Heather Winskel
James Cook University Singapore
Assoc. Prof. Heather Winskelis currently working in the Psychology Department at James Cook University, Singapore. Her expertise is primarily in the areas of psycholinguistics, cognitive, cross-cultural and experimental psychology. She has worked at various universities in the UK, Australia and Thailand and been a visiting professor at other institutions in the Asian region.
Learning to read and write in Thai
Thai has a distinctive script that shares some common characteristics with Indic writing systems due to having common origins. It has inherent vowels and a non-linear graphic configuration in that consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written above, below, or to either side of the consonant as full letters or diacritics, and commonly combine across the syllable to produce a single vowel or diphthong. Notably, Thai is also a tonal language and tone is orthographically marked in its script. Thai also does not have interword spaces. Hence, when one reads Thai, words have to be segmented using cues other than spaces. There is a high level of consistency of mapping between phonemes and graphemes but there are multi-grapheme to phoneme correspondences. Consequently, spelling development lags behind reading in Thai. The aim of the presentation is to examine the particular challenges this distinctive orthography poses to beginning readers and writers of Thai. The characteristics of the Thai language and its orthography are initially outlined. Subsequently, some research conducted on learning to read and write in Thai children is examined. After summing up the main findings, some future research directions are discussed.
