Maternal mediation of writing and children's early spelling and reading: The Semitic abjad versus the European alphabet

Abstract

Maternal writing mediation and children's literacy were analysed in two writing systems; the Semitic abjad and the European alphabet. Forty Israeli Hebrew-speaking and 43 Spanish-speaking mother-child dyads participated in this study. The children, aged: M=68.58 months, had not yet been exposed to formal reading instruction. Israeli kindergartners embark on their initial steps in reading and spelling in an abjad—a consonantal writing system that deficiently and inconsistently marks vowels by letters. Spanish kindergartners are introduced to a shallow alphabetic writing system that consistently marks consonants and vowels. This study assessed: (1) children's code-based skills (letter knowledge and phonological awareness), spelling, and reading, and (2) mothers' word writing mediation. The groups were basically similar in code-based skills, but the reading and spelling of the Israeli children were substantially lower than those of their Spanish counterparts. Maternal writing mediation was lower among Israeli than Spanish mothers with respect to vowels. Regression analyses showed that children's spelling in Hebrew and in Spanish were predicted by children's code-based skills and by maternal writing mediation. Children's reading in Hebrew was uniquely predicted by code-based skills and in Spanish by maternal writing mediation. This study sheds light on the importance of writing mediation and its relation to writing systems.

Keywords:

• Abjad
• Alphabetic writing system
• Writing mediation
• Early reading
• Early spelling
• Orthographic depth
• Hebrew
• Spanish

We would like to thank the Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as the Hong Kong Government GRF grant 448608 for partially supporting the present study. Thanks are extended to Rotem Shapira and Sigal Shatil-Carmon from Tel-Aviv University, and to Milagros Albert from the University of Barcelona and Catalina Barragan from the University of Almeria.

We would like to thank the Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as the Hong Kong Government GRF grant 448608 for partially supporting the present study. Thanks are extended to Rotem Shapira and Sigal Shatil-Carmon from Tel-Aviv University, and to Milagros Albert from the University of Barcelona and Catalina Barragan from the University of Almeria.

Notes

¹ The assumption that guiding children through the entire grapho-phonemic process is optimal does not apply across the board. It applies to a wide range of children who have at least some basic understanding of the written code and initial alphabetic knowledge. However, children who have not reached this point yet, say, a typical three-year-old in Israel or Spain, may not be able to gain from such mediation. In Vygotskian terms, such mediation would be beyond his/her Zone-of-Proximal Development (ZPD). In the studies that have used these scales, high levels of mediation were considered to be within or not too far from the ZPD for most children most of the time.