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Article published In:
Written Language & Literacy
Vol. 22:1 (2019) ► pp.1–32

From abugida to alphabet in Konso, Ethiopia

The interplay between script and phonological awareness

| University of Jyväskylä
| University of Jyväskylä
| University of Jyväskylä
| University of Jyväskylä

This study examines the interplay between phonological awareness and orthography in Konso, a Cushitic language in Southwest Ethiopia. Thirty-two adults reading the Konso abugida but with minimal exposure to alphabetic literacy completed an orally administered phoneme deletion task. The responses were then examined using the minimal edit distance hypothesis (Wali, Sproat, Padakannaya & Bhuvaneshwari, 2009) as a framework for the analysis. The results suggest that the difficulty of a deletion was related to the way the phoneme was represented in the Konso abugida. Content-based error analysis of the incorrect responses gave indications of how Konso abugida readers’ processing of sounds is linked to Konso abugida sound-symbol relationships.

The Konso language community is undergoing a change in their writing system from abugida to alphabetic writing. As abugida symbols primarily denote consonant-vowel sequences, the change requires learning new sound-symbol mappings. By examining Konso abugida readers’ phonemic awareness the study contributes to developing transfer literacy teaching methods from abugida to alphabetic writing in Konso and elsewhere.

Keywords: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, abugida, alphabetic writing system, orthography, transfer literacy, Konso, Cushitic languages, African languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.The Konso abugida and the teaching method
    • 3.1The Konso abugida
    • 3.2Teaching method of the Konso abugida
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2The data collecting procedure
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Ability to delete a consonant phoneme and the effect of word positions
    • 6.2Error types and their correspondence to Konso abugida writing
      • 6.2.1Errors involving word-medial consonants
      • 6.2.2Monosyllabic responses
      • 6.2.3Errors involving vowels
      • 6.2.4Miscellaneous errors
    • 6.3Summing up the results of the error analysis
      • 6.3.1The difficulty of word-initial deletions
      • 6.3.2The ease of deleting the syllable-final consonant
    • 6.4Implications of the results for Konso transfer literacy teaching
    • 6.5Limitations of the study and the need for further studies
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00018.ahl
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