Phonological processing and reading in a semi-transparent orthography (Polish)

Abstract

Background: In the semi-transparent Polish orthography, children develop their reading skills from sound blending, through syllable and morpheme blending, to word and phrase recognition strategies (Awramiuk & Krasowicz-Kupis, 2015).

Aim: The aim of the study was to examine reading proficiency and reading strategies of year 4, 11-year-old primary school students, and to investigate the relationship between the selected aspects of phonological processing and literacy skills. We aimed to confront the newly collected empirical data with the already developed model of reading acquisition to confirm the developmental path of reading strategies.

Methods: We used a set of tests measuring phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), working memory, short story reading, nonword reading, and reading comprehension.

Results: Most children achieved a global stage in reading, as the most frequent mistake was an entire word repetition, followed by a syllable blending, and a syllable and sound blending combined among word reading errors. Phonological awareness predicted the number of errors, and RAN - the accuracy and fluency of the short story reading.

Conclusions: Our results confirm the development of reading strategies from phonological-analytical to global in Polish. This model is consistent with other alphabetical orthographies.