Orthographic awareness through orthographic fast-mapping of children with low-reading-achievement in lower grades in elementary school [철자 빠른의미연결 과제를 통한 초등학교 저학년 읽기부진 아동의 철자인식 특성]

Abstract

Objectives: This study compared the orthographic awareness ability through fast mapping between children who are reading at a low-achieving level and normal children in the lower grades of elementary school. Methods: The participants of the study were 16 low reading achievers (LRA group) and 16 typically developing children (TD group), for a total of 32 children. To identify the orthographic awareness ability of the children, an orthographic fast-mapping (OFM) task was used. The OFM task was analyzed by using a two-way mixed ANOVA according to the group and degree of wordlikeness. A Pearson correlation coefficient was performed to identify any associations of the orthographic awareness ability and linguistic factors according to each group. Finally, to discover error type patterns from the OFM task, the error type was analyzed. Results: First, our results showed that orthographic awareness has a significant main effect of group. Also, the main effect of the degree of wordlikeness were only significant in the orthographic production task. Second, static correlation was found only in the writing abilities of the TD group. For the LRA group, static correlations appeared in all areas except for vocabulary. Third, the analysis of the error type pattern of the OFM task between groups showed a high error rate in the order of visual similarity, phonetic similarity, and mixing. Conclusion: This study was able to compare the characteristics of low reading achievers and normal children by evaluating their orthographic awareness ability belonging to metalinguistic awareness. So these findings could be used as basic data for the mediation of orthographic awareness abilities of low reading achievers. © 2019 Korean Academy of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.