The contributions of phonological awareness and decoding on spelling in isiXhosa Grade 3 readers

The aims of this pre-registered study are to establish the unique contributions which decoding and phonological awareness have on spelling in Grade 3 isiXhosa first language readers, as well as to determine whether the strength of these relationships differ by spelling ability. This pre-registered study acts as a replication of a non-pre-registered initial study where the same research questions were examined in a smaller sample of Grade 3 readers. For the preregistered study, we use secondary data from the Volkswagen Literacy Legacy Intervention Project. Data were collected from Grade 3 isiXhosa-speaking children attending five isiXhosa medium of instruction schools, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Participants completed phonological awareness tasks which included syllable and phoneme isolation and elision, real word spelling tasks as a measure of encoding and a one minute oral reading fluency task as a measure of decoding. The research questions of our preregistered study are: 1. What are the unique contributions of decoding and phonological awareness to spelling in Grade 3 isiXhosa readers? 2. To what extent does overall spelling ability affect the strength of the relationship between decoding and spelling, and phonological awareness and spelling?