Word concept of illiterates and low-literates: worlds apart?

Abstract

"Over the past 25 or so years extensive research has been done into the development of children’s metalinguistic awareness and its role in learning to read. Although results contradict each other regarding the question which of the two appears first, there is undoubtedly some kind of interrelationship between metalinguistic skills and literacy. Some suggest that metalinguistic awareness facilitates learning to read and write (e.g. Bus & Van IJzendoorn, 1999; Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cuckle, 1996; Sharpe & Zelazo, 2002), whereas others (e.g. Ehri, 1975; Gombert, 1992; Olson, 1994, 1996; Roberts, 1992) suppose that it is the other way round, viz. that literacy stimulates the development of metalinguistic skills. This paper deals with only one aspect of metalinguistic knowledge, the word concept, which can be defined as an awareness of the word as a linguistic unit demonstrated by the ability to isolate words in a stream of spoken language"