Early Reading Literacy in Elementary School Students from the Teluk Tomini Coastal Region: Exploring Psycholinguistic Processing Barriers – A Conceptual Review
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Abstract
Early reading literacy in Indonesian elementary schools remains a central national priority, particularly within the Kurikulum Merdeka and the Minimum Competency Assessment (AKM) literacy development agenda. However, existing discussions often emphasise instructional strategy, assessment policy, and teacher competence, with limited attention to psycholinguistic processing barriers that shape how children cognitively and linguistically process written language. This conceptual paper offers a theoretical exploration of psycholinguistic processing barriers that influence early reading literacy development among elementary school students in the Teluk Tomini coastal region of Gorontalo. Drawing on Scarborough’s Reading Rope and the AKM literacy construct, the paper argues that reading literacy is a multidimensional process that integrates decoding, language comprehension, and automaticity. Four major psycholinguistic processing barriers are highlighted: working memory limitations, phonological processing weaknesses, difficulty with vocabulary retrieval, and challenges with attention regulation during reading tasks. These barriers are conceptualised as interconnected developmental barriers that shape decoding efficiency, depth of comprehension, and literacy growth trajectories in coastal socio-cultural ecosystems. The Teluk Tomini context is particularly relevant due to linguistic diversity, dominance of oral tradition, and a limited text-rich literacy environment, which increase the cognitive demands of reading acquisition. By integrating international theoretical models with Indonesia’s literacy policy orientation, this paper proposes a conceptual synthesis that locates literacy failure not only in pedagogical practice but also within child cognitive processing conditions. The paper concludes by offering conceptual implications for curriculum design, assessment calibration, and literacy intervention tailored to coastal primary schools. Future empirical research is recommended to validate this conceptualisation and to develop psycholinguistically informed literacy models for early-grade reading development in coastal Indonesia.
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