com-prehension. All this makes it very clear that the development of the skill of word reading must be continued in lower secondary education, too.
The effectiveness of development can be promoted by assessments per-formed with diagnostic, criterion-referenced tests.
Swanson, Trainin, Necoechea and Hammill (2003) provide empirical evidence for the importance of the factors discussed above. In their study, a global meta-analysis is presented about the close relationship between phonological awareness, rapid letter and word recognition, vocabulary, text comprehension and related cognitive skills. Cross-cultural linguistic studies have also proven the relationship between the phonological awareness and the development of the vocabulary of bilingual elemen-tary school age pupils on the one hand, and their reading comprehension performance in a second language on the other hand (Dickinson, McCabe, Clark-Chiarelli, & Wolf, 2004; Swanson, Rosston, Gerber, & Solari, 2008).
Reading and The Knowledge
Phonetic Level
One of the important elements of the preparation of school-based reading instruction is the teaching of sounds. This concentrates on the differen-tiation of the groups of sounds, human voices and speech sounds, as well as the development of the skill of perception. This preparation makes pupils aware that words are made up of speech sounds and that they have meanings. The sound-letter, actually the phoneme-grapheme correspond-ence rules differentiate speech sounds from each other and designate them as independent entities by making them visible as letters. As the emergence of the ability toabstract is an important stage in the develop-ment of humanity, as a condition of the emergence of writing in the life of a child, the presence of the understanding of the sign function, the ability to abstract and the basics of metaphorical thinking are precondi-tions for learning to read. An essential indicator of this is the understand-ing that one thunderstand-ing can be a signifi er of another thing.
Morphological Level
The perception and observation of morphemes strengthens the awareness that words are often made up of word elements; they can be put together, which leads to new meanings; and they can have affi xes, through which their meaning changes. The understanding and development of the back-and-forth effect of the logical process of synthesis and analysis enable the formation of analogies, and reinforce already existing analogies. On the morphemic level, the knowledge of further concepts is established and becomes visible simultaneously in the course of learning about lan-guage and in the learning process of reading: the concepts of stem, com-pound, and affi xes and their types: formative, marker, suffi x.
Lexical Level
In reading fl uently, the reader needs the automation of word recognition in addition to a good skill in letter recognition and reading letter combi-nations in order to learn the most frequently occurring words of everyday texts as sight words, and in order to avoid the segmentation of those words, i.e. decoding them serially while reading.
When learning to read, the spatial distances between words represent the units indicated by intervals in speech. The recognition of this also de velops language awareness. Furthermore, words improve semantic
awareness, making one aware that, in language, individual things are signifi ed by unique phoneme combinations, according to the given char-acteristics of the given language.
In the course of learning to read, the curriculum provides countless readings in belles letters that are the single source of the development of the passive vocabulary. We shall discuss these in the section about read-ings in more detail. For now we just note that this segment of vocabulary constitutes a layer of the Hungarian language word stock not accessible in any other way.
Syntactical Level
Sentences visually represent the units of utterances, assertions and con-clusions which are expressed by intonation in speech. The written sen-tence enhances the independence of this linguistic unit and its being constructed from words through a visual channel. Doubtless, however, writing cannot display the speaker’s intention in the same nuanced and sophisticated way as speech.
The differences in the use and in the rules of written and oral language appear most markedly at this level. In other words, this is where it can be seen most clearly that written language is not simply transcribed speech. Unfortunately, school-based instruction at present does not make students aware of this to the required degree. However, if children were appropriately aware of this, then their spelling would be better, their written composition skills would be much improved and their communi-cative competence would be at a higher level.
Level of Textology
Text is the highest level of language, as well as of reading comprehen-sion and written composition. Naturally, the hierarchical organization also applies to reading, and this supports the assertion that in the organi-zation of reading skills the successful acquisition of a given level is con-ditional upon the automation of the level immediately below it. At the textual level, written language presents the most important organizers:
title, paragraphs, dialogue, headings and layout.
The role of Spelling
Spelling can be considered as the system of rules that defi nes the differ-ences between the use of written and oral language. Knowledge and ex-perience acquired in this area cannot be separated from the linguistic knowledge and awareness described as per the grammatical levels above, and is also promoted by reading (Józsa & Steklács, 2009). Seen in a wider context, the knowledge and awareness of written language as such develops and is mastered in parallel with the acquisition of reading, and this also strengthens the awareness of language use. The recognition of the logic of letter-sound correspondence rules is followed by the compre-hension of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. To put it more simply, in the initial period, we recognise that speech sounds have written signs, and then, knowing the rules, we can transcribe speech accurately. This gives the illusion that we write everything as we pronounce it (Hungar-ian examples: ‘agygy’ for adj, ‘felejcs’ for felejts, ‘egésség’ for egészség,
‘fi jú’ for fi ú, ‘mixát’ for Mikszáth, etc.). However, since this is not true, through spelling we learn what the exceptions are, which cases differ from the above logic, and what the rules are that organize written lan-guage. The understanding of all these necessarily changes our notions of language, speech and writing, too.
In fact, two logics exist in parallel regarding the written version of any language: (1) we write it as we pronounce (say) it; (2) we do not write it as we pronounce (say) it. In order to understand how written language operates, fi rst we have to understand the fi rst logic. From a linguistic perspective, it must be noted here that when interpreted in the context of writing-speaking-language, the spelling principles taught in Hungarian schools, and the principles of word analysis, tradition and simplifi cation belong to the category of “we do not write it as we say it”, whereas the principle of pronunciation is naturally the equivalent of “we write it as we say it” logic. (In this regard various languages show great differences, mostly in the light of how shallow or deep the orthography of their system of writing is; see Lengyel, 1999.)
The rules system of spelling comprises all linguistic levels. We have already discussed phonetics above. At the level of morphemes the rules of the connection of word components and the logic of writing
some-thing as one word or dividing it into words gradually take shape for students learning to read, and the differentiation of affi xes and postposi-tions could be counted also among these. (For example, the level of pseudo-lexemes, and the differences of verb prefi xes, suffi xes and post-positions: -ba, -be, ebbe, bele, etc. / in, into, in this, into this, etc.)
At the level of words, the most important spelling rules should be understood together with the semantic level, and here the word classes, and the established rules of their writing are at issue. An advanced level of systematizing ability is required for understanding the concepts of word classes (set formation, defi nition and categorisation, Nagy, 1990, 2003; Zentai, 2010). In Hungarian, there is only one element to mark word class in writing, i.e. the capitalised initial letter of proper nouns, but its accurate and correct use requires the knowledge of several components, rules and their hierarchy. (For example: Arany János-i, Közel-keleti, Dél Afrikai Köztársaság-béli, Dunán túl, Dunántúl, dunántúli, Dunántúli barátaim közül sokan eljöttek.)
At the sentence level, the rules of modality in written language, the function of punctuation marks and the capital letter (the latter being the elements indicating the separation of sentences from each other) must be understood, as well as their use. At the text level, the rules of arranging and editing, and the rules of text to be completed can be mentioned. The former qualify more as typographical rules, but their role and importance has signifi cantly increased in everyday life with handwriting giving way to the use of the keyboard. The Hungarian educational system has not responded adequately to this shift with measures that refl ect its impor-tance yet,.
In summary, we can assert that the acquisition and understanding of reading and spelling occur together. It is not only rules that are learnt during the process, but ideas of the functionality of written language are also shaped. At best, all this also induces the understanding of the social role of writing, contributing to the development of language awareness.
It should be noted here that unfortunately primary education devotes little attention to this, thus losing a great opportunity.
The interpretation of language awareness in a wider context enables the assertion that reading transmits and strengthens the knowledge of the rules and norms of adequate linguistic behaviour, in addition to the knowledge of language and grammar. This can be seen indirectly in the
norms of the author’s and the reader’s behaviours. More important are those contents that exemplify general and special rules of behaviour, and project thinking processes, in various text types and genres. Their repre-sentations can be basically connected to various types of texts, and genres of fi ction and non-fi ction.