Phonemic Awareness

Foundational research

Does Phoneme Awareness Training in Kindergarten Make a Difference in Early Word Recognition and Developmental Spelling?

Ball, E. W., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49-66.

Abstract:
The goal of this project was to evaluate the effects of training in phonemic segmentation and of instruction in letter names and letter sounds on kindergarten children's reading and spelling skills. Ninety students from three urban public schools in the U.S. were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group received training in segmenting words into phonemes, as well as training in correspondences between letter names and letter sounds (phoneme awareness group). The second group received only the training in letter names and letter sounds (language activities group). The third group received no intervention (control group). Results indicated that phoneme awareness instruction, combined with instruction connecting the phonemic segments to alphabet letters, significantly improved the early reading and spelling skills of the children in the phoneme awareness group. However, instruction in letter names and letter sounds alone did not significantly improve the segmentation skills, the early reading skills, or the spelling skills of the kindergarten children who participated in the language activities group, as compared with the control group.

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Categorizing Sounds and Learning to Read: A Causal Connection

Bradley, L., & Bryant, P.E. (1983, February 3). Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A causal connection. Nature, p. 419.

Abstract:
Children who are backward in reading are strikingly insensitive to rhyme and alliteration1. They are at a disadvantage when categorizing words on the basis of common sounds even in comparison with younger children who read no better than they do. Categorizing words in this way involves attending to their constituent sounds, and so does learning to use the alphabet in reading and spelling. Thus the experiences which a child has with rhyme before he goes to school might have a considerable effect on his success later on in learning to read and to write. We now report the results of a large scale project which support this hypothesis.

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Children's Use of Analogy in Learning to Read: A Developmental Study

Goswami, U. (1986). Children's use of analogy in learning to read: A developmental study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 73-83.

Abstract:
If children are able to make analogies between the spelling patterns in words, this would have important consequences for theories of reading development, as a child who knew a word like beak could use analogy to read new words like peak and bean. A study is reported which compared the ability of children at three different reading levels to use analogy in reading both real and nonsense words. The results showed that even very young children can successfully use analogy to decode new words. This finding suggests that analogy has a role to play in the initial stages of reading acquisition.

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Effects of an Extensive Program for Stimulating Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Petersen, O. (1988). Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 263-285.

Abstract:
A training program consisting of metalinguistic games and exercises was developed with the aim of stimulating preschool children to discover and attend to the phonological structure of language. The program was evaluated in a longitudinal study in which 235 Danish preschool children in intact classes had daily training sessions over a period of 8 months. The children received no reading instruction prior to or during training. Pre- and posttest measures were also taken from a comparison group of 155 children. Subsequently, the authors assessed long-term effects of the training on the children's progress in reading and spelling in first and second grades. The design of the study permitted the authors to assess the specificity of the training effects.

The program had no significant effect on functional linguistic skills, such as comprehension of oral instructions, or vocabulary. It did not affect the informal learning of letter names. But it did affect metalinguistic skills: Small but significant effects were observed on rhyming tasks and on tasks involving word and syllable manipulation. And on tasks requiring phoneme segmentation, the effect was dramatic. Apparently, phonemic awareness can be developed among preschool children outside the context of the acquisition of an alphabetic writing system. However, explicit instruction seems to be required. It was also demonstrated that preschool training in phonological awareness can have a facilitating effect on subsequent reading and spelling acquisition. The positive effect persisted until Grade 2.

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Defining Phonological Awareness and its Relationship to Early Reading

Stahl, S., & Murray, B. A. (1994). Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 221-234.

Abstract from PsycINFO Database Record:
Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many different tasks, and task comparisons have been confounded by differing levels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergartners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task difficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were, in turn, compared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the measures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be more closely related to the factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from rimes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis.

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Phonological Awareness Intervention Research: A Critical Review of the Experimental Methodology

Troia, G. (1999). Phonological awareness intervention research: A critical review of the experimental methodology. Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 28-53.

Abstract:
The methodological rigor of 39 studies of phonological awareness intervention was evaluated based on internal and external validity criteria. The internal validity criteria encompassed general design characteristics, measurement, and statistical treatment, while the external validity criteria included research hypotheses, participant selection and description, and generalization and maintenance measures. The most serious methodological flaws observed in many of the studies were (a) nonrandom assignment of participants to conditions; (b) failure to control for Hawthorne effects by providing alternate interventions to control groups; (c) insufficient or nonexistent assurance of fidelity of treatment; (d) poor measurement sensitivity; and (e) inadequately described samples. Only seven studies met two thirds or more of all the evaluative criteria, although all of these investigations demonstrated at least one fatal flaw. The reported findings are compared with those of two similar methodological reviews. Suggestions for improvement of future intervention research are provided.

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Phonological Coding, Phonological Awareness and Reading Ability: Evidence From a Longitudinal and Experimental Study

Vellutino, F.R., & Scanlon, D.M. (1987). Phonological coding, phonological awareness and reading ability: Evidence from a longitudinal and experimental study. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33, 261-279.

Additional articles

Developing Phonological Awareness and Word Recognition Skills: A Two-year Intervention with Low-income, Inner-city Children

Blachman, B. A., Tangel, D. M., Ball, E.W., Black, R. S., & McGraw, C. K. (1999). Developing phonological awareness and word recognition skills: A two-year intervention with low-income, inner-city children. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11, 239-273.

Abstract:
Low-income, inner-city children were involved in a two-year intervention delivered in the regular classroom by regular classroom teachers to develop phonological awareness and word recognition skills. For the treatment children, an 11-week phoneme awareness program in kindergarten was followed by a first grade reading program (extended to grade 2 for some children) that emphasized explicit, systematic instruction in the alphabetic code. Control children participated in the school district’s regular basal reading program. Both groups participated in a phonetically-based spelling program mandated by the district.

At the end of grade 1, treatment children (n = 66) significantly outperformed control children (n = 62) on measures of phonological awareness, letter name and letter sound knowledge, and three measures of word recognition, and reached marginal significance (0.056) on a fourth. They also significantly outperformed the control children on two measures of spelling. One year later, at the end of grade 2, the treatment children (n = 58) significantly outperformed the control children (n = 48) on all four measures of word recognition.

For the groups as a whole, there were no differences on the one measure of spelling re-administered at the end of grade 2. However, there were significant differences in spelling between the treatment (n = 16) and control children (n = 13) who remained in the bottom quartile of spellers at the end of grade 2 when partial credit was given for phonetically correct spelling, and significant differences in reading favoring these treatment children on all four measures of word recognition.

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Getting Ready for Reading: Early Phoneme Awareness and Phonics Teaching Improves Reading and Spelling in Inner-city Second Language Learners

Stuart, M. (1999). Getting ready for reading: early phoneme awareness and phonics teaching improves reading and spelling in inner-city second language learners. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 69, 587-605.

Previous studies demonstrate that phoneme awareness training, particularly when combined with letter-sound teaching, results in improved reading and spelling development. This study seeks to extend previous findings by including children learning English as a second language, who have typically been excluded from previous studies.

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Preventing Reading Failure in Young Children With Phonological Processing Disabilities: Group and Individual Responses to Instruction

Torgesen, Joseph K., Wagner, Richard K., Rashotte, Carol A., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., Garvan, C. (1999). Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579-593.

Abstract:
The relative effectiveness of 3 instructional approaches for the prevention of reading disabilities in young children with weak phonological skills was examined. Two programs varying in the intensity of instruction in phonemic decoding were contrasted with each other and with a 3rd approach that supported the children's regular classroom reading program. The children were provided with 88 hr of one-to-one instruction beginning the second semester of kindergarten and extending through 2nd grade. The most phonemically explicit condition produced the strongest growth in word level reading skills, but there were no differences between groups in reading comprehension. Word level skills of children in the strongest group were in the middle of the average range. Growth curve analyses showed that beginning phonological skills, home background, and ratings of classroom behavior all predicted unique variance in growth of word level skills.
Copyright © 1999 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced with permission.

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Musical Training Helps Language Processing, Studies Show

Trei, L. Musical Training Helps Language Processing, Studies Show. Stanford Report, 15 November 2005.

In what will be music to the ears of arts advocates, researchers for the first time have shown that mastering a musical instrument improves the way the human brain processes parts of spoken language. The findings could bolster efforts to make music as much a part of elementary school education as reading and mathematics.

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Training Phonological Awareness With and Without Attention to Articulation

Wise, B.W., Ring, J., & Olson, R.K. (1999). Training phonological awareness with and without attention to articulation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 271-304.

Abstract:
One hundred twenty-two second- to fifth-grade (7- to 11-year-old) children with reading difficulties studied phonological awareness with or without explicit attention to articulation and with or without manipulation of sounds. They all studied identical phonics and read stories on the computer with speech and decoding support for difficult words. Regular-instruction controls received regularly scheduled language-arts or reading activities.

After 40 h of training, children in all three trained conditions outperformed controls on all tests except math. Conditions that manipulated sounds showed advantages over the condition without explicit practice manipulating sounds, but only on the two measures of phonological awareness. Articulatory awareness training yielded no unique benefits during this training period. Individual differences in response to treatment related to initial levels of phonological awareness, naming speed, IQ, and grade. The similar outcomes of the three conditions suggest that specific variations in good phonological training may be less important than once thought for most children with reading difficulties.

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Developing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children

Yopp, H. (1992). Developing phonemic awareness in young children. The Reading Teacher, 45, 696-703.

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The Validity and Reliability of Phonemic Awareness Tests

Yopp, H.K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 253-266.

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