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Learning to Read and Write in Thai

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Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography

Part of the book series: Literacy Studies ((LITS,volume 17))

Abstract

Thai has a distinctive alphabetic script that shares some common characteristics with Indic writing systems, due to common origins. It has syllabic characteristics as it has inherent vowels for some consonants. Furthermore, it has a non-linear 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 does not normally have interword spaces. Hence, when one reads in 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 particular challenges this distinctive orthography poses to beginning readers and writers of Thai is discussed. First, the characteristics of the Thai language and its orthography are outlined. Secondly, relevant background literature is reviewed prior to examining some research conducted on learning to read and write in Thai. Finally, some future research directions on reading and spelling in Thai are presented.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tones are marked in the Thai examples cited in this paper as follows; 0 = mid, 1 = low, 2 = falling, 3 = high, 4 = rising. This system is based on the system that was developed at the Linguistics Research Unit (LRU) of Chulalongkorn University (Luksaneeyanawin, 1993). IPA transcription is used for the transcription of all other Thai text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia

    Heather Winskel

  2. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

    Theeraporn Ratitamkul

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  1. Heather Winskel
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  2. Theeraporn Ratitamkul
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Correspondence to Heather Winskel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    R. Malatesha Joshi

  2. Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Catherine McBride

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Winskel, H., Ratitamkul, T. (2019). Learning to Read and Write in Thai. In: Joshi, R.M., McBride, C. (eds) Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography. Literacy Studies, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05977-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05977-4_12

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