Background Factors Associated With Poor Scores in Reading Alphabetic Letters: Elementary School Students

― 76 ― The present study examined background factors associated with children’s poor scores on a test of achievement in learning to read alphabetic letters (in Japanese, romaji ). The participants were 1,763 elementary school students in the third to sixth grades. The data were analyzed using chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID). The results suggested that the distribution of the students’ scores on the test of achievement of reading letters was associated most closely to their having scores below the 5th to 10th percentile on an achievement test of reading kanji. Signifıcantly fewer than expected children in the 3rd and 4th grades were found to have low scores on the kanji-reading test, as well as poor scores on a test of reading alphabetic letters that had resonant sounds and special mora. Background factors found to be associated with these score patterns were low scores on a test of reading hiragana syllables, a test of fluent searching of words written in hiragana, and a verbal working memory test. Fewer than expected children in the 5th and 6th grades were found to have typical scores on the kanji reading test and poor scores on reading words with special mora that were written in alphabetic letters. Background factors found to be associated with these score patterns of the 5th grade children were low scores on the test of fluent searching of words written in hiragana and on the verbal working memory test, whereas the background factor found to be associated with these score patterns of the 6th grade children was low scores on the verbal working memory test. On the basis of these results, the discussion suggests that facilitating fluent conversion of written syllables and letters to sounds, visual sight vocabulary, and verbal working memory might be effective when teaching children to read alphabetic letters.