Abstract: In 1982-84 a group of junior secondary school children in Carriacou, Grenada, who had failed to acquire critical literacy in English, were given the opportunity to read and write their own home language, an English-lexicon creole. A phonemic spelling system designed by the PI was used. Their progress was monitored and compared to a control group. They exceeded the control group in English literacy acquisition, suggesting that children’’s first literacy is most easily obtained in the home language using a rationally designed spelling, and that the same children are capable of transferring their knowledge of reading to a standard language, in this case English. Dissertation Discovery Company and University of Florida are dedicated to making scholarly works more discoverable and accessible throughout the world. This dissertation, ““It Have More Soft Words”” by Ronald F. Kephart, was obtained from University of Florida and is being sold with permission from the author. A digital copy of this work may also be found in the university’’s institutional repository, IR@UF. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation.
