Word reading abilities of early multilingual readers of Aklanon, Tagalog and English

• Main Author: Rentillo, Philip Adrianne A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Word recognition—Ability testing; Reading comprehension; Multilingualism; Language and Literacy Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5079
• Institution: De La Salle University

Reading research has come a long way. From its beginnings in grasping literacy and its broader impacts to education, it has developed into a subfield which aims to understand the finer details of reading with the aid of psychology and neurology. As such, the growth of reading research is mainly attributed to endeavors focused on European languages and much lesser on other major languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Research in this area, in particular, largely focuses on orthographic consistency which aims to help improve literacy instruction and materials development for various language groups. Therefore, this paper would attempt to fill an insurmountable gap in Philippine reading research and to contribute local data to the emerging branch of multilingual reading. This study describes the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis as the primary motivation in conducting word reading tasks in three languages namely Aklanon, Tagalog and English among multilingual Filipino early readers in a school in Kalibo, Aklan, the Philippines. In addition, the Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory, through sound oddity tasks, was included to understand grain size activation and how it could have a possible relationship with word recognition. The researcher expects this thesis would widen the door for more local studies in reading both for bilingual and multilingual groups, and to encourage research in Philippine languages which have been experiencing a huge dearth in scholarly attention for the past decade such that of Aklanon.