Phonemic awareness and early spelling skills in urban Australian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children

Abstract

This study investigated the phonological awareness and early spelling skills of 10 Australian Aboriginal and 10 non-Aboriginal children in their first year of schooling at urban schools. Phonological awareness was assessed using a standardized test (the Queensland University Inventory of Literacy), and children completed a standard spelling task that required them to generate spelling attempts in response to 12 line drawings of familiar animals. Spelling was analysed using the Spelling Scoring Sensitivity procedure. All children performed within the normal range for scores on the QUIL. However, as a group, Aboriginal children performed more poorly than their non-Aboriginal peers. Statistically significant differences were found on the subtests non-word spelling, non-word reading, and phoneme segmentation. Both formal scoring and informal observations were used to examine the spelling skills of participants. Possible explanations of the differences between groups are discussed in terms of health and cultural factors, and implications for the education of Aboriginal children are suggested.

Keywords:

• Literacy
• spelling
• Aboriginal
• indigenous

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Women in Research Seeding Grant (Curtin University) and a ReCAP grant (School of Psychology, Curtin University). Thanks to the schools and children who participated, and to Theresa Davidson and Rebecca Fry who collected the data. Thanks also to Kenn Apel for his comments on the spelling analyses, and to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments played an important part in shaping the final paper.

Note

1. Year 1 is the first year of compulsory, full time schooling in Western Australian Schools. Children may also attend full time schooling (Preprimary) in the year before they enter Year 1.