Letter recognition and hand-copying skills of children: A comparative study of Dari and English alphabet letters

Abstract

The study comparatively examined the difficulty level in recognizing Dari and English alphabet letters and hand-copying skills among children. The study participants were preschool children between four and five years old at the time of the study. The participants were administered a pretest, a class session, and a post-test. The data was analyzed by Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), descriptive statistics, and a paired samples T-test. The study's findings showed no significant difference in letter recognition between English and Dari letters; however, there was a significant difference in the hand-copying test. Also, the study’s results revealed that the shapes of the letters played an important role in hand-copying the alphabet letters, while it did not impact the letter recognition process.

Keywords

• English and Dari alphabet
• Letter recognition
• Hand-copying
• RAN
• Preschoolers

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