Learning a transparent orthography at five years old: reading development of children during their first year of formal reading instruction in Wales

This study compared the early reading development of five-year-old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English-speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction.Teaching methods in both schools emphasised phonics. The reading, letter recognition and phonological awareness skills of the children were tested at three points in the year (November 1998, March 1999 and June 1999). By March, the children who were learning to read in Welsh were performing better than the English-speaking group at word recognition. The English-speaking children showed some improvement in their ability to read regular words across the three test phases,but no significant improvement in their ability to read irregular words. The children learning to read in Welsh also performed better on a phoneme counting task in March and June than the English-speaking children. Both groups performed similarly on tests of letter recognition throughout the year. The results suggest that a transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward.