Grain-size units of phonological awareness among Russian first graders

This article presents the results of a study of phonological awareness development with 43 grade 1 children in Russian primary school. It is suggested that languagespecific factors, such as the complexity of syllabic structure, as well as the salience of consonant-vowel (CV) units in Russian phonology and orthography influence the course of phonological awareness development of Russian schoolchildren. The findings suggest that the special cohesion of CV units in Russian orthography promotes rapid development of explicit awareness of CV units in Russian-speaking beginning readers, while the instability of syllabic boundaries slows down the process of developing explicit syllabic awareness. The results are discussed in terms of phonological units prominent at different levels of explicitness in connection with the qualitative shift in phonological awareness brought about by the onset of literacy acquisition. Keywords: reading development; phonological awareness; language-specific phonological patterns; orthographic depth; grain-size units; Russian-speaking beginning readers