Role of Phanology, Morphology and Orthography

Even though comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, word recognition skills have received a considerable amount of research attention. On the other hand, orthographic awareness, or sensitivity to the visual representation of language as it is conditioned by morphological and phonological factors, has received much less attention. This publication aims to address the nature of orthography as it relates to reading. It is divided into four sections that pertain to phonological sensitivity in reading and writing, the role of orthography in reading, spelling, and the integration of orthography and phonology in learning to read. The first section gives evidence that in addition to explicit teaching of basic decoding skills, metalinguistic knowledge or epilanguage that children bring into reading is also important. Section two presents the role of orthography from the perspective of the Dual Coding Theory (DCT) of reading, according to which cognition consists of two coding systems; one specializes for language and the other for nonverbal world knowledge. The third section deals with some research studies on spelling. It explores the relationship between reading and spelling in Spanish and show that they are inter-related. Their study also suggests that reading experience improves spelling performance. The last section deals with the integration of orthography and phonology in learning to read. It explains the orthography of Greek, Japanese, and Brahmi writing systems. It is shown that children should have some knowledge of the orthographic principles in order to become good sight word readers.