Phonological awareness, letter knowledge and literacy development in Indonesian beginner readers and spellers

The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learningto read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllableis a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge,reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered tochildren in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate thatthe phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling inIndonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabicaffixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependenton developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the languageand its orthography.