Acquiring Reading Skills in Languages with Varying Orthographic Depth: A Case of Cinyanja-English Bilinguals in Zambia

Abstract

This study sought to assess the influence of orthographic depth on literacy development by comparing the reading proficiency of Cinyanja-English bilingual primary students. Cinyanja, unlike orthographically opaque English, is a highly transparent orthography and is a first language and medium of instruction from first to fourth grade in Zambia. One hundred and nineteen grades 4-6 students were assessed on the Cinyanja measures of letter discrimination, phonological awareness, word reading, pseudo-word decoding and reading comprehension, while 121 participants received the English measures of the same constructs. Correlation analysis of the reading measures revealed high within-orthography associations as opposed to between-orthography associations. Generally, both single- and pseudo-word reading were significantly better in the transparent orthography than in English. However, Descriptive Discriminant Analysis (DDA) revealed that only three of the five reading measures were statistically significant, phonological awareness, word reading and pseudo-word decoding, with one linear discriminant function emerging from the analyses. Overall, our findings confirm the hypothesis that transparent orthographies facilitate reading acquisition and proficiency better than opaque orthographies.