Abstract:
To investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and reading proficiency of 10 year-old Thai children. The phonological awareness is the ability to understand phonological representations. This paper sets out to investigate the link between phonological awareness and reading proficiency in a more systematic way, by controlling word reading ability, and by using a wide range of phonologically based assessment. The method used in this study was the assessment of reading ability using vocabulary and inference making tests. The phonological awareness was assessed using the word and non-word pronunciation task, and the odd-one-out task, which was a strong predictor of reading proficiency even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been tested, However, the less memory-dependent phonological task was not. The sample used in this study was 28 students from the population of 152 students, in prathom suksa 4 and 5 from Somapa 2 school. The collected data was analysed by Pearson's Product Moment Correlation Coefficient by using SPSS for Windows. The finding of this study were 1) There was a significant relationship between the reading proficiency and the word and non-word pronunciation task of 10 year-old Thai children, at the level of 0.01; the correlation coefficient was 0.579. 2) There was a significant relationship between the reading proficiency and the odd-one-out task of 10 year-old Thai children, at the level of 0.05; the correlation coefficient was 0.443. 3) There was a significant relationship between phonological awareness (the word and non-word pronunciation task and the odd-one-out task) and reading proficiency of 10 year-old Thai children, at the level of 0.05; the correlation coefficient was 0.621. This study supports previous work, which indicates that poor reading proficiency problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties