can be predicted that letter knowledge will play a significant role in reading acquisition Applied Psycholinguistics 28:1 28 Winskel & Widjaja: Phonological awareness in Indonesian children and be a predictor of reading in Indonesian, in particular in the early stages of learning to read. As there is a transparent relationship between the orthography and Indonesian oral language, almost a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, in conjunction with the close correspondence between the letter names and sounds, then these characteristics of Indonesian are expected to facilitate access to grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules, and hence the phoneme will be the prominent unit for beginner readers as is the case for German (Wimmer & Hummer, 1990). Additional clues about the level of processing can be gained from an analysis of word and nonword reading errors, that is, children will make nonword errors rather than whole word errors if processing at the sublexical level. Alternatively, as the syllable is such a salient phonological unit in Indonesian, it is predicted that sensitivity to the syllable and a syllable strategy for decoding and encoding printed words in Indonesian is likely to be adopted by young children in the early stages of literacy acquisition, especially as the teaching approach corresponds to these salient units. Based on their study of spelling in Malaysian children, Liow and Lee (2004) have suggested that as the syllable is such a salient unit that possibly segmentation at the phoneme level is unnecessary. On this basis, it can be predicted that Indonesian children will find tasks involving judgments about syllables easier than those involving onsets and rimes or phonemes, and furthermore, that the syllable will be a predictor of both reading and spelling, but in particular, spelling based on Liow and Lee’s (2004) research. In addition, as affixes are salient units in Indonesian, it is expected that morpheme awareness will play a predictive role in reading and spelling when the children are older and the demands of the task require it, for example, when spelling or reading long multisyllabic, affixed words, which is common in Indonesian. As Indonesian is a multisyllabic language and the onset-rime is not such a salient unit, performance is expected to be lower on these phonological awareness tasks, and this level or grain size is not expected to be a predictor of reading in Indonesian.