Phonological Awareness Instruction Research Articles

Levelling the Playing Field for Kindergarten Entry: Research Implications for Preschool Early Literacy Instruction

THE PURPOSE OF THIS paper is to consider the importance of intervening with early literacy instruction at the preschool level. Research has found phonological awareness skills in preschool to be one of the most robust predictors of early reading success in a child's first few years of formal schooling. The efficacy of phonological awareness instruction at the preschool level is discussed, as well as the research implications for best practice in teaching it. Shared book reading plays an important role in facilitating oral language development in young children. Two types of shared book-reading techniques (dialogic and non-dialogic) are reviewed, and their effect on oral language outcomes is examined. A plethora of research has examined phonological awareness intervention in preschool and kindergarten, but much less research is available on shared book-reading interventions in these settings. It is concluded that both phonological awareness and shared book reading are necessary components of a preschool early literacy intervention, as they are important prerequisite skills for decoding, spelling and reading comprehension.

Relationships Between Vocabulary Size, Working Memory, and Phonological Awareness in Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners

The goals of this study were to evaluate the impact of short-term phonological awareness (PA) instruction presented in children's first language (L1; Spanish) on gains in their L1 and second language (L2; English) and to determine whether relationships exist between vocabulary size, verbal working memory, and PA in Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). Participants included 25 kindergartners who received PA instruction and 10 controls. A 2-way within-subjects repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted to evaluate gains. Relationships between PA gains, Spanish and English vocabulary, and memory, as measured using nonword repetition and experimental working memory tasks, were analyzed using correlation and regression analyses. Results indicated significant and equivalent gains in both languages of children in the experimental group and no gains in the control group. Spanish vocabulary size was significantly related to PA gains in both languages and was more strongly related to English gains than was English vocabulary size. The memory tasks predicted gains in each language in distinct ways. Results support the conclusion that PA instruction and strong vocabulary skills in an individual's L1 benefit PA development in both the L1 and L2. Results also indicate that dynamic relationships exist between vocabulary size, storage and processing components of working memory, and PA development in both languages of ELLs.

Preliteracy Speech Sound Production Skill and Later Literacy Outcomes: A Study Using the Templin Archive

This archival study examined the relationship between the speech sound production skill of kindergarten children and literacy outcomes in Grades 1-3 in a data set where most children's vocabulary skills were within normal limits, speech therapy was not provided until 2nd grade, and phonological awareness instruction was discouraged at the time data were collected. Data were accessed from the Templin Archive (2004), and the speech sound production skill of 272 kindergartners were examined relative to literacy outcomes in 1st and 2nd grade (reading) and 3rd grade (spelling). Kindergartners in the 7th percentile for speech sound production skill scored more poorly in 1st- and 2nd-grade reading and 3rd-grade spelling than did kindergartners with average speech sound production skill; kindergartners in the 98th percentile achieved superior literacy skills compared to the mean. Phonological awareness mediated the effects of speech sound production skill on reading and spelling; vocabulary did not account for any unique variance. Speech sound disorders appear to be an overt manifestation of a complex interaction among variables influencing literacy skills, including nonlanguage cognition, vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness. These interrelationships hold across the range of speech sound production skill, as children with superior speech sound production skill experience superior literacy outcomes.

Early Comprehension Instruction for Spanish–Speaking English Language Learners: Teaching Text–Level Reading Skills While Maintaining Effects on Word–Level Skills

This study investigated the effects of three instructional conditions on precursors to successful reading for Spanish–speaking English language learners (ELL). The study was conducted using a randomized, alternate treatment control group design specifically targeting phonological awareness (PA) listening comprehension (LC), and decoding in a sample of ELL ( N= 82) including students who were and were not at risk for later reading failure. Two randomly assigned experimental intervention groups and one treatment control group were created to test the effectiveness of three instructional interventions that differed in the relative amount of time used for instructing the word– and text–level targeted skills. Specifically, the two experimental intervention groups received different doses of LC relative to PA instruction, creating a LC Concentration group and a PA Concentration group. The treatment control group received only PA and alphabet knowledge instruction (word–level skills). Results indicated that both at–risk and not–at–risk ELLs in the LC Concentration group outperformed students in the other groups on almost all measures, including PA skills, despite minimal amounts of instructional time–targeting word–level skills. These data extend the existing literature by lending empirical support to the use of a LC component in early reading interventions for young ELL.

Field-Based Evaluation of Two-Tiered Instruction for Enhancing Kindergarten Phonological Awareness

Research Findings: This study reports on the outcomes of a multisite, two-tiered, response-to-intervention instructional model for delivering phonological awareness instruction and intervention to kindergartners. Fifty-seven kindergartners from 3 classrooms participated in a supplemental phonological awareness program, and 56 kindergartners from 3 classrooms received the prevailing school-adopted literacy curriculum. All children in the supplemental condition received supplemental classroom-based phonological awareness instruction in addition to the adopted literacy curriculum. At mid-year, 6 low literacy achievers were identified in each supplemental classroom (n = 18) to participate in an additional 12-week small-group intervention. The classroom-based supplemental curriculum did not produce statistically significant gains for typically achieving children on measures of letter–sound knowledge, word recognition, or developmental spelling. However, an add-on tier of supplemental instruction exerted a substantial advantage for low-achieving children on a measure of developmental spelling. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that a 2-tiered intervention model provides an effective means for improving the literacy outcomes of low-achieving kindergarten children.

Successful phonological awareness instruction with preschool children: Lessons from the classroom.

Phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills to conventional literacy that develop during the preschool period. Significant amounts of research support the causal and predictive relation between phonological awareness and children's ease of learning to decode and spell. However, many preschool curricula and early childhood educational and caregiving settings are still lacking in robust instruction in this area, and many preschool instructors do not yet have a strong grasp of the developmental trajectory of phonological awareness nor of how to incorporate effective support and instruction into a developmentally appropriate teaching plan. This article summarizes what is known from high-quality research about the development of phonological awareness and about how this informs effective pedagogical strategies for its instruction. Numerous examples are given of effective instructional strategies derived from randomized trials of preschool curricula and interventions.

Phonological Awareness Instruction: Opinions and Practices of Educators and Speech-Language Pathologists

Phonological Awareness Instruction: Opinions and Practices of Educators and Speech-Language Pathologists

Reading First kindergarten classroom instruction and students' growth in phonological awareness and letter naming–decoding fluency

This study investigated the role of the amount, content, and implementation of reading instruction provided by 17 kindergarten teachers in eight Reading First elementary schools as it related to students' progress ( n = 286 students) on early reading assessments of phonological awareness and letter naming–decoding fluency. Children's phonological awareness and letter naming–decoding fluency grew significantly from fall to spring. On average, across the three 60 min observations, teachers provided over 30 min a day of phonological awareness and phonics instruction and 15 min a day of vocabulary and comprehension instruction. Global ratings of instructional quality revealed two implementation factors: explicit and individualized implementation and meaningful interactions around text. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the amounts of specific instructional content, as well as how this instruction was implemented, was related to students' letter knowledge and phonological awareness skill growth.

Phonological Awareness Treatment Effects for Children from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds

This study investigated whether phonological awareness intervention is effective for children at risk when administered in a small group setting and whether such intervention is more effective following a period of language stimulation. A group of 20 children aged between 5;05 and 7;08 who attended a school in New Zealand with a government-defined low socioeconomic status participated in the study. These children displayed poor phonological awareness and weakness in some aspect of their spoken semantic and syntactic language development prior to intervention. The participants were randomly assigned to intervention groups. Group 1 received 16 hours of phonological awareness intervention, followed by 16 hours of language intervention, whereas Group 2 received the same interventions in the reverse order.The results indicated that the phonological awareness intervention implemented was effective in rapidly accelerating the participants' phonemeblending, segmentation, and manipulation skills and significantly improved their phonetic decoding ability. Both groups made comparable gains inphonological awareness and decoding ability regardless of whether they received the intervention first or following language intervention. The results suggested that for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with delays in aspect of their spoken language development, the standard classroom curriculum provides sufficient language enrichment to allow rapid, positive responses to a direct approach to phonological awareness intervention. It is not necessary for these children to receive additional language stimulation before they can benefit from phonological awareness instruction.

Phonological Awareness and Rapid Naming Predict Word Attack and Word Identification in Adults With Mild Mental Retardation

In this study we asked whether measures of phonological awareness and rapid naming were correlated with single-word reading skills of 30 adults with mild mental retardation. We presented four tests of phonological awareness (for rime, first, middle, and end-sound categorization), two rapid-naming tests (pictures and letters), and the Woodcock Word-Identification and Word-Attack subtests. All four phonological-awareness measures and both rapid-naming measures were significantly correlated with both word-attack and word-identification skills. This outcome is consistent with findings from typically developing children, suggesting that instruction in phonological awareness would facilitate the acquisition of word-attack skills in individuals with mental retardation.

Word‐attack skills in individuals with mental retardation

This article assesses the state of the literature on word-attack skills and phonological awareness (PA) in individuals with mental retardation, in light of progress towards the development of effective teaching procedures. The literature contains promising findings. Studies have shown PA to be correlated with word-attack skills in individuals with mental retardation, as has been shown conclusively in typically developing children. This suggests that instruction in PA would facilitate the acquisition of word-attack skills in individuals with mental retardation, as it does with typically developing children. As of yet, however, very few experimental studies designed to demonstrate effective teaching procedures for PA and word-attack skills have been published. This research field might evolve most effectively and efficiently by following a two-step research program. First, test new teaching procedures in a series of small-N studies, each study incorporating modifications of teaching procedures based on the results of the previous study. Once procedures prove effective at this level, the resources necessary to pursue large-scale studies can be used to their best advantage.

The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness and Word Reading

This study investigates the effect of phonological awareness instruction on the development of word-reading ability for EFL first-graders in a Jordanian state school. Based on Chard and Dickson’s (1999) phonological awareness hierarchy, a phonological awareness training program was developed by the researchers, and used in training the experimental group whose children after 10 training sessions significantly outperformed their peers in the control group on TampaReads’ (2003) word-reading measures. The study concludes that phonological awareness is relevant to the development of first-graders’ word-reading ability, and that explicit phonological awareness instruction is essential for this development. The study thus provides support to previous research, and implies that phonological awareness can be taught contrary to the notion of the pure whole language approach, and that explicit phonological awareness intervention can help overcome the Jordanian EFL children’s reading problems once it is systematically integrated into their school curricula.

The effects of phonological awareness instruction on beginning word recognition and spelling

This investigation examined the effects of phonological awareness instruction on four children, aged 8 – 9 years, with complex communication needs (CCN) who used augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). During Experiment 1 all four children acquired letter/sound correspondence and phoneme awareness at varying levels. One child reached criterion. Three children maintained their skills and one child generalized to 10 untaught letters/sounds. During Experiment 2 one of four children reached criterion in beginning word recognition and improved her post-intervention word identification. Three children increased their spelling ability. The results are interpreted within the framework of current theory and are suggestive of the skills children with complex communication needs may need in order to acquire early decoding skills.

Bilingual education & bilingualism

Bilingual education & bilingualism

Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS): The Effects of Intervention and Stimulus Characteristics on the Blending Performance of Preschool Children with Communication Impairments

The primary purpose of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of the blending portion of the Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS) program, a comprehensive and explicit phonological awareness intervention curriculum designed for preschool children with speech and language impairments. A secondary purpose was to examine the effects of stimulus characteristics on responsiveness to the phonological awareness intervention via post-hoc analysis. A single-subject design was used to examine treatment effects among children with varying levels of communicative abilities. The PASS blending module was implemented with 11 children with speech and/or language impairments, following the establishment of a stable pretreatment baseline on a series of phonological awareness probes. After instruction, the children demonstrated substantial improvement in their blending ability, which appeared to be attributable to the intervention rather than environmental or maturational factors. These findings suggest that PASS blending training was an effective approach to phonological awareness instruction for the preschoolers with disabilities in our sample. Additionally, word frequency and neighborhood density were found to influence performance on some phonological awareness tasks. Specifically, children correctly blended high-frequency words more than low-frequency words, but they correctly blended words from lower-density neighborhoods more than words from higher-density neighborhoods. Findings are discussed with respect to predictions of the lexical restructuring hypothesis.

The role of language of instruction and vocabulary in the English phonological awareness of Spanish–English bilingual children

This study explores influences on bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) performance in English, examining the role of language of instruction and vocabulary. English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual kindergartners and first graders receiving either English or Spanish literacy instruction were assessed in English PA and in English and Spanish vocabulary, as appropriate. Spanish-instructed bilinguals were more likely than English-instructed bilinguals or English monolinguals to treat diphthongs as two units, reflecting their analysis in Spanish phonology and orthography. Surprisingly, unbalanced bilinguals dominant in either English or Spanish scored better on English PA than children with approximately equal scores on the English and the Spanish vocabulary test. This finding suggests that familiarity with many lexical items within a language constitutes a source of analyzable phonological knowledge.

Clinical Issues: Phonological Awareness, Reading Fluency, and Strategy-Based Reading Comprehension Instruction for Children with Language Learning Disabilities: What Does Research Show?

Clinical Issues: Phonological Awareness, Reading Fluency, and Strategy-Based Reading Comprehension Instruction for Children with Language Learning Disabilities: What Does Research Show?

Training in phonological awareness generalizes to phonological working memory: A preliminary investigation.

Abstract Early reading achievement relies on phonological awareness (PA) and phonological working memory (WM). Children with language impairment (LI) have problems with both. Three studies were conducted to determine whether treating PA would also improve phonological WM in preschoolers with LI. Study 1 confirmed that children with specific LI perform more poorly than age-matched peers on both PA and WM tasks. Study 2 showed that when children with and without LI are matched on a nonword WM task, differences between the groups on PA and on a word WM task are no longer statistically significant. In Study 3, sixteen preschool children with LI received intervention targeting PA skills and improved both their PA and WM abilities. These studies support the use of PA instruction to improve basic phonological mechanisms underlying working memory. Keywords: literacy, language disorder, intervention, preschool children. Introduction Scholars and practitioners alike are by now well aware that children with language impairments are at increased risk for difficulties in learning to read (e.g., Aram, Ekelman, & Nation, 1984; Aram & Nation, 1980; Bishop & Adams, 1990; Gillam & Carlile, 1997; Korngold, Menyuk, Libergott, & Chesnick, 1988; Menyuk & Chesnick, 1997). The relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and early reading achievement has been clearly established for the general population (e.g., see reviews by Adams, 1990; Blachman, 1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987)). It is also been well-documented that children with language impairments have delays in phonological awareness abilities (e.g., Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995; Bishop & Adams, 1990; Catts, 1993; Kamhi & Catts, 1986; Kamhi, Lee, & Nelson, 1985; Menyuk & Chesnick, 1997), and intervention studies have shown that we can successfully foster PA skills in preschoolers and kindergartners with both speech and language impairments (e.g., Gillon, 2000, 2002; Laing & Espeland, 2005; Segers & Verhoeven, 2004; van Kleeck, Gillam, & McFadden, 1998). Phonological awareness, however, is only one of the phonological processing skills known to be important to early decoding. In addition to PA, the contributions of phonological working memory (WM) to early decoding (word attack skill in early reading) have been well established for children who are typically developing, children with reading disorders, and children with language impairments (see Catts & Kamhi, 1999; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987 for reviews). Phonological WM has been measured by both word and nonword repetition and span tasks. Of these two kinds of measures, nonword recall tasks are believed to more purely reflect phonological working memory, since they must be carried out independent of semantic lexical knowledge (Gathercole, in press; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990; Henry & Millar, 1991). Studies outside of the area of reading corroborate that children with language impairment perform more poorly than age- and language-matched peers on nonword repetition and nonword span tasks, suggesting that these children have a diminished phonological WM capacity (e.g., Bishop, North, & Donlan, 1996; Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998; Edwards & Lahey, 1998; Ellis Weismer, Tomblin, Zhang, Buckwalter, Chynoweth, & Jones, 2000; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990; Gillam, Cowan, & Day, 1995; Gray, 2003, 2004; Marton & Schwartz, 2003; Montgomery, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). As we continue to work to develop interventions that take empirical findings regarding the basic cognitive underpinnings of early decoding into account, these findings might lead us to ask if we should be targeting phonological WM in addition to PA in order to provide the best possible foundation for later early decoding skills in children with language impairments. First, however, we might ask if it is feasible to directly improve phonological WM skills. …

Facilitating Phoneme Awareness Development in 3- and 4-Year-Old Children With Speech Impairment

This study investigated the phonological awareness and early literacy development of 12 children who presented at 3 years of age with moderate or severe speech impairment. The children's response to early intervention that included specific activities to facilitate phoneme awareness and letter knowledge, in addition to improving speech intelligibility, was examined. Using a 3-year longitudinal design, the children's development in phonological awareness was monitored and compared to that of a group of 19 children without speech impairment. During the monitoring period from 3 to 5 years of age, the children with speech impairment received, on average, 25.5 intervention sessions. At 6 years of age, the children's performance on phonological awareness, reading, and spelling measures was also compared to that of the 19 children without impairment as well as to a matched control group of children with speech impairment who had not received any specific instruction in phonological awareness. The results indicated that (a) phoneme awareness can be stimulated in children with speech impairment as young as 3 and 4 years of age, (b) facilitating phoneme awareness development can be achieved concurrently with improvement in speech intelligibility, and (c) enhancing phoneme awareness and letter knowledge during the preschool years is associated with successful early reading and spelling experiences for children with speech impairment. The data provide evidence to support the clinical practice of integrating activities to develop phoneme awareness and letter knowledge into therapy for 3- and 4-year-old children with moderate or severe speech impairment.

An Examination of Phonological Awareness Treatment Outcomes for Seventh-Grade Poor Readers From a Bilingual Community

The goal of this study was to examine posttreatment outcomes following direct, systematic phonological awareness instruction for seventh-grade poor readers, most of whom had English as their second language. The treatment group (n = 35) participated in small-group instruction sessions that emphasized phonological awareness at the phoneme level and incorporated explicit linkages to literacy. The treatment, which was administered in the participants' school setting over a 12-week period, involved approximately 45 hr of contact with a trained instructor. Postintervention performance of the treatment group was compared to performance of students from the same school and grade level who were waiting to receive phonological awareness treatment (nontreatment group, n= 33). ANCOVA results for total reading scores and MANCOVA results for Phonological Awarenes, Word Attack, Word Identification, Word Comprehension, and Passage Comprehension subtests indicated that group differences were significant. The posttreatment scores of the treatment group were higher for all measures. Seventh-grade poor readers, including bilingual students who have English as their second language, can benefit from direct, systematic instruction that emphasizes phonological awareness and is linked to literacy.