This study examined whether English literacy instruction given to Japanese second-grade elementary school students facilitated the development of their phonemic awareness. Two research questions were ...set: (1) Can synthetic phonics instruction improve the phonemic awareness of elementary school students? and (2) Are there differences in the effects of synthetic phonics instruction depending on the different types of the Phoneme Oddity Task? A total of twelve sessions of synthetic phonics instruction were given to 17 Japanese second-grade elementary school students. The instruction consisted of six activities for English reading and writing. A pretest was administered the day before the first instruction, and a posttest was given three days after the last instruction. For the tests, all participants had a Phoneme Oddity Task. There were two types of tasks in the Phoneme Oddity Task:an Open Oddity task, focusing on the first sound of a word, and an End Oddity task, focusing on the last sound of a word, where the participants tried to identify the odd word out that has different phonetic characteristics than the other three words after listening to four words. The results showed that (1) phonological awareness was improved, and (2) there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of the instruction depending on the type of task.
ABSTRACT
Equipping elementary (i.e., grades K–5) teachers with adequate content and pedagogical knowledge to promote effective reading instruction based on the science of reading is a crucial piece ...of the reading education puzzle. We reviewed 20 empirical studies to examine the impact of teacher preparation and training programs on elementary teachers’ knowledge of the science of reading, focusing on the foundational pillars of reading instruction, namely, phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphological awareness, as well as student outcomes in reading. We also identified program characteristics that promoted positive growth in teacher knowledge. Generally, findings support the effectiveness of training and preparation programs in increasing elementary teachers’ knowledge of foundational constructs. Training in which teachers have the opportunity to apply their learned knowledge and skills under expert guidance produced the largest growth in teacher knowledge. Implications of findings are discussed.
The two major determinants of reading comprehension are language comprehension and decoding, but prior studies of the development of reading comprehension from an early age show inconsistent results. ...To clarify these inconsistencies we report a 6-year longitudinal study (starting at Age 4 years) where we control for measurement error and track the development and interrelationships between a range of predictors of reading comprehension (language, decoding, and cognitive skills). We found two main pathways to reading comprehension: a highly stable language comprehension pathway (reflecting variations in vocabulary, listening comprehension, grammar, and verbal working memory) and a less stable code-related pathway (reflecting variations in phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid automatized naming). Early language comprehension at Age 4 years is strongly related to code-related predictors (phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming), and influences decoding indirectly through these constructs. Early oral language skills predicted initial levels of reading comprehension and its growth between the ages of 7 and 9 years. Strikingly, language comprehension and decoding, together with their interaction and curvilinear effects, explain almost all (99.7%) of the variance in reading comprehension skills at 7 years of age. Our study adds to prior knowledge in several important ways and provides strong support for an elaborated version of the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986).
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Word reading (decoding) and language skills are the foundations for reading comprehension. The present study shows that oral language skills are highly stable and are a critical foundation for the development of both decoding and reading comprehension skills. Evidence from several randomized trials shows that broadly based language interventions can be effective. Early education policy should place a strong emphasis on providing interventions to improve oral language skills for children who experience difficulties in this area.
Abstract There is good evidence that high-quality instruction targeting reading-related skills in the classroom leads to gains in reading. However, considerably less is known about the possible ...efficacy of remote instruction. This study evaluated the efficacy of an interactive evidence-based language-rich literacy programme. 184 children were randomly allocated either to an 8-week remotely delivered language-rich literacy programme or to a wait-list control group. Children in the programme arm ( n = 77 at analysis) completed 16-lessons remotely targeting vocabulary, phonemic awareness, reading, spelling, and narrative skills. Children in the wait-list arm ( n = 58 at analysis) received business-as-usal from their schools. Children’s word reading accuracy and phonemic awareness was measured prior to and after the programme delivery period. Children receiving the literacy programme made significantly larger gains than the wait-list control group on reading accuracy ( d = 0.32) and phonemic awareness ( d = 0.63). This study demonstrates that a remotely-delivered literacy programme is effective. These findings have important implications for delivering specialist literacy instruction at scale.
The authors report a systematic meta-analytic review of the relationships among 3 of the most widely studied measures of children's phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rime awareness, and verbal ...short-term memory) and children's word reading skills. The review included both extreme group studies and correlational studies with unselected samples (235 studies were included, and 995 effect sizes were calculated). Results from extreme group comparisons indicated that children with dyslexia show a large deficit on phonemic awareness in relation to typically developing children of the same age (pooled effect size estimate: -1.37) and children matched on reading level (pooled effect size estimate: -0.57). There were significantly smaller group deficits on both rime awareness and verbal short-term memory (pooled effect size estimates: rime skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.93, and reading-level controls, -0.37; verbal short-term memory skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.71, and reading-level controls, -0.09). Analyses of studies of unselected samples showed that phonemic awareness was the strongest correlate of individual differences in word reading ability and that this effect remained reliable after controlling for variations in both verbal short-term memory and rime awareness. These findings support the pivotal role of phonemic awareness as a predictor of individual differences in reading development. We discuss whether such a relationship is a causal one and the implications of research in this area for current approaches to the teaching of reading and interventions for children with reading difficulties.
ABSTRACT
Since well before the release of the National Reading Panel report in 2000, phonemic awareness has been an important topic for reading researchers. However, it is unclear the extent to which ...commercial materials for phonemic awareness instruction are consistent with that report and subsequent research. In the current study, we investigated the use of commercial kindergarten materials for such instruction in one state and suggest that the most widely used materials have areas of inconsistency with the science of reading. Notably, the commercial materials reviewed here did not take orthographic development into sufficient account. Additionally, the materials did not use letters and did not limit focus to one or two skills. Implications for classroom instruction, teacher education, commercial materials development, and future research are identified.
The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six ...pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, is the strongest independent predictor of early reading outcomes. However, limited research has addressed the development of these component skills due in part to the fact that many of the measures used to assess sub-skills such as phonemic awareness are oral production measures that cannot easily be administered with children under the age of five, and are not designed to detect implicit or emerging knowledge. To address this limitation, we developed and administered two receptive measures of phonemic awareness to 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children. We found evidence for the emergence of this component skill earlier in ontogeny than is currently acknowledged in the literature. Overall, children performed at above chance rates on measures of receptive phonemic awareness at the level of the individual phoneme as early as 2.5-years-old. Results are discussed in terms of the need for a paradigm shift in prevailing models of how phonological awareness develops, as well as the potential to identify children at-risk for reading failure at an earlier point in ontogeny than is currently feasible.
ABSTRACT
In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme–phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole‐syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write ...words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese‐speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. The GPD group was taught to decode 40 consonant–vowel (CV) syllables by sounding out and blending grapheme–phoneme constituents (combinations of 10 consonants and five vowels). The WSD group was taught to decode the same CV syllables as whole graphosyllabic units. The individual grapheme–phoneme (IGP) group was taught the same 15 grapheme–phonemes as single units but no decoding. Groups were taught to a mastery criterion. Results showed that GPD instruction was much more effective than WSD and IGP instruction in enabling beginners to read CV syllables, multisyllabic words, and pseudowords; to learn to read words from memory; to write words; and to segment and blend spoken words phonemically. Also, GPD instruction facilitated phonological memory for spoken pseudowords. Despite receiving much practice in reading whole CV syllables, the WSD group learned few, if any, grapheme–phoneme subunits. Results support theories that reading instruction is most effective when it begins by teaching students to decode with small grapheme–phoneme units rather than with larger syllabic units, even when syllables are salient spoken and written units in the writing system.
ABSTRACT
Advocates of the science of reading have argued that (a) teacher preparation programs do not provide adequate preparation to teach code‐related reading skills; (b) as a result, teachers lack ...knowledge of this area of literacy development; and (c) without that knowledge, teachers are unable to effectively teach students to read. In this integrative literature review, we assessed the research evidence for the first claim. We identified 27 studies examining preservice general elementary preparation in code‐related instruction, including phonological/phonemic awareness, phonics/decoding, spelling/orthography, and morphology, published between 2001 and 2020. We analyzed the studies to determine (a) how preservice knowledge of code‐related instruction has been studied, (b) how preservice teachers’ literacy knowledge was defined and assessed in these studies, and (c) primary findings across studies and implications for teacher preparation and future research. We found that the research base largely relied on quantitative multiple‐choice assessments that privileged linguistic content knowledge over pedagogical and situated knowledge. The body of research was constrained by narrow definitions of science and knowledge, repetition across studies in methods and data sources, limited samples that overlooked diversity in preservice teachers and elementary contexts, and methodological problems. Thus, we caution against considering the issue of teacher preparation settled, and we offer recommendations for teacher preparation programs and directions for future research.
