Abstract

This study investigated Phonological Awareness (PA) which is considered an important prerequisite for literacy acquisition. For this purpose, this study explored the contribution of phoneme awareness, rhyme awareness, and letter name knowledge to English word reading. The participants were thirty Korean EFL third-grade elementary students who were initiating their English learning. The results indicated that the EFL elementary students’ overall English PA predicted their English word reading. Also, the students were more accurate with phoneme awareness than rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness played a more important role than rhyme awareness and letter name knowledge in word reading. Phoneme awareness predicted word reading more than rhyme awareness for EFL elementary students. However, the students’ rhyme awareness was not associated with phoneme awareness and lettername knowledge. These results suggest that rhyme awareness is underdeveloped and not yet well established to allow for promoting their word reading and show that native language plays an important role for their English word reading. This is in line with previous findings that have shown a positive relationship between phoneme awareness and English reading for Korean EFL learners. It seems that education about PA at the beginning of English learning would be helpful for students’ learning English.

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