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Spelling Seminar: Theory and Practice

by: Hadeel Swaaed

Aleen Zeitoun

Introduction

Introduction

THE EFFECTS OF EARLY PHONOLOGICAL

AWARENESS TRAINING ON READING SUCCESS

The aim/ purpose:

The aim

The present study aimed to:

(1) To establish the predictive value of pre-reading phonological awareness ability on future reading success.

(2) To measure the impact of pre-reading phonological awareness training on reading success in first and third grades.

Phonological Awareness

Definitions

Phonological awareness is the metalinguistic ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of speech.

Phonemic Awareness

Is one component of phonological awareness.

It refers to the ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes within words.

Phonemic Awareness

Longitudinal study

more

A longitudinal study is an observational research method in which data is gathered for the same subjects repeatedly over a period of time.

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted

Findings in different studies showed that there is a significant relationship between them:

Literature

Review

1.

Correlational studies have provided evidence that successful readers also have good phonological awareness abilities.

2.

Predictive studies maintain that performance on pre-reading phonological awareness tasks is highly predictive of success in reading acquisition in first grade and that the predictive

relationship exists even when intelligence and socio-economic status are controlled.

3.

The third type of evidence comes from training programs in which direct phonological awareness training, prior to or -in the first stages of learning to read, contributes significantly to initial decoding skills.

Method

Method

Subjects

  • Seventy students from two public kindergarten classes participated in the study.
  • The classes were located in a lower-middle class neighborhood in a southern city of Israel.
  • Most of these children were later registered in the same public elementary school (two groups; experimental group- 27 students and the control group- 26 students).
  • At that time, an additional 27 children who entered these same first-grade classes from other neighboring kindergartens were added as an additional control group (Control- G1).

Subjects

+

  • 1) Experimental group
  • 2) Control- K
  • 3) Control- G1

Treatment

An eight-month phonological awareness training program was offered to the experimental

group during the kindergarten year.

The following training activities were included:

Activities used

(1) listening games (non-speech and speech sounds).

(2) identifying the rhyme and creating rhymes.

(3) identifying repeated words, dividing sentences into their component words and reflecting upon the length of words.

(4) segmenting words into syllables or into sub-syllabic units.

(5) blending syllables into words, blending syllables from different words and blending sub-syllabic units into words.

6) phoneme segmentation (initial, middle, and/or final phoneme in a word).

(7) counting syllables, sub-syllabic units, or phonemes in a word.

(8) blending phonemes into a word.

(9) sounding the remaining part of a word following a phoneme deletion.

The program was comprised of three parts:

The program

(a) a structured 20-min group activity delivered twice a week by a trained student teacher.

(b) two 5 min practice sessions a day, in which the kindergarten teacher specifically reviewed elements from the structured training activities during the routine full-class activity.

(c) a phonological awareness activity center, comprised of games and audio cassettes for unstructured use by individuals and small groups during the school day.

For the control group

For the control group

  • Like the experimental group, the control group kindergarteners (Control-K) participated in a general language enrichment program, which was part of the national kindergarten curriculum. In addition, a special program on visual-motor integration was delivered to them by another student teacher (in an attempt to control for the external variable of added adult-child interaction).
  • With regard to the Control-G1 group, we had no prior knowledge nor control over the programs of the kindergartens that these children had attended; however, it is reasonable to assume that they followed the general national curriculum.
  • All three groups learned to read using a Whole Language program.
  • This program provides language enrichment and teaches reading strategies that rely on contextual cues from various sources, but are not geared to systematic training in using the phonemic code.

Testing Instruments

1. Phonological Awareness.

2. Reading Comprehension.

Testing Instruments

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness ability was measured by two instruments:

1. the LAC test

(Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test; Lindamood & Lindamood, 1979) adapted for Hebrew speakers.

2. the PAT test- A constructed Phonological Awareness Test, in Hebrew, a curriculum-based assessment that directly measured the skills taught in the training program.

The LAC Test

The LAC

The PAT Test

The PAT

The PAT test consists of 48 items grouped into eight sub-tests that directly test the phonological awareness skills that were taught in the training program:

(1) Rhyme Detection;

(2) Sentence Segmentation (into words);

(3) Syllable Synthesis (into words);

(4) Syllable Segmentation (segmenting words into syllables);

(5) Initial Phoneme Isolation (isolating the first phoneme in a word);

(6) Sound Deletion (sounding the remaining part of a word following phoneme

deletion);

(7) Phoneme Segmentation (segmenting words into phonemes);

(8) Phoneme Synthesis (into words).

All the stimuli were meaningful words or sentences. All PAT tasks were given with the aid of pictures, except Sentence Segmentation. The PAT is an individual test and it was administered in about 10-15 min by the examiners. Subjects scored one point for each correct answer (maximum score = 48).

Reading Comprehension

Reading

Comprehension

Reading comprehension was measured by the Hebrew-language Reading Comprehension Test (Ortar, 1987), a 68-item multiple choice test. The first 14 items entail matching a word to a picture. The remaining items consist of comprehension questions to short texts that gradually increase in length and complexity - from single-sentence to 200-word texts. Each item is worth one point (maximum score = 68). The Reading Comprehension Test is a group test. It was administered by the examiners and it was conducted in 30 min.

Procedure

Procedure

  • The PAT test was administered to the experimental and control groups at the end of the kindergarten year following the training program.
  • The LAC test was administered at three separate points of time: the beginning of the kindergarten year (pre-training),the end of the kindergarten year (post-training) and the end of first grade (this time to the Control-G1 group as well). Due to examiner error, only 13 of the 26 Control-K students and 17 of the 27 Control-G1 students took the LAC test in first grade.
  • The reading comprehension test was administered to all three groups at two different points of time: at the end of first grade and at the end of third grade.

Table

*

Results are presented in two parts:

Results

  • The first deals with the relation between phonological awareness training in general and reading comprehension.
  • The second part presents the findings with respect to specific phonological awareness tasks.

Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Reading Comprehension

Part 1

  • The statistical significance of the correlations was tested by using a Bonferroni criterion.
  • Significant positive correlations were found for the experimental group between all the post-training phonological awareness measures and first-grade reading comprehension scores (but not for third-grade scores).
  • In addition, first-grade phonological awareness was positively correlated with first-grade reading comprehension for the two control groups combined (R = 0.70; p < 0.01 - not in table).

Phonological Awareness

Phonological

Awareness

  • With regard to LAC scores (Table 1)) a comparison between experimental and control subjects at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year revealed non-significant differences.
  • There was a significant LAC score increase for the entire study population from the beginning to the end of the kindergarten year, but no group-by-time interaction effect was observed.
  • However, following the intervention at the end of the kindergarten year, the PAT score of the experimental group (M = 27.38; SD = 8.49) were 0.8 standard deviations higher than those of the control group (M = 20.97; SD = 6.11; t(59) = 3.35, p < 0.05).
  • Furthermore, the experimental mean score was significantly higher than the mean LAC score of the two control groups combined (F(1,52) = 4.75; p c.O.05).

Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension

There was a significant mean improvement in reading comprehension scores between first and third grade (M

= 17.63 and 38.86, respectively; F(1,26) = 21.72; p <0.05), but no group-by-time interaction effect was found (F(1,26) = 0.19).

The analysis revealed significantly higher scores for the experimental group than the control group

(M = 30.30 and 26.28, respectively; F(1,45) = 6.00; p < 0.05).

Phonological Awareness Tasks and Reading Comprehension

Part 2

  • Univariate ANOVAs that were performed for each task indicate that the experimental group’s scores exceeded those of the control group on five of the eight tasks (the exceptions were Syllable Synthesis, Sound Deletion and Phoneme Synthesis).
  • In addition, the Bartlett test revealed larger obtained variance for the experimental group than the control group with respect to four tasks: Initial Phoneme Isolation, Sound Deletion, Phoneme Segmentation and Phoneme Synthesis.
  • Significant positive correlations were found only for the experimental group between first-grade (but not third-grade) reading scores and two phonological awareness tasks - Initial Phoneme Isolation (R = 0.81, p < 0.05) and Sound Deletion (R = 0.81, p < 0.05) - as well as the total PAT score.

Discussion and Conclusion

Conclusion

Discussion and Conclusion

  • The present study confirmed the predictive and causal relationship between phonological awareness and success in reading comprehension.
  • Both experimental and control students increased their phonological awareness abilities from the beginning to the end of the kindergarten year. This finding suggests that phonological awareness is a cognitive developmental ability.
  • The PAT results displayed differences between the experimental group and the control groups, even though in the LAC test there were barely any differences; that might be based on the fact that LAC works on the capacity of the memory, while PAT is based on learners' lexicon.
  • It demonstrates that phonological awareness training at a relatively young age (five), prior to the developmental maturity of the phonological systems, has a sustained effect on reading comprehension skills during the first years of school.

Reference

Reference

Kozminsky, L., & Kozminsky, E. (1995). The effects of early phonological awareness training on reading success. Learning and Instruction, 5(3), 187-201.

Thank You

Thank you

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