THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORTHOGRAPHIC LINGUISTIC AWARENESS IN KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF THIS AWARENESS TO LATER READING ACHIEVEMENT

ABSTRACT

To examine the developmental course of children's understanding of print concepts, orthographic linguistic awareness, the Concepts About Print (CAP) test was given to 29 boys and 27 girls three times during their kindergarten year and on two occasions during their first‐grade year. That approximately 20% of these children did not understand print‐direction and letter‐word concepts at the beginning of the first grade confirmed previous findings that many children entering formal reading instruction may have little knowledge of the reading instruction register. Orthographic linguistic awareness, measured even at the beginning of kindergarten, was found to be highly correlated with reading achievement measured at the end of the first grade, and these relationships between orthographic linguistic awareness and reading achievement were consistently higher for the girls than for the boys. Path analyses including the Record of Oral Language, Metropolitan Readiness Test and Iowa Test of Basic Skills revealed strong direct influences of orthographic linguistic awareness at the beginning of the first grade on reading achievement measured at the end of first grade