Blending Skills Research Articles

An experimental comparison of additional training in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and decoding for struggling beginner readers.

Despite evidence that synthetic phonics teaching has increased reading attainments, a sizable minority of children struggle to acquire phonics skills and teachers lack clear principles for deciding what types of additional support are most beneficial. Synthetic phonics teaches children to read using a decoding strategy to translate letters into sounds and blend them (e.g., c-a-t = "k - ae - t" = "cat"). To use a decoding strategy, children require letter-sound knowledge (LSK) and the ability to blend sound units (phonological awareness; PA). Training on PA has been shown to benefit struggling beginning readers. However, teachers in English primary schools do not routinely check PA. Instead, struggling beginner readers usually receive additional LSK support. Until now, there has been no systematic comparison of the effectiveness of training on each component of the decoding process. Should additional support for struggling readers focus on improving PA, or on supplementary LSK and/or decoding instruction? We aim to increase understanding of the roles of LSK and PA in children's acquisition of phonics skills and uncover which types of additional training are most likely to be effective for struggling beginner readers. We will compare training on each of these components, using a carefully controlled experimental design. We will identify reception-age children at risk of reading difficulties (target n = 225) and randomly allocate them to either PA, LSK or decoding (DEC) training. We will test whether training type influences post-test performance on word reading and whether any effects depend on participants' pre-test PA and/or LSK. Two hundred and twenty-two participants completed the training. Planned analyses showed no effects of condition on word reading. However, exploratory analyses indicated that the advantage of trained over untrained words was significantly greater for the PA and DEC conditions. There was also a significantly greater improvement in PA for the DEC condition. Overall, our findings suggest a potential advantage of training that includes blending skills, particularly when decoding words that had been included in training. Future research is needed to develop a programme of training on blending skills combined with direct vocabulary instruction for struggling beginner readers.

From Compliance to Play: Enhancement of Phonemic Awareness Through Play-Based Learning Activities in Kindergarten

Phonemic awareness is a skill that begins developing from birth and continues to develop throughout a child’s early years. In the context of 21st-century learning, there is a growing demand for students to establish a solid foundation in this skill during their early developmental stages. Despite the recognized importance of phonemic awareness, there have been instances of low achievement in this area. This study aimed to assess the impact of incorporating play-based activities on improving phonemic awareness in kindergarten learners. The variables examined within phonemic awareness include letter sound fluency, blending, and segmenting. The study employed a quasi-experimental research design and utilized purposive sampling. A total of 20 kindergarten learners from Tangway Loob Elementary School participated in the study. The primary instruments for data collection were pre-tests and post-tests. The findings revealed that, before the implementation of play-based activities, kindergarten learners had a mean phonemic awareness score of 42.58, interpreting a moderate level of awareness. After the intervention, the learners attained a mean of 56.53, also interpreted as a moderate level of awareness. The analysis revealed a significant improvement in letter sound fluency and blending skills between the pre-test and post-test assessments. However, no significant difference was observed in terms of segmenting. In conclusion, this study demonstrated the effectiveness of incorporating play-based activities in enhancing the phonemic awareness of kindergarten learners. It is recommended that these activities be integrated into instructional practices to further develop phonemic skills, which serve as a crucial foundation for more advanced literacy skills.

Supporting Children Who Are English Language Learners Succeed in Their Early Literacy Development

Introduction: The Better Start Literacy Approach is an example of a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) to facilitate children’s early literacy success. It is set within a strengths-based and culturally responsive framework for literacy teaching and is being implemented in over 800 English medium schools across New Zealand. This report focuses on how children identified at school entry as English Language Learners (ELL) responded to the Better Start Literacy Approach during their first year at school. Method: Using a matched control design, the growth in phoneme awareness, phoneme-grapheme knowledge, and oral narrative skills for 1,853 ELL was compared to a cohort of 1,853 non-ELL. The cohorts were matched for ethnicity (mostly Asian, 46% and Pacific, 26%), age (M = 65 months), gender (53% male), and socioeconomic deprivation index (82% in areas of mid to high deprivation). Results: Data analyses indicated similar positive growth rates for ELL and non-ELL from baseline to the first monitoring assessment following 10 weeks of Tier 1 (universal/class level) teaching. Despite demonstrating lower phoneme awareness skills at baseline, following 10 weeks of teaching, the ELL cohort performed similarly to non-ELL in non-word reading and spelling tasks. Predictors of growth analyses indicated that ELL from areas of low socioeconomic deprivation, who used a greater number of different words in their English story retells at the baseline assessment, and females made the most growth in their phonic and phoneme awareness development. Following the 10-week monitoring assessment, 11% of the ELL and 13% of the non-ELL cohorts received supplementary Tier 2 (targeted small group) teaching. At the next monitoring assessment (20 weeks post baseline assessment) the ELL cohort showed accelerated growth in listening comprehension, phoneme-grapheme matching and phoneme blending skills, catching up to their non-ELL peers. Discussion: Despite limitations of the dataset available, it provides one of the few insights into the response of ELL to Tier 1 and Tier 2 teaching in their first year at school. The data suggest that the Better Start Literacy Approach, which includes high-quality professional learning and development for teachers, literacy specialists, and speech-language therapists, is an effective approach toward developing foundational literacy skills for ELL. The important role speech-language therapists have in collaborating with class teachers to support children’s early literacy success within a MTSS framework is discussed.

Gamification in Improving Reading Skills of Preschool Children: Blending Through Puzzle Game

This study explores the effectiveness of puzzle games in improving the learning of Malay Language reading skills among preschool children. The study focuses on inculcating blending skills through puzzle games since one of the most critical elements in learning reading is phonics which involves the skills of letter recognition and phonemic segmentation. Two teachers and twenty-eight preschool children were involved in this study, consisting of 17 preschool children from one of the primary schools in Serian and 11 preschool children from one of the schools in Padawan. These preschool children between the age of five and six were divided into two teams of red and blue. Their preschool teacher monitored them during playday. Two methods were involved in collecting the data: interview and observation. Teachers' opinions on the interventions were acquired in semi-structured interviews, and preschool children were observed. These two preschools' findings show that blending through puzzle games in improving reading skills displays more significant learning benefits and is effective in collaboration, readiness, understanding, and shared mental models. Preschool children show more interest in participating in puzzle games' learning process. The game could be used for English classes and played in a larger space, such as a hall, to make it easier for preschool children to move. Future enhancements could focus on digitalised gamification that can provide more exciting and interactive gameplay.

Examining the effectiveness of a supplemental reading intervention on the early literacy skills of English language learners

ABSTRACTWhile the research on effective early reading interventions for English language learners is expanding, the majority of the research focuses on students whose native language is Spanish. This study investigated the effects of a supplemental reading program that builds phoneme awareness skills and emphasizes explicit instruction in the alphabetic code for five first grade ELLs whose native language was not Spanish. Each of the five participants spoke a different language, including Somali, French, Arabic, Burmese, and Chinese. A single-case design study was conducted to examine students’ response to the intervention, as measured by weekly progress monitoring probes in areas of phoneme segmentation, phonetically regular real word reading skills, and pseudoword reading skills. The study also investigated pretest and posttest measures of phoneme blending, phoneme segmenting, and real word reading. All students showed improvement on the phoneme segmentation and nonsense word reading probes, and four out of five improved on the phonetically regular word reading probes. Additionally, all students showed growth from pretest to posttest on phoneme segmentation and real word reading, and four of the five students improved their blending skills. The data from this study indicate that explicit and systematic phonological awareness and phonics-based instruction shown to be effective with native English speakers can be effective with non-Spanish-speaking ELLs.

Action video games improve reading abilities and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting in English-speaking children with dyslexia

Dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in learning to read and there is some evidence that action video games (AVG), without any direct phonological or orthographic stimulation, improve reading efficiency in Italian children with dyslexia. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying this improvement and the extent to which the benefits of AVG training would generalize to deep English orthography, remain two critical questions. During reading acquisition, children have to integrate written letters with speech sounds, rapidly shifting their attention from visual to auditory modality. In our study, we tested reading skills and phonological working memory, visuo-spatial attention, auditory, visual and audio-visual stimuli localization, and cross-sensory attentional shifting in two matched groups of English-speaking children with dyslexia before and after they played AVG or non-action video games. The speed of words recognition and phonological decoding increased after playing AVG, but not non-action video games. Furthermore, focused visuo-spatial attention and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting also improved only after AVG training. This unconventional reading remediation program also increased phonological short-term memory and phoneme blending skills. Our report shows that an enhancement of visuo-spatial attention and phonological working memory, and an acceleration of visual-to-auditory attentional shifting can directly translate into better reading in English-speaking children with dyslexia.

Phonological awareness in German-speaking preschool children with cochlear implants – 3 case examples

ObjectiveThe aim was to explore PA skills German-speaking preschool children with cochlea implants (CIs) and how these skills may be related to their speech and language skills. MethodsThree monolingual German-speaking pre-school children aged 5;04–6;01 with bilateral CIs were tested. Their cognitive, speech and language skills were assessed. Six subtests of a standardized PA test battery were administered (i.e. rhyme identification, rhyme production; phoneme identification- input and -output; phoneme blending-input and -output). ResultsAll three children showed distinctive PA profiles. One boy, who had no spoken language deficits, struggled to complete the rhyme tasks but performed well on three phoneme tasks. However, he showed a discrepancy between expressive and receptive phoneme blending skills, scoring poorly on the expressive subtest. The second boy, who displayed grammar comprehension and expressive vocabulary difficulties, showed a mixed profile, with a below average performance on rhyme production. The girl who had significant speech and language deficits scored below average on all six PA subtests. ConclusionsPA profiles in children with CI vary considerably and PA testing should include a range of different PA tasks. The assumed link between spoken language deficits and PA difficulties shown in children with normal hearing could be confirmed.

Relevance of Phonological Awareness Intervention to a Jordanian EFL Classroom

Building on Tamimi and Rababah (2007), the present study is an investigation of the effectiveness of explicit phonological awareness intervention in contrast with formal classroom instruction on developing phonological awareness skills for Jordanian EFL second-graders in a governmental school. Based on some views (Adams, 1990; Yopp, 1992; Stanovich, 1994; and Chard and Dickson, 1999) a phonological training program was designed with focus on five phonological awareness skills, viz., segmentation, isolation, deletion, substitution and blending, and their respective sub-skills. On measures of Robertson and Salter's (1997) Phonological Awareness Test (PAT), the experimental group that had undergone 15 40-minute phonological awareness sessions outperformed in deletion, substitution and blending skills the control group which continued to receive formal classroom instruction based on Action Pack 2. The findings corroborate previous research conclusions favoring explicit phonological awareness interventions; thus giving less credit to formal classroom instruction. The study also calls for integrating phonological awareness interventions in Jordanian basic stages' curricula.

Training phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome

This article reports the evaluation of a 6-week programme of teaching designed to support the development of phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver the intervention to individual children in daily 10 –15-minute sessions, within a broader context of reading and language instruction. Ten children with Down syndrome (aged 6 years 11 months to 10 years 6 months) took part in the study; assessments of reading and phonological skills were completed at baseline, after an 8-week control period, and after 6-weeks of intervention. Children made significantly greater gains in phoneme blending skills and single word reading during the intervention period than in the control period. Thus, children with Down syndrome can make gains in blending skills, which may generalize to wider literacy skills, following targeted training over relatively short periods.

Perception of temporally modified speech in auditory neuropathy

Objective: Disrupted auditory nerve activity in auditory neuropathy (AN) significantly impairs the sequential processing of auditory information, resulting in poor speech perception. This study investigated the ability of AN subjects to perceive temporally modified consonant-vowel (CV) pairs and shed light on their phonological awareness skills. Design: Four Arabic CV pairs were selected: /ki/-/gi/, /to/-/do/, /si/-/sti/ and /so/-/zo/. The formant transitions in consonants and the pauses between CV pairs were prolonged. Rhyming, segmentation and blending skills were tested using words at a natural rate of speech and with prolongation of the speech stream. Study sample: Fourteen adult AN subjects were compared to a matched group of cochlear-impaired patients in their perception of acoustically processed speech. Results: The AN group distinguished the CV pairs at a low speech rate, in particular with modification of the consonant duration. Phonological awareness skills deteriorated in adult AN subjects but improved with prolongation of the speech inter-syllabic time interval. Conclusions: A rehabilitation program for AN should consider temporal modification of speech, training for auditory temporal processing and the use of devices with innovative signal processing schemes. Verbal modifications as well as visual imaging appear to be promising compensatory strategies for remediating the affected phonological processing skills.SumarioObjetivo: En la neuropatía auditiva (AN) la disrupción de la actividad del nervio auditivo impide significativamente el procesamiento secuencial de la información auditiva con la consecuente pobre percepción del habla. Este estudio investiga la habilidad de los sujetos con neuropatía auditiva para percibir pares temporalmente modificados de consonante vocal (CV) y nos da luz sobre sus habilidades en el reconocimiento fonológico. Diseño: Se seleccionaron cuatro pares de CV en árabe: /ki/-/gi/, /to/-/do/, /si/-/sti/ y /so/-/zo/. La transición de la formante en las consonantes y las pausas entre los pares de CV fueron prolongados. Se probaron las habilidades de rima, segmentación y combinación utilizando palabras a una tasa normal del habla y con prolongación del flujo del habla. Muestra: Se compararon catorce adultos con neuropatía auditiva con un grupo pareado en su percepción del habla acústicamente procesada, de pacientes con implante coclear. Resultados: El grupo de AN distinguió los pares CV a tasa de velocidad baja, en particular con modificaciones en la duración de las consonantes. Las habilidades de reconocimiento fonológico se deterioraron en los adultos con AN pero mejoraron con la prolongación del intervalo de tiempo inter-silábico. Conclusiones: Un programa de rehabilitación auditiva debe considerar las modificaciones temporales del lenguaje, el entrenamiento del procesamiento auditivo temporal y el uso de equipos con esquemas innovadores de procesamiento de la señal. Las modificaciones verbales así como las imágenes visuales parecen ser prometedoras estrategias compensatorias para remediar las afecciones en las habilidades del procesamiento fonológico.

Does Music Instruction Help Children Learn to Read? Evidence of a Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis of 30 studies using a variety of music interventions to affect reading skills resulted in a moderately strong, significant, overall effect size of d = .32. When music activities incorporate specific reading skills matched to the needs of identified children ( d = .44) or contingent music is used to reinforce reading behavior ( d = .66), benefits are large. The music activities that pair alphabet recognition with phonetic patterns, incorporate word segmentation and sound blending skills, and promote rapid decoding skills are effective in enhancing reading instruction and require little transfer to the assessment methodology. Benefits are greater when the special music reading activities are added to an existing music education curriculum than when replacing it. All schedules of intervention are equally effective regardless of whether daily, intense, short-term, or weekly periodic intervention spread across the school year.

An Experimental Analysis of Phoneme Blending and Segmenting Skills

In this 2-experiment study, experimental analyses of phoneme blending and segmenting skills were conducted with four-first grade students. Intraindividual analyses were conducted to identify the effects of classroom-based instruction on blending phonemes in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, the effects of an individualized intervention for the student who failed to improve in the first experiment were examined. Stimulus materials were drawn directly from the classroom curriculum, making it possible to monitor students’ response to classroom instruction and intervention over time. Generalization of responding to unique letter combinations was measured. A multiple-probe across tasks designs was used in both studies. Results indicated that all students improved their phoneme blending skills and are discussed in terms of the need for evaluation methods that are sensitive enough to identify individual differences in responding between students and to detect within-student performance increases in critical early literacy skills.

Training reading and phoneme awareness skills in children with Down syndrome

The authors report a short-term reading intervention study involving 15 children with Down syndrome (DS) who attended mainstream schools. The intervention programme taught children phoneme segmentation and blending skills in the context of learning letter-sounds and working with words in books. The children were taught by their learning support assistants, who received special training for this purpose. Compared to a waiting group, a group of eight children with DS improved significantly on measures of early literacy skills (letter-sound knowledge, Early Word Recognition) following eight weeks of intervention. The waiting group started to make progress once they received the intervention. Both groups maintained progress on the literacy measures five months after the intervention had finished. The results suggest that children with DS can benefit from structured, phonics-based reading intervention.

Reading difficulties of Hindi-speaking children with developmental dyslexia

The current research is an examination of thenature of reading difficulties in dyslexicreaders of Hindi. The reading performance ofchildren with dyslexia was compared with thatof reading-age (RA) and chronological-age (CA)matched controls on word and nonword reading ofitems of different length. The results showedthat the dyslexic children were significantlypoorer than CA controls on reading speedand accuracy and were worse than RA controlson reading accuracy. For all groups, reactiontime and errors increased with increasinglength of stimuli. Analysis of reading errorsfurther indicated that the dyslexic childrenproduced a greater percentage of graphemic thanphonological errors, and that errors involvingvowel substitutions or deletions were much morefrequent than those involving consonant errors.In general, the findings reveal that, despitethe transparency of the Hindi script, dyslexicreaders of Hindi have difficulty in developinghigh-quality, segmentally organizedphonological representations of words anddisplay poor blending skills.

The influence of phonemic awareness development on acoustic cue weighting strategies in children's speech perception.

In speech perception, children give particular patterns of weight to different acoustic cues (their cue weighting). These patterns appear to change with increased linguistic experience. Previous speech perception research has found a positive correlation between more analytical cue weighting strategies and the ability to consciously think about and manipulate segment-sized units (phonemic awareness). That research did not, however, aim to address whether the relation is in any way causal or, if so, then in which direction possible causality might move. Causality in this relation could move in 1 of 2 ways: Either phonemic awareness development could impact on cue weighting strategies or changes in cue weighting could allow for the later development of phonemic awareness. The aim of this study was to follow the development of these 2 processes longitudinally to determine which of the above 2 possibilities was more likely. Five-year-old children were tested 3 times in 7 months on their cue weighting strategies for a /so/-/[symbol in text]o/ contrast, in which the 2 cues manipulated were the frequency of fricative spectrum and the frequency of vowel-onset formant transitions. The children were also tested at the same time on their phoneme segmentation and phoneme blending skills. Results showed that phonemic awareness skills tended to improve before cue weighting changed and that early phonemic awareness ability predicted later cue weighting strategies. These results suggest that the development of metaphonemic awareness may play some role in changes in cue weighting.

The Effectiveness of Remedial Programs for Reading Disabled Children of Different Ages: Does the Benefit Decrease for Older Children?

One hundred and twenty-two severely reading disabled children were randomly assigned to one of two word identification training programs or a study skills control program. One program remediated deficient phonological analysis and blending skills and provided direct instruction of letter-sound mappings. The other program taught children how to acquire, use, and monitor four metacognitive decoding strategies. The effectiveness of the remedial programs was evaluated for children in grades 2/3, 4, and 5/6 to determine whether programs were differentially effective at different grade levels. Both training approaches were associated with significant improvement in word identification and word attack skills and sizeable transfer-of-training effects. The phonological program resulted in greater transfer across the phonological processing domain, whereas the strategy training program produced broader transfer for real words of both regular and irregular orthography. Children at each grade level made equivalent gains with remediation. These results suggest that the phonological deficits associated with reading disability are amenable to focused and intensive remediation and that this effort is well directed across the elementary school years. From grades 2 through 6, there is no evidence of a developmental window beyond which phonological deficits cannot be effectively remediated with intensive phonological training.

Treating the core deficits of developmental dyslexia: Evidence of transfer of learning after phonologically- and strategy-based reading training programs.

Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty generalizing from word identification training. This study compared 2 firls of word identification to promote transfer of learning by children with dyslexia. Sixty-two children were randomly assigned to one of the training programs or to a study skills control program. One program trained phonological analysis and blending skills and provided direct instruction of letter-sound correspondences; the other trained the acquisition, use, and monitoring of 4 metacognitive decoding strategies

Barriers to literacy development in two cases of developmental verbal dyspraxia

Abstract Two cases of children with developmental verbal dyspraxia with dyslexic difficulties are presented. When first tested Michael was 10 years 7 months and Caroline was 11 years of age. At this time, their reading errors were primarily visual in nature and they were unable to read nonwords. Spelling was predominantly nonphonetic. Investigation of their auditory processing and segmentation skills showed pervasive deficits in the auditory modality. At follow-up 4 years later, although some progress had been made, the pattern of errors was similar. It is argued that their problems with phonological processing militated against the successful development of segmentation and blending skills and phonological reading and spelling strategies and that their limited literacy development consisted of the accumulation of word-specific knowledge.

Reading without Speech: A Study of Children with Cerebral Palsy

Ten nonspeaking cerebral palsy children, aged 7 - 10 years and of average intelligence, were assessed on a battery of tests measuring visual and auditory-perceptual skills and reading ability. Scores on perceptual tests were related to Reading Quotient achieved, and scores on auditory-perceptual tasks were related to speech production ability. Mean scores on all perceptual tests were well below population norms, and 9 of the 10 children achieved Reading Quotients below 85. A significant positive correlation was found between scores on visual perceptual tasks and Reading Quotient. Those subjects with some limited speech production abilities achieved significantly higher scores on the sound blending tasks than the subjects with reflexive vocalisation only. Speech production ability was found to correlate significantly with sound blending skills. However, on each of the tasks, the range of scores was wide, suggesting a need for a case-study approach to this population. Areas requiring further research are in...

Establishing Phoneme Blending in Trainable Mentally Retarded Children

The present study evaluated a program for establishing sound blending and word skills in trainable mentally retarded students. Seven subjects participated. Sound blending was taught in six steps, using words as the beginning units. The training involved procedures to (a) gradually increase pauses between verbally presented stimuli (words, syllables, phonemes) and (b) initially use and then withdraw pictures for prompting blending responses. Word reading was taught in two steps, involving two- and three-letter words. A multiple-probe technique was used for each subject. The data indicated that (a) the procedures were effective for all steps and (b) the training of some steps resulted in increases in correct responding and/or appropriate response (blending and reading) approximations in other untrained steps.