The development of phonological awareness literacy measures for isiXhosa

Abstract

This study outlines the development of linguistically based, language-specific   measures of phonological awareness in isiXhosa and presents some preliminary findings. Hitherto, the study of phonological awareness has predominantly focussed on English, and to date phonological awareness in Bantu languages has not been   adequately addressed. This study explicitly discusses the decisions made when   developing a phonological awareness test for isiXhosa, which can easily be adapted for other Bantu languages. Our results show how participants perform better in syllable
awareness tasks and how this is conditioned by the language-specific structures of isiXhosa. We demonstrate the need for micro-linguistic and language-specific  considerations in the development of phonological awareness tests.