Mitsue Tamai Allen

In the past three decades, L1 researchers have investigated the relationship between phonological awareness (sometimes called phoneme awareness or phonemic awareness) and literacy development. They have also reported that phonological awareness plays an important role in developing reading ability.
 

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is defined as “an awareness of sounds in spoken (not written) words that is revealed by such abilities as rhyming, matching initial consonants, and counting the number of phonemes in spoken words” (Stahl & Murray, 1994), or “the ability to recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of individual sounds.” (Ball & Blachman, 1991). McBridge-Chang (1995) examined the theory that phonological awareness is composed of general cognitive ability, verbal short-term memory, and speech perception. Past studies have reported that general cognitive ability and short-term memory correlate with phonological processing tasks (Bryant & Bradley, 1994; Wagner, Torgesen, Longhon, Simmons, & Rashotte, 1993). In order to manipulate phonemes, one needs to perceive a stimulus correctly. Speech perception is, therefore, the basis of phonological awareness. According to McBridge-Chang’s (1995) study, all of the three components were shown to be strong predictors of phonological awareness. She emphasized the importance of researching the interplay between speech perception and phonological awareness.
 

Correlational Studies

Dozens of correlational studies (e.g., Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985) have reported that there is a positive relationship between the awareness of sounds in spoken words and the early stage of literacy acquisition. Lundberg, Olofsson, and Wall (1980) reported that phonological awareness was a moderately strong predictor of the spelling and reading development of their Danish participants. They examined the phonological awareness of 143 kindergartners in performing several different phonemic tasks. Following the same children for one year after the assessment of their phonological awareness, they found that the children’s achievement of reading and spelling could be predicted from their phonological awareness. Another study (Bradley & Bryant, 1983) measuring phonological awareness of pre-readers also showed that awareness of spoken words related to eventual success in reading.
 

Experimental Studies

In order to claim a causal relation between phonological awareness and literacy development, a significant number of experimental studies have been conducted. Some studies have reported that young learners are able to be trained to manipulate phonemes. Thirty-eight Swedish first graders achieved better scores in segmenting words after receiving a training of rhyming, sound blending, and phonemic segmentation (Torneus, 1984). A similar study with kindergartners also reported that children who received rhyme, segmentation, and blending training were able to perform better on sound blending tests (Olofsson & Lundberg, 1985).

Although sound training in those studies showed no effect on reading and spelling development, Lundberg, Frost, and Peterson (1988) reported that sound training improved reading and spelling acquisition. In a replication of the previous study done by Olofsson and Lundberg (1985), with minor changes such as devising instruments and a longer training period, the researchers found no significant differences between the children in an experimental group with sound training and those in a control group in post-tests of pre-reading ability. However, they found that the experimental group outperformed the control group in spelling skills one year later and in spelling and reading skills two years later. This result suggests that sound training is beneficial to developing spelling and reading skills in young learners.

These confounding results can be understood by categorizing them into two types of research: (a) studies investigating the effects of only phonological awareness training on literacy development and (b) those investigating the effects of both phonological awareness training and explicit instruction of grapho-phonemic correspondence on reading development. In order to examine the effects of training in phonemic segmentation and of explicit instruction of letter-sound correspondence, Ball and Blachman (1991) studied 90 kindergartners divided into three groups. The first group received phonological awareness training such as learning rhymes, alliteration, and phonemic segmentation. The second group was called the ‘language activity group’, in which the participants listened to stories, learned semantic categorization and general vocabulary. These two groups were taught letter-name and letter-sound in exactly the same way. The last group functioned as a control group and received no treatment. After nine hours and twenty minutes of training, tests of phoneme segmentation, letter name, letter sound, the Woodcock Word Identification, reading regular words, and spelling were given as assessments to each child. The researchers concluded, “[I]t appears that increased phoneme awareness did have an immediate impact on the ability to read words on the Woodcock… These results indicate that letter-name and letter-sound training, when provided without phoneme awareness training, was not sufficient to improve the early reading skills measured by the two tests” (p. 63). This study, thus, claims that the letter-name and letter-sound training is beneficial with tasks to improve phonological awareness for literacy development.

In order to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy development of young Japanese EFL learners, the researcher conducted the following which aims at describing the nature of the phenomena as it exists.
 
 

The Study

The present study aimed at (a) establishing reliable measurements, and (b) investigating the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy development.
 
 

Method

Participants

All participants in the pilot study were elementary school children learning English from the same population to be investigated in the main study. Thirty-nine school-aged girls and 20 boys from three different English institutions in Tokyo participated in the pilot study. Children ranged in age from seven to eleven years, with an average of nine years and two months. All of them had learned English once a week for 60 minutes for longer than one year when this study was conducted.

Procedures

Five tests were drawn up to examine reading ability and phonological awareness of the participants. It took the first 30 to 40 minutes of two lessons to conduct these tests; the alliteration test, the spelling test, and the reading test II in the first week, and the rhyme test and the reading I in the second week. The purpose and the procedure of the study was explained to each experimenter, who was the teacher for the participants as well.
 

Instruments

In order to examine phonological awareness and reading ability of the participants, five tests were designed for this experiment.

The Alliteration Detection Test. This test consisted of 20 items of four multiple choices and the subjects were asked to select one word which did not have the same alliteration. For example, the subjects were supposed to choose ‘king’ from the set of words ‘cat, cap, cash, king’. All the alliteration pairs in this test shared the same initial consonant(s) but the odd element had a different vowel (Appendix A).

The Rhyme Detection Test. This test was composed of 20 items of four multiple choices and the subjects were asked to select the one word which did not have the same rime. For example, the subjects were supposed to choose ‘road’ from the set of sold, told, cold, road. All the rhyme pairs used in this test shared the same final consonant(s) but the odd element had a different vowel (Appendix B).

Reading Test I. This test consisted of 20 items of three multiple choices. The subjects were asked to choose an appropriate word to complete a sentence. For example, they were supposed to choose ‘red’ in the question of “The color of apples is (1 rat, 2 red, 3 read).” All the question words in items 1 to 10 shared the first two letters, and no pseudo words were used (Appendix C).

Reading Test II. Another kind of test using some pictures was drawn to examine reading ability of the subjects. This test consisted of 20 items of matching and true/false questions. In items 1 to 10, the subjects were asked to choose the appropriate picture which depicted each sentence. In the second half of the test, they had to put a circle if a sentence described the picture correctly, and put an “X” if it did not. There were two pictures, and five questions were asked for each picture (Appendix D).

The Spelling Test. Spelling ability was assessed by 27 multiple-choice items having three choices. Thirty words were selected, based on the results of the Vocabulary Test done with the same population two years ago. The question items were composed of one correctly spelled word and two pseudo words as distractors (Appendix E).
 
 

Data Analysis

Item Analysis

In order to examine whether or not the instruments used in this experiment were reliable, all items were analyzed on the basis of classical item analysis theory.

Item facility (IF), Item Discrimination (ID), and point-biserial correlation coefficient     (rpbi) of each item are listed for the five tests. Appropriate IF which are in a range of between .30 and .70, are underlined and good ID, with .40 or more value, are also underlined. point-biserial correlation coefficient with one asterisk indicate that the coefficient is significant at the .05 levels and those with two asterisks are significant at the .01 level.

Table 1 presents item analysis of the alliteration test. It showed that the subjects found item 11 the easiest and item 13 most difficult. ID and rpbi show that low-scoring subjects answered item 1 better than high-scoring subjects. Items 4 and 20 had good IF and ID, but only item 4 had significant rpbi values.

 

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Table 1. Item Analysis for the Alliteration Test (N = 59)
 

 

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Table 2 shows the results of item analysis of the rhyme test. The subjects found item 7 the easiest and items 10 and 15 most difficult. ID and rpbi show that items 1, 4, 6, 7, 15, 19,and 20 did not separate high-scoring subjects from low-scoring subjects. Items 3, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, and 18 had good IF and ID, but only items 3, 11, 16, 17, and 18 had significant rpbi values.

 

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Table 2. Item Analysis for the Rhyme Test (N = 47)
 

 

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Table 3 reports item analysis of Reading test I. It shows that the subjects found item 8 the easiest and item 20 most difficult. ID and rpbi show that items 5, 19, and 20 did not separate high-scoring subjects from low-scoring subjects. All the items except items 1, 5, 7, 8, 19 and 20 had good IF and ID and all of them also had significant rpbi values.

 

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Table 3. Item Analysis for the Reading Test I (N = 51)
 

 

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Table 4 shows that the subjects found item 8 the easiest and item 20 most difficult. ID and rpbi show that items 5, 8, 15, and 18 did not separate high-scored subjects from low-scored subjects. Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, and 17 had good IF and ID and these also had significant rpbi values.

 

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Table 4. Item Analysis of Reading Test II  (N = 47)
 

 

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Table 5 reports item analysis of the spelling test. It showed that the subjects found items 24, 25, 26, 3 and 22 to be easy and items 23 and 15 to be difficult. ID and rpbi show that items 5, 15, 17, 18, 20, 26 and 29 did not separate high-scoring subjects from low-scoring subjects. Items 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 19, 21, 27, 28 had good IF, ID and significant rpbi values.
 

 

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Table 5. Item Analysis for the Spelling Test (N = 59 items 1-23;
             N = 35 items 24-30)
 

 

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Reliability

The Alliteration Test and the Rhyme Test were combined and used as an indicator of phonological awareness. Reading Test I and II were also combined for reading ability.

The ability to find a correctly spelled word was considered as a separate ability from general reading ability, although spelling knowledge is the basis and a part of reading ability. The spelling test examined the lower level of reading knowledge such as automatic perceptional identification of either letters or whole words, vocabulary knowledge, and grapho-phonemic correspondence, rather than high level schema or interactive strategies, which are also believed to be an important component of reading ability.

In order to increase the reliability of the spelling test, seven items were constructed after the initial piloting of the instrument. Since some subjects were already in their spring vacation, only 35 subjects could participate in it. Each additional item was composed of one correctly spelled word and two existing words as distractors. Although pseudo words or non-sense words are frequently used to measure spelling knowledge of first language learners, from a pedagogical point-of-view the value of creating confusion by using pseudo words seemed counterproductive for young foreign language learners. The reliability for the 30 items on the revised spelling test was .76 with 35 subjects. Table 6 reports reliability of each test and combined tests.

 

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Table 6. Reliability of the five tests and two combined tests
 

 

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The Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Reading Ability

The attribute variables of literacy acquisition are examined in this section. The descriptive statistics of the five tests and two combined tests are reported in Table 7. The alliteration test showed substantial negative skewness. The kurtosis of the alliteration test also showed that the distribution curve was too ‘flat’. Thus, these two components of normality indicate that the distribution of the alliteration test was questionable.
According to the descriptive statistics of the two combined tests, the skewness and kurtosis of these tests indicate that their distribution were within an acceptable range.

 

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Table7: Descriptive Statistics of the Five Tests
 

 

Table 8 shows the correlation coefficients for all the three tests, age, the length of learning (LL, hereafter) and gender. The Reading Test positively correlated to AGE (r = .63), Spelling Test  (r =.62) and Sound Test (r =.53), which means that the older children were better readers and those with better sound ability and more spelling knowledge were more proficient readers. The Sound Test also positively correlated to Age (r = .46) and Spelling Test (r =.33), but negatively correlated to GENDER (r =-.31). The older children were found to be better at detecting alliterations and rhymes. Those with better phonological awareness had more knowledge about spelling than those with less sound awareness. The male subjects showed better sound awareness than the female subjects. The Spelling Test correlated to Age (r =.43), LL (r =.27) and LL corresponded with AGE (r =.43). The AGE and the Sound Test shared more variance together than the other factors. The highest correlation coefficient in this study was found between AGE and Reading Test (r =.63) and showed 39.6% of overlapping variance.

 

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Table 8: Correlation Matrix of Six Variables
 
 

Note: ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
            * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

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In order to estimate the effects among the variables and to find unique relations of variables to each other, the researcher carried out a Path Analysis and its results are reported in Figure 1. The six variables in this analysis were Sound (for Sound Test), Read (Reading Test), Spelling (Spelling Test), AGE, GENDER, and LL (length of learning). The researcher tested how reading ability was directly and indirectly affected by other variables by setting AGE, SEX and LL affecting variables in early wave, and Sound and Spell in middle wave.

Figure 1. Path Analysis of Five Variables affecting Reading

Sound was predicted by a linear combination of AGE, GENDER, and LL. The causal flow was pruned by dropping LL and SEX. The standardized coefficient of AGE to Sound was .46. In this case, Spell was predicted by a linear combination of AGE, GENDER, LL and Sound, but there was no significant predictor. Finally, Read was predicted by a linear combination of AGE, GENDER, LL , Sound, and Spelling. The causal flow was pruned by dropping SEX. In this case the standardized coefficient of Spell to Read was .430, that of AGE to Read was .50, that of Sound to Read was .22, and that of LL to Read was -.36.
 

Discussion and Conclusion

According to item analysis and reliability, the five tests used in this experiment seemed adequately reliable. There were items with high IF in the Alliteration Test. The subjects in this study also found that alliteration detection was easier than rhyme detection.

Reading ability correlated significantly with AGE, the Spelling Test, and the Sound Test. According to the Path Analysis, AGE is the strongest factor to predict successful literacy acquisition, since there were direct and indirect paths from Age to Reading. On the contrary, LL did not show correlation to Reading, which means that there was no correlation between educational effect and literacy development. The path Analysis displayed this relationship more clearly by reporting -.36 standardized coefficient of LL to Reading ability. There was a variety of English learning backgrounds for the subjects in this experiment. For example, some subjects received regular English classes at their private elementary schools and others had a prior experience of English lessons before they entered the classes of this experiment. Each teacher reported only the length that each subject learned English at their own places. A precise questionnaire should be prepared to investigate more about educational background of the subjects.
 

References

• Adams, M. J. (1995). Beginning to read / thinking and learning about print. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
• Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49-66.
• Bradley, L., & Bryant P. E. (1983). Categorizing sounds and learning to read/ A causal connection. Nature, 301, 419-21.
• Bryant, P., & Bradley, L. (1985). Phonetic analysis capacity and learning to read. Nature, 313, 73-74.
• Bryant, P., & Bradley, L. (1994). Children’s reading problems—psychology & education. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
• Bryant, P. E., Bradley, L., Maclean, M. & Crossland, J. (1989). Nursery rhymes, phonological skills and reading. Journal of Child Language, 16, 407-428.
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• Castle, J. M., Riach, J. & Nicholson, T. (1994). Getting off to a better start in reading and spelling: the effects of phonemic awareness instruction within a whole-language program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86 (3), 350-359.
• Eskey D. E. & Grabe, W. (1988). Interactive models for second language reading: perspectives on instruction. In P. Carrell, J. Devine & D. Eskey (Eds.), Interactive approaches to second language reading (pp. 223-238) New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Fox, B., & Routh, D. K. (1976). Phonemic analysis and synthesis as word-attack skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 68:1, 70-74.
• Fox, B., & Routh, D. K. (1980). Phonemic analysis and severe reading disability, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 9, 115-119.
• Goodman, K. (1988). The reading process. In P. Carrell, J. Devine & D. Eskey (Eds.), Interactive approaches to second language reading (pp. 11-21) . New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Goswami, U. (1991). Learning about Spelling Sequence: The role of onsets and rimes in analysis in reading. Child Development, 62, 1110-1123.
• Lewkowicz, N. K. (1980). Phonemic awareness training: What to teach and how to teach it. Journal of Educational Psychology, 72 (5), 686-700.
• Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W., & Carter, B. (1974). Reading and the awareness of linguistic segments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, 201-212.
• Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Peterson, O. (1988). Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 263-284.
• Lundberg, L., Olofsson, A., & Wall, S. (1980). Reading and spelling skills in the first school year predicted from phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten. The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 21, 159-173.
• Maclean, M., Bryant, P., & Bradley, L. (1987). Rhymes, nursery rhymes, and reading in early childhood. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33 (3), 255-281.
• McBridge-Chang, C. (1995). What is phonological awareness? Journal of Educational Psychology, 87 (2), 179-192.
• McBridge-Chang, C., Wagner, R. K. & Chang, L. (1997). Growth Modeling of Phonological Awareness. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89 (4), 621-630.
• Olofsson, A., & Lundberg, I. (1985). Evaluation of long term effects of phonemic awareness training in kindergarten: Illustrations of some methodological problems in evaluation research. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 26, 21-34.
• Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L. C., & Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read and reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33 (3), 283-319.
• Stahl, S. A., & Murray, B. A. (1994). Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86 (2), 221-234.
• Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E., & Cramer, B. R. (1984). Assessing Phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 175-190.
• Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.
• Torneus, M. (1984). Phonological awareness and reading: A chicken and egg problem? Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 1346-1358.
• Treiman, R., Berch, D., & Weatherston, S. (1993). Children’s use of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in spelling: roles of position and stress. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85 (3), 466-477.
• Tunmer, W. E., & Nesdale, A. R. (1985). Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 77, 417-427.
• Wagner, R.K., Torgesen, J. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1994). Development of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New evidence of bidirectional causality from a latent variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 30 (1), 73-87.
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 Appendix A. The Alliteration Test

 
 

Appendix B. The Rhyme Test

 

Appendix C. Reading Test I

1.  The color of apples is (1 rest, 2 red, 3 read).
2.  The color of lemons is (1 yellow, 2 year, 3 yeast).
3.  The color of leaves is (1 grow, 2 grass, 3 green).
4.  The color of snow is (1 whale, 2 white, 3 what).
5.  The shape of an ice cream cone is a (1 triangle, 2 trick, 3 tricycle).
6.  The shape of a doughnut is a (1 circuit, 2 circle, 3 circus).
7.  The first month of the year is (1 Jangle, 2 Japan, 3 January).
8.  The animal which says “Meow, meow,” is a (1 cat, 2 cap, 3 cab).
9.  The animal which says “Baa, baa” is a (1 ship, 2 shop, 3 sheep).
10.  The animal which says “Quack, quack,” is a (1 dump, 2 duck, 3 dust).
11.  A (1 monkey, 2 desk 3 car) lives on the jungle.
12.  You wear a (1 hat, 2 pen, 3 ice cream) on a hot day.
13.  I like to eat (1 trains, 2 monkeys, 3 hamburgers).
14.  I like to go to the (1 potato, 2 pool, 3 dog) in summer.
15.  Eleven comes after (1 tent, 2 test, 3 ten).
16.  Seven + three = (1 ten, 2 twelve, 3 seven).
17.  Five ? two = (1 two, 2 one, 3 three).
18.  You say, (1 “Good morning,” 2 “Good afternoon,” 3 “Good night”) in the morning.
19.  You say, (1 “Good morning,” 2 “Good afternoon,” 3 “Good night”) before going to bed.
20. A (1 chair, 2 spoon, 3 doctor) works at a hospital.
 

Appendix D. Reading Test II

I.  Choose the appropriate picture for each sentence.

1.  He’s reading.
2.  She’s coloring.
3.  They’re eating.
4.  It’s climbing a tree.
5.  I brush my hair.
6.  I wash my face.
7.  I eat my breakfast.
8.  I watch TV.
9.  I go to bed.
10.  I get up.

II.  Look at the picture and put a circle if the sentence is right. Put an X if it is not.

11.  Two monkeys are on the tree.
12.  The monkeys are eating apples.
13.  The bird is swimming.
14.  The lion is looking at the monkeys.
15.  The monkeys have long tails.
16.  Susan lives on a farm.
17.  Susan has a bird, a cat, and some fish.
18.  Susan is opening the window.
19.  The cat is running around the chair.
20.  The picture is over the chair.
(Picture A for questions 11 to 15, and Picture B for questions 16 to20.)
 
 

Appendix E. The Spelling Test