Preschool Phonological Awareness Research Articles

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek.

Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology–orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to increase due to the spelling demands of Greek inflectional and derivational suffixes introduced at later grades.

Comparing Two Forms of Dynamic Assessment and Traditional Assessment of Preschool Phonological Awareness

The goal of the current study was to compare two forms of dynamic assessment and standard assessment of preschool children’s phonological awareness. The first form of dynamic assessment was a form of scaffolding in which item formats were modified in response to an error so as to make the task easier or more explicit. The second form of dynamic assessment was direct instruction of the phonological awareness tasks. The results indicate that preschool children’s phonological awareness can be assessed using standard assessment procedures, provided the items require processing units larger than the individual phoneme. No advantage was found in reliability or validity for either dynamic assessment condition relative to the standard assessment condition. Dynamic assessment does not appear to improve reliability or validity of phonological awareness assessments when preschool children are given tasks that they can perform using standard administration procedures.

Dynamic and Static Assessment of Phonological Awareness in Preschool: A Behavior-Genetic Study

The genetic and environmental overlap between static and dynamic measures of preschool phonological awareness (PA) and their relation to preschool letter knowledge (LK) and kindergarten reading were examined using monozygotic and dizygotic twin children (maximum N = 1,988). The static tests were those typically used to assess a child’s current level of PA such as blending and elision, and the dynamic test included instruction in phoneme identity to assess the child’s ability to respond to this instruction. Both forms were influenced by genes and by shared and nonshared environment. The static and dynamic versions were influenced by the same genes, and part of the total genetic influence was shared with LK. They were subject to both overlapping and independent shared environment influences, with the component in common also affecting LK. Nonshared environment influences were mostly independent. Scores from dynamic assessment added only minimally to variance explained in kindergarten reading after LK and static assessment had been factored in. Although one of the genetic factors that influenced both forms of PA also affected kindergarten reading, it was only the one shared with LK. The authors conclude that dynamic assessment of PA in preschool offers little advantage over the more commonly used static forms, especially if LK scores are available, although they acknowledge its potential in cases of preschool educational disadvantage.

Phonological awareness in kindergarten: a field study in Luxembourgish schools

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of a phonological awareness training program in the specific context of the Luxembourgish educational system. The intervention was run by the kindergarten teachers in their classes with minimal external supervision. Forty-one classes of the area around Luxembourg City participated in the study. One hundred and fifty children from 20 kindergarten classes were part of the training group and 157 children from 21 classes formed the control group. At the end of kindergarten, clear training effects were observed for all phonological awareness tasks, except for the highly demanding phoneme deletion task. After 6 months of reading and writing instruction in first grade, no training effects were found in a pseudoword spelling task for the entire training group. Only at-risk children, which had the lowest performance on preschool phonological awareness measures, showed significant training effects. We conclude that early phonological awareness training may be profitably incorporated in kindergarten classroom activities, particularly for at-risk pupils, even when the language characteristics and teaching methods already concur in facilitating the understanding of the alphabetic principle.

The conception of phonological awareness in educational psychology

Significant research efforts in the field of cognitive, developmental and educational psychology over the past several decades have been focused on the impact of phonological awareness on children’s early literacy development. A substantial body of research evidence from different countries indicates that there is a powerful relationship between preschool phonological awareness and subsequent literacy achievement in alphabetic orthography. There is little research focused on the understanding of phonological awareness in Lithuania, so the aim of this article is to present a theoretical overview of the main areas of the field and to discuss them. First of all, there is a consensus on the definition of phonological awareness, and phonological awareness is broadly defined as a conscious awareness of separate linguistic units in speech and the ability to carry out mental operations on these units of speech. Unfortunately, the relationship between phonological awareness and its many operationalizations is ambiguous, resulting in both theoretical and practical difficulties. Second, there is still no consensus on the structure of phonological awareness. The question is whether the different sets of items intended to measure phonological awareness reflect a single underlying latent ability or several related abilities. Third, research has identified the general sequence of phonological awareness development as universal across languages, and the transparency of a language influences the rate of normal development of phonological awareness. The development of phonological awareness appears to progress from more global phonological characteristics of words to those representing smaller units, i.e. from the syllable level to the phonemic level. A substantial body of research evidence from English indicates that there is a powerful relationship between preschool phonological awareness and subsequent literacy achievements. However, the pattern of findings from research in transparent writing systems with simpler and more consistent letter–sound relationships than English tends to be inconsistent and sometimes contradictory. Some have reported findings more similar to those in English with a strong predictive effect of preschool phonological awareness on early literacy performance. Others have reported that preschool phonological awareness skills are either less important or irrelevant for future literacy attainment.

Preliterate phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Turkish

The role of preschool phonological awareness in early reading and spelling skills was investigated in the transparent orthography of Turkish. Fifty‐six preschool children (mean age=5.6 years) were followed into Grade 2 (mean age=7.6 years). While preschool phonological awareness failed to make any reliable contribution to future reading skills, it was the strongest longitudinal correlate of spelling skills measured at the end of Grades 1 and 2. Overall findings suggested that phonological awareness may be differentially related to reading and spelling, and that spelling is a more sensitive index of phonological processing skills. In this study, verbal short‐term memory emerged as the most powerful and consistent longitudinal correlate of reading speed. This finding raised important questions about the component processes of reading speed, and the role of memory and morphosyntactic skills in an agglutinative and transparent orthography such as Turkish.

Genetic and environmental influences on early literacy

Prereading and early reading skills of preschool twin children in Australia, Scandinavia and the United States were explored in a genetically sensitive design (max. N=627 preschool pairs and 422 kindergarten pairs). Analyses indicated a strong genetic influence on preschool phonological awareness, rapid naming and verbal memory. Print awareness, vocabulary and grammar/morphology were subject primarily to shared environment effects. There were significant genetic and shared environment correlations among the preschool traits. Kindergarten reading, phonological awareness and rapid naming were primarily affected by genes, and spelling was equally affected by genes and shared environment. Multivariate analyses revealed genetic and environmental overlap and independence among kindergarten variables. Longitudinal analyses showed genetic continuity as well as change in phonological awareness and rapid naming across the 2 years. Relations among the preschool variables of print awareness, phonological awareness and rapid naming and kindergarten reading were also explored in longitudinal analyses. Educational implications are discussed.

Preschool Phonological Awareness and Subsequent Literacy Development

There is an unresolved debate in the developmental literature regarding whether phonemic awareness is acquired naturally as part of phonological awareness, or whether it is instead an artefact of reading tuition. This ambiguity affects the interpretation of studies which show that pre‐literate phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of literacy attainment in school. There is also evidence to suggest that spoken word recognition might contribute to literacy development. The present study therefore initially assessed 30 preschool, pre‐literate children on a battery of tests designed to provide a profile of pre‐literate phonological awareness. The reading and spelling ability of these children was then monitored at the end of each school term for five terms. Results suggest that young children can develop phonemic awareness before beginning reading or attending school, and that children's pre‐literate rhyme detection ability is the best predictor of initial reading development. Spoken word recognition also contributed to spelling ability at the end of the first term in school. Spelling ability was consistently found to be superior to reading ability throughout the duration of the study. These results are suggested to support the idea that word recognition plays an early, but important, role in the initial development of spelling ability and that spelling facilitates the development of alphabetic awareness in children's reading. The results generally support growing evidence that rhyme awareness is associated with literacy as a predictor and discriminates between good and poor readers.