Onset-rime Awareness Research Articles

Multisensory Learning Approach: Impacts on Phonological Awareness among Young ESL Learners in a Rural Setting

English is de facto global and primary lingua franca. English is proven to be a prolific communication tool and a language of choice used by speakers of diverse native languages across the globe to communicate. In Malaysia, English is taught and learned as a second language due to its importance and status in Malaysian society. However, the worrying state of English language literacy in rural settings, particularly in Malaysia, needs to be addressed to bridge the existing gap on language literacy between urban and rural dwellers, especially among young ESL learners. Reading impediment among young learners has been known to be due to a lack of knowledge in phonological awareness – syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness and phonemic awareness. This study employs a quasi-experimental study to investigate this phenomenon. It evaluates the effects of multisensory learning approach (P.A. Multiscape Application and low-technology modalities) on phonological awareness in a primary school in Maludam, Sarawak with 30 treatment and 30 comparison samples. Results revealed that students in the treatment group made significant gains in syllable awareness (d = 2.74), onset-rime awareness (d= 2.20), and phonemic awareness (d= 2.56). Results suggested that the use of the multisensory learning approach was promising and effective in enhancing phonological awareness among young ESL children.

The development of phonological awareness and Pinyin knowledge in Mandarin-speaking school-aged children

Purpose The writing of Chinese is non-alphabetic, but children in China learn Pinyin, a Romanised alphabetic system, to facilitate literacy development. This research investigates how Mandarin phonological awareness (PA) develops, and how it interacts with Pinyin in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children in China. Method In Beijing, 182 students in grades two through four (ages ranged between 91 and 135 months) were tested for PA (syllable manipulation and onset-rime oddity tasks) and Pinyin knowledge (Pinyin symbol naming and syllable reading tasks). ANOVAs were used to examine their developmental trajectories. Partial correlations and linear regressions were used to examine the relationships between PA and Pinyin knowledge. Result Syllable awareness has already reached the ceiling level by grade two, while onset-rime awareness is still developing across grades. The ability to name Pinyin symbols decreases over time, while the ability to read syllables written in Pinyin stays invariant across grades. PA and Pinyin knowledge are significantly correlated, and the results of linear regression indicated that the relationship between PA and Pinyin syllable reading is bi-directional. Conclusion This study suggests that Mandarin PA development shows features characteristic of a non-alphabetic language with Pinyin knowledge playing a crucial role. Implications for theory and practice of Mandarin-speaking children’s literacy development are discussed.

The Association of Phonological Awareness with Chinese Character Writing Among Mainland Chinese Primary School Students

Phonological awareness is related to multiple language skills. However, the effect of phonological awareness on Chinese character writing has not been fully addressed. This paper aims to discover the relationship of phonological awareness with Chinese character writing, and how such relation varies according to learners’ grade levels. 260 primary school students from Grades 2 to 5 were tested using an onset-rime test, a syllable awareness test and a character dictation test. Results indicated a moderate positive association between phonological awareness and character writing. Two levels of phonological awareness (onset-rime and syllable awareness) showed different and independent influences on character writing with a graded effect, which extend current understanding of the development of phonological awareness in relation to Chinese character learning.

Identifying phonological awareness difficulties in preschool children with speech sound disorders

Phonological awareness is one type of phonological processing ability and is considered to be particularly important for early literacy development. Specific phonological awareness skills include syllable-level awareness, onset-rime awareness, and phonemic awareness. Children with speech sound disorders are at a high risk of difficulties with phonological awareness and literacy. There is a body of literature reporting both composite scores and task-specific phonological awareness scores from the assessment of children with typically developing speech and school-age children with speech sound disorders. In this study, we completed a systematic overview of the available literature regarding the assessment of phonological awareness in preschool-age children with speech sound disorders. A systematic search of literature databases yielded 777 articles which were screened. The full text of 30 articles was read and 12 articles met all specified criteria. Ten of the 12 articles reported composite scores for the phonological awareness of participants. The studies rarely reported the profile of specific phonological awareness skills. Of the final 12 articles, eight were case–control studies (Level III) and four were case-series or cross-sectional studies without a control reference (Level IV). There is a need for more research reporting task-specific phonological awareness abilities in preschool-age children with speech sound disorders in order to understand the relationship between specific skills and literacy development in this population.

The relationship between speech impairment, phonological awareness and early literacy development

Although children with speech impairment are at increased risk for impaired literacy, many learn to read and spell without difficulty. Around half the children with speech impairment have delayed acquisition, making errors typical of a normally developing younger child (e.g. reducing consonant clusters so that spoon is pronounced as ‘poon’). A smaller group make disordered speech errors that are atypical of normal development (e.g. marking all consonant clusters with /f/ so bread is pronounced as ‘fed’). Profiles of surface speech errors may provide a way of identifying underlying deficits that account for differences in literacy development. This paper investigates the relationship between type of speech impairment, phonological awareness and literacy acquisition. Thirteen children, aged 5;2–7;9, with either delayed or disordered speech and six typically developing controls were compared on tasks measuring onset-rime awareness, letter knowledge, phonological rule knowledge, real and non-word reading. Children with delayed speech development performed like typically developing controls on all phonological awareness and reading measures. Children with speech disorder, who consistently made errors atypical of normal development, had difficulties on all phonological awareness tasks with the exception of syllable awareness. They showed no measurable emergent reading ability. The results suggest the need to differentiate between speech delay and disorder when planning intervention, particularly for literacy skills.

Comparison of the Phonological Awareness Abilities of Monolingual Cantonese and Putonghua-Speaking Children

The experiment reported here examined the phonological awareness (PA) abilities of four- and five-year-old children learning Cantonese in Hong Kong and Putonghua in China. The four-year-olds had no exposure to formal literacy teaching, whereas the five-year-olds were exposed to different orthographic systems: the Puntonghua-speaking children learned Pinyin (a Romanized alphabet) and the Cantonese-speaking children learned to recognize words in a logographic orthographic system. These data allow investigation of the effect of the acquisition of an alphabetic orthography on phonological awareness. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether syllable and onset-rime awareness emerge in the absence of knowledge about alphabetically written words. Two syllable tasks, one rhyme task, a word-initial phoneme detection tasks and a task assessing tone discrimination were administered. The results indicated that exposure to Pinyin (the five-year-old Putonghua-speakers) significantly enhanced their overall phonological awareness mean score. The only task showing a significantly better performance by the older Putonghua participants in comparison to all other groups was phoneme detection. The older Putonghua children also performed better than the younger Putonghua-speakers on the syllable deletion and rhyme detection task. The performance of the younger and older Cantonese-speakers, who were exposed to a logographic orthography, did not differ. These data suggest that knowledge of alphabetic orthography is important for phonological awareness at the phoneme level, and also contributes some advantage at syllable and rhyme levels. The relationship between phonological awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy is considered in the discussion.

Development of Phonological Awareness in Bilingual Chinese Children

This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset awareness task in grade one, but the difference disappeared in higher grades. However, their performance on the rime and tone awareness tasks was better in Mandarin. These results reflect the phonological structure of the two languages: Mandarin has a more complex onset system, whereas Cantonese has more complex tone and rime systems. Moreover, children's phonological awareness increased faster in Mandarin, which likely resulted from Mandarin instruction. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that onset-rime awareness is a universal construct, whereas tone awareness is a language-specific construct.

Phoneme manipulation not onset‐rime manipulation ability is a unique predictor of early reading

Phonological awareness is known to be an excellent predictor of later reading acquisition. It remains unclear, however, whether phoneme manipulation alone best explains this association or whether an additional direct contribution of onset-rime awareness is predictive. This issue is explored here. A longitudinal study is reported predicting national test and teacher-assessed performance of 351 children aged 7 from phonological awareness measures, pupil baseline attainment and background measures at age 5. Explicit phoneme manipulation skills at age 5 correlated most strongly with literacy skills at age 5. Phoneme manipulation at age 5 predicted all four reading measures taken at age 7 after pupil background, baseline data and onset-rime awareness were controlled in regression analyses. Onset-rime manipulation did not predict reading at 7 in parallel analyses. After controlling for initial reading at age 5, phoneme manipulation still predicted reading comprehension, and teacher-assessed reading and writing at age 7. Results support the existence of a route from phoneme manipulation, but not an additional direct route from explicit onset-rime manipulation at 5, to reading at 7. Practically, findings show that professionals can augment baseline and pupil background data with phoneme manipulation screening in the early identification of learning needs.

Learning to Read and Spell: The Relative Role of Phonemic Awareness and Onset-Rime Awareness

It has been assumed that Chinese-speaking children do not have phonemic awareness. This study investigated phonemic awareness of Chinese-speaking children in tandem with onset-rime awareness and their relative roles in learning to read and spell English. The participants were 29 fourth graders with better onset-rime and phonemic awareness, 29 with better onset-rime but poorer phonemic awareness, and 26 with poorer onset-rime and phonemic awareness. The children first took a criterion learning of letter-sound correspondences task and were then tested on their abilities to spell and read English pseudowords. The results showed that most children were able to detect segmental components in a falling diphthong or a VN rime, indicating phonemes were constituents in their phonological awareness. Children with better onset-rime and phonemic awareness performed better in English pseudoword spelling than children with better onset-rime but poorer phonemic awareness, who in turn, performed better than children with poorer onset-rime and phonemic awareness. Similar patterns were observed for pseudoword reading, only that the effect of onset-rime awareness was less conclusive. These findings underscore the role of phonemic awareness in the acquisition of EFL reading and spelling for Chinese-speaking children.

Phoneme Awareness Is a Better Predictor of Early Reading Skill Than Onset-Rime Awareness

We present the results of a short-term longitudinal study. Children in the early stages of learning to read (5 and 6 year olds) were administered three different tasks (deletion, oddity, and detection) tapping awareness of four phonological units (initial phoneme, final phoneme, onset, and rime). Measures of phoneme awareness were the best concurrent and longitudinal predictors of reading skill with onset-rime skills making no additional predictive contribution once phonemic skills were accounted for. The findings are related to recent controversy over the role of large versus small phonological units as predictors of children's reading skills.

It Doesn't Matter Whether Onset and Rime Predicts Reading Better Than Phoneme Awareness Does or Vice Versa

Hulme et al. argue against our hypothesis that there are two routes from onset and rime awareness to reading: an indirect route whereby onset-rime awareness feeds into the development of phoneme awareness which in turn affects children's reading, and a direct route by which onset-rime awareness makes an independent contribution to children's reading. The evidence that Hulme et al. present against this hypothesis is not convincing, partly because our hypothesis actually predicts most of their results and partly because of weaknesses in the design of Hulme et al.'s study and in the unusual procedures that they employed.

The role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition.

This study examined the role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. The subjects were 154 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders in Beijing who had learned an alphabetic script known as Hanyu Pinyin to help read Chinese characters. Children's performance on tests of various cognitive skills, reading ability, and pinyin knowledge were examined. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that (a) visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades; (b) pinyin knowledge and the ability to discriminate homophonic characters predicted reading success in Grades 2, 3, and 5; and (c) onset-rime awareness, but not phonemic awareness, predicted Chinese reading. This suggests that learning to read Chinese progresses from a logographic phase to an orthographic-phonological phase and that the nature of phonological awareness predicting reading success is contingent on the characteristics of the writing system.

Phonological awareness and spelling abilities of Cantonese–English bilingual children

The phonological awareness of 36 Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged between 3 & 10 years, was compared with matched monolingual English-speaking children. A battery of phonological awareness tasks was used that assessed syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, phoneme awareness, reading & spelling. The only task differentiating monolingual & bilingual preschool children was rhyme awareness, the monolingual children performing better than the bilingual children. A comparison of the school-age children indicated that the monolingual children performed better in terms of number of plausible spelling errors, nonword spelling, nonword reading, visual rhyme recognition, phoneme manipulation & spoonerisms. Previous research on children learning two phonologically similar languages (eg, English-French, Italian-English) has reported that bilingual children have superior phonological awareness. The conflicting findings reported are discussed in terms of the following factors: spoken phonological structure; type of orthography; & literacy teaching strategies. It was concluded that each of these factors plays a role in determining the phonological awareness skills of bilingual children. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 43 References. Adapted from the source document

Persistence of dyslexics' phonological awareness deficits.

This study examined the phonological awareness skills of dyslexic children, adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia, and good readers at various age levels. Comparisons of the dyslexics to good readers of the same age or the same reading level indicated that dyslexics do not acquire appropriate levels of phoneme awareness, regardless of their age or reading levels, although they eventually acquire appropriate levels of onset-rime awareness. Even adults with fairly high levels of word recognition skill show phoneme awareness deficits. For normal readers reliable increases in phoneme awareness were associated with age and reading level, whereas for dyslexic subjects these associations were not reliable