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Read Writ (2014) 27:15071527
DOI 10.1007/s11145-014-9503-6
Evdokia Pittas Terezinha Nunes
Published online: 21 February 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract The aim of this longitudinal study is to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The target group (N = 404) consisted of children, aged 69 years at the start of the project, who learn literacy in Cyprus. Because there are no standardized measures of morphological awareness for Greek Cypriot children, morphological awareness measures were developed and validated. A concurrent analysis of the rst wave of data collection showed that morphological awareness made a unique contribution to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The longitudinal analyses showed that morphological awareness predicted performance in reading eight months later, even after partialling out grade level, verbal intelligence, phonological awareness and initial scores in reading and spelling. This study makes theoretical, empirical and practical educational contributions. It shows the long term and specic relation of morphological awareness with reading in Greek and establishes the plausibility of a causal link between morphological awareness and reading, which must be tested in further research using intervention methods. In practice, this study contributes valid measures for assessing morphological awareness in Greek as well as a new measure of spelling skill.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9503-6
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E. Pittas T. Nunes
Department of Education, University of Oxford, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK
E. Pittas (&)
Stadiou 21, Apartment Block Maramco 20, Apartment 105, 2103 Aglantzia, Nicosia, Cyprus e-mail: [email protected]
T. Nunese-mail: [email protected]
The relation between morphological awareness and reading and spelling in Greek: a longitudinal study
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1508 E. Pittas, T. Nunes
Keywords Morphological awareness Reading Spelling Longitudinal study Standard Modern Greek
Introduction
The aim of this paper is to examine the contributions of morphological awareness to childrens learning to read and spell in Greek. The hypothesis is that morphological awareness predicts literacy skills concurrently and longitudinally even after appropriate controls such as phonological awareness and verbal IQ. This hypothesis was examined with Greek Cypriot children aged 610 years who speak the Greek Cypriot Dialect in most social contexts but learn to read...