Written Language & Literacy - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2018

Abstract

This paper investigates morphological awareness for inflected and derived words among high versus low literacy students of English as a foreign language in the 5th, 7th and 9th grades. The study experimented with Arabic L1 students and tested inflectional morphological awareness (IMA) and derivational morphological awareness (DMA) separately using the Word Analogy task. Results demonstrate generally less developed morphological awareness skills in low as against high EFL literacy students. Moreover, significant differences between IMA and DMA in favor on IMA were observed in both groups of students and across all grades. This appears to reflect the distributional and linguistic properties of the two morphological systems. Moreover, though morphological awareness emerged rather early in EFL learning, differences between the two morphological systems decreased, though remained significant, as grade level increased. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as the potential role of Arabic as L1, are discussed.

Abstract

The Sindhī language has been written in numerous scripts throughout its history. However, in the twentieth century, Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī emerged as the dominant scripts for the language. Today, Perso-Arabic is the sole official script for Sindhī in Pakistan, while both Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī are in concurrent use for the language in India. This paper identifies and analyses areas of orthographic standardisation and variation in the Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī scripts for Sindhī, focusing primarily on practices in the Indian context. It first classifies orthographic variation into that stemming from phonological ambiguity, and that which is purely graphematic. The former includes the representation of reduced vowels, gemination, vocalic endings, loanwords, consonant clusters and sounds of unclear phonemic status. The latter includes the shapes and positioning of diacritics, allographs, derivative graphemes and collation orders. The paper concludes by summarising the possible pedagogical implications of such orthographic standardisation and variation.

Abstract

Tai Dam [blt] is a Southwestern Tai (< Kra-Dai) language spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China, and Thailand with approximately 750,000 speakers (Simons & Fennig 2017). The Tai Viet script has been used for centuries to write Tai Dam and other Tai languages. Because the Tai Viet script is not taught in schools, however, some Tai Dam readers prefer to use adaptations of the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies for writing Tai Dam. This paper describes Tai Dam orthographies in the Tai Viet, Lao, and Roman scripts. Particular focus is given to the way writers have faced the challenge of tonal mismatch between Tai Dam and Vietnamese or Lao by borrowing tone marking devices from one script to another, and to the sociolinguistic implications of these tone marking systems.

Abstract

The aim of the current study was two-fold. It aimed (i) to examine how a multi-component task, as well as more specific executive function (EF) tasks, are related to a wide range of early literacy (phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, word writing) and emergent mathematical abilities; and (ii) to broaden our understanding of the similar (domain-general) or differential (domain-specific) nature of these relations. The study was conducted in the northern part of Israel. Our results indicated that the multi-component task Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders, which taps most EF components (attentional control, inhibition, shifting, and working memory) significantly contributed to most domains of preschool academic development. These included orthographic knowledge and emergent mathematical abilities even after controlling for the role of background cognitive skills.

The findings showed that EF tasks have domain-general predictive power for pre-academic abilities that are less automatic and require more effortful processing of information such as word writing at preschool age. Moreover, our results provide clear empirical evidence for the psychometric validity of the multi-component task as a tool that can assess individual differences in EFs for the early identification of children at risk for academic difficulties. This finding can contribute to practitioners searching for an ecologically valid, age-appropriate, and age-sensitive measure of EF abilities as a diagnostic tool.

This article reviews An Exploration of Writing