Young Learners Reading Fluency and Accuracy in Assamese: A Complex Orthography more

Reading is a crucial skill for children's literacy development. While much research has focused on alphabetic languages. There is limited investigation into Indic scripts. These complex writing systems, like Assamese, a Northeast Indian language pose unique challenges for young learners due to their extensive symbol inventory, consonant clusters, and inherent vowels. This study evaluates reading outcomes in primary school children learning Assamese by assessing their accuracy and fluency using the Assamese equivalent of TOWRE (Torgesen et al., 2012) that included simple words, complex words, and non-words, and was administered to 60 children across grades VI, VII, and VIII. Results indicated that children struggled with decoding opaque clusters and polysyllabic words. Performance differed by grade, with VI and VII students demonstrating significantly lower speed and accuracy than grade VIII. Findings confirm that complex orthographies like Assamese can hinder literacy development, necessitating awareness of orthographic symbols and consistent reading practice to improve fluency.