| dc.description.abstract | This paper sought to investigate the reading ability of six class seven dyslexic children at
the Thogoto Primary School in the Kikuyu district of Kenya. The aim was to establish the
linguistic information that multilingual dyslexic subjects miss. The study was done within
the framework of the Psycholinguistic Theory of Language disorders dealing specifically
with dyslexia.
The study was based on 6 reading tasks administered to the six pupils. Lists of English
monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, Kiswahili disyllabic and Kiswahili polysyllabic
words were administered to the respondents. They then read a list of nonsense words.
They were then given English and Kiswahili sentences to read. The research shows that
as we had hypothesized the dyslexic pupils read monosyllabic words better than
polysyllabic words. They read Kiswahili better than English. They also had a challenge
reading the inflectional endings in words. However, contrary to what the research had
hypothesized, both functional words and content words were challenging for the
respondents. Errors of omission, substitution, insertion and reversal were noted in both
the Kiswahili and English data. Nonsense words were also challenging for the
respondents.
The frequency of misreading was reported in tables as was the performance of each of the
respondents. We analyzed the data statistically by calculating the mean of all the reading
tasks. A summary of the total misreading results was then presented in a graph. | en |
