| Summary: | <p>Urdu is a member of the Indo-European language family. When children understand words and how schools promote children’s vocabulary development has important educational implications both in terms of vocabulary growth, and the inter-connectedness of vocabulary and literacy domains like reading comprehension. This study aimed to explore Urdu vocabulary development by assessing the age of acquisition ratings of words derived from a child-directed print corpus of first to third-grade textbooks. A related aim was investigating the associations between the rated age of acquisition and other psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency, number of letters and syllables, and orthographic transparency. A secondary aim was to analyze activities included in the same first to third-grade Urdu textbooks for their promotion of morphological and orthographic awareness. </p>
<p>A word corpus of 1,968 words was created by digitizing connected text (i.e. poems, stories, etc.) found in nine children’s textbooks. The corpus was annotated for word classes and orthographic transparency. After inter-rater reliability was assessed for these annotations, the frequencies of six word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and postpositions) in the word corpus were calculated. A word list of 600 words representing the same proportions of word classes as the word corpus was extracted for an online AoA study. Ten teachers responded to three questionnaires on Qualtrics containing 200 words each. The first and third-grade textbooks were analyzed using Vagh & Nag’s (2014) template for South Asian languages after appropriate amendments were made to reflect Urdu’s linguistic properties.</p>
<p>Results reveal that, on average, teachers think children acquire words in the word list between the ages of three and five years. Consensus analysis revealed strong inter-rater reliability for all word classes except conjunctions. According to teachers, conjunctions and nouns are acquired later than other word classes, high frequency content words were acquired earlier than low frequency content words, and vowelized nouns are acquired earlier than semi-vowelized or un-vowelized nouns. The textbook analysis revealed main effects of component skills in the morphological and orthographic domains with a higher proportion of activities coded for vocabulary and letter knowledge than other component skills in the domain. Qualitative analysis suggests a restricted range of activities in both grade levels although the types of activities differ by publisher. Instructional implications for vocabulary development and other component skills are discussed and the need for future experimental research is emphasized.
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