CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
Overview
This chapter begins with a review of the background relevant to the topic of this study including the importance of reading, reading theory and characteristics of Thai language.
Next, statements of the problem, the purpose of the study, research questions and the significance of the study are described.
1.1 Background
Reading is the most fundamental skill in modern societies and, as a consequence, acquiring the ability to read is one of the most important goals in early education. In our society, reading is essential to success as well as to social and economic advancement (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). The ability to read facilitates successful participation in a variety of environments such as home, work, school and social settings. It helps individuals to reach academic excellence in all subjects, whereas a weakness in this ability is an obstacle to educational achievement (Graves, Juel, Graves, & Dewitz, 2010). (Please add at least one reference here).
Models of the reading process generally describe the relations among the components of reading in skilled readers. In these models, the relations between bottom-up word
recognition processes (lower-order processes) and top-down comprehension processes (higher-order processes) are typically described. According to Shankweiler (1989), children with problems in reading comprehension cannot build or contain the phonological
representation from verbal information. The result is that children will lack experience in
2
containing and processing this information in verbal working memory. Shankweiler (1989) believed that comprehension failure is a symptom of a low-level processing problem or phonological processing difficulties. In contrast, some studies show that reading experiences can facilitate the development of phonological awareness (Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987; Ellis & Large, 1988). Oakhill, Cain, and Bryant (2003) pointed out that comprehension failure can occur when low-level language processing is intact, but higher-level cognitive processing is insufficient. And they found that higher-level skills such as inference making can improve the reading comprehension of children who have a problem with reading.
However, research evidence makes it clear that neither purely bottom-up nor purely top-down models can fully explain the reading process (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Stanovich, 2000).
An interactive model of ongoing top-down and bottom-up processes is therefore needed to imply both graphic and contextual information to grasp the meaning of text for the reader (Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005; Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2008). Moreover, one important model came from Gough and Tunmer (1986), the Simple View of Reading (SVR). The SVR model explains reading comprehension as the product of two main components, namely, decoding skills and language comprehension.
In the process of learning to read, children must hear and be able to recognize the sounds that are spoken and determine the differences between the sounds. This is often referred to as auditory perception and auditory processing, and involves the need to recognize the different sizes, shapes, position and form of letters and then learn to apply these with greater accuracy and speed. Word recognition subsequently becomes increasingly automatized by direct recognition of multi-letter units and whole words (Reitsma, 1983;
Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Automatic word recognition enables children to devote their mental resources to the meaning of text rather than to recognizing words, allowing them to use reading as a tool to acquire new concepts and information (Perfetti, 1998; Samuels &
3
Flor, 1997). According to the SVR model (Hoover & Gough, 1990), reading comprehension refers to the product of decoding skill and language comprehension. It is claimed that the reading ability involved in the comprehension of oral language strongly constrain the process of reading comprehension and word recognition.
From the cognitive perspective, decoding skill is an important factor related to reading achievement. Decoding skills consist of establishing the link between orthographic units or letters of written words and phonemes of speech sound. To acquire decoding skills, children must understand the patterns to integrate speech sound (Kendeou, Papadopoulos, &
Kotzapoulou, 2013). In addition, rapid automatized naming (RAN) is one aspect of the cognitive skill of reading development. Research previously found that RAN speed, defined as how quickly children can name continuously presented and highly-familiar visual stimuli, such as letters, digits, colours and objects, is a strong concurrent and longitudinal predictor of reading development for second and fourth grade (Liao, Georgiou, & Parrila, 2008).
Moreover, morphological awareness, the sensitivity to morphemes in words, is an important cognitive skill during the acquisition of reading. According to Carlisle (1995, p. 194), morphological awareness refers to the 'conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure'. Kuo and Anderson (2006) further suggest that morphological awareness does not only involve the ability to encode or decode morphemes but it also pertains to a set of high-order abilities called
grapho-morphological awareness, which coordinates orthographic, phonological and semantic awareness.
Reading draws upon multiple cognitive components and reading ability in complex ways. Because the consistency degree of orthography varies in different writing systems, it has been questioned whether models of reading can be applied across orthographies. This study focused on the transparent orthography of the Thai language. Thai has its own unique
4
orthography for which, similar to Greek, Italian and Spanish, spelling and sound relationship is consistent. The unique characteristics of Thai include complex graphemic expressions, nonlinear vowel mixtures and expressions of tone, and complex combinations of vowels and diacritics (Winskel & Iemwanthong, 2010). The complexity of Thai language should involve quite distinct abilities, yet, there are surprisingly only few empirical studies investigating the influence that the cognitive component (decoding skills, rapid automatized naming and morphological awareness) and reading ability (reading comprehension and word recognition) have on reading development.
In this study, the cognitive and reading ability and their relationship to reading development in Thai are explicitly examined. Based on previous evidence, this study gives insights to the generation of theoretical models of reading development. Evidence of specific directionality in the relationships between the two domains found in this study resulted in implications that could guide the development of integrated curricula incorporating cognitive and linguistics instruction, which is a new finding in Thai language.