Children at risk : their phonemic awareness development in holistic instruction

The development of phonemic awareness and its relationship to beginning reading was examined among 20 first-grade children at risk for failing to learn to read and write. Their instructional programs were observed; their levels of reading, writing, and phonemic awareness development were measured in October and April; and their home literacy experiences were surveyed by questionnaire. The findings corroborate previous investigations in two ways: (a) phonemic awareness is necessary, but not alone sufficient for reading success, and (b) measures of invented spelling are not only reliable indicators of phonemic awareness, but correlate strongly with reading achievement. The findings show also that instruction that includes repeated readings of predictable text and opportunities for writing using invented spelling contributes to phonemic awareness development. Finally, the findings suggest that home literacy activities, both before school entry and during first grade are also influential in the development of children's phonemic awareness. Phonemic Awareness 2 CHILDREN AT RISK: THEIR PHONEMIC AWARENESS DEVELOPMENT IN HOLISTIC INSTRUCTION Generations of research and inquiry have endeavored to dispel the mystique that surrounds both the processes of reading and writing and their related pedagogy. The object of much recent classroom and experimental research in the ongoing quest for understanding has been phonemic awareness, the conscious knowledge of phonemes (the smallest identifiable units of sound). Phonemic awareness, specifically its development among at-risk children, is also the concern of the study described in this report. In her comprehensive review of the literature pertaining to beginning reading, Adams (1990) leaves no doubt about the importance of phonemic awareness to reading success. She states: "Faced with an alphabetic script, children's level of phonemic awareness on entering school may be the single most powerful determinant of their success . in learning to read" (p. 54). In other words, possessing phonemic awareness is associated with reading success. What then, can teachers expect of the child who begins school without awareness of the phonological structure of language? Training studies have determined that specific instruction to increase children's phonemic awareness, to bring the sound system of the language into their conscious awareness, can effectively raise their level of phonemic awareness and benefit their reading achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1988; Cunningham, 1989; Wallach & Wallach, 1976; Williams, 1979). Holistic programs of instruction, those that are largely concerned with meaningful language units, however, are not likely to provide specific instruction similar to that of the training studies. The question that then arises is: If instruction with the primary intent of raising a child's level of phonemic awareness is not offered, are there activities, included in holistic classroom instruction for other primary purposes, that contribute to phonemic awareness development? In our study, we examined the development of phonemic awareness and its role in the early reading and writing of 20 first-grade children identified by their teachers as at risk for failure to learn to read and write. As part of our examination, we observed the children's holistic language arts instruction (instruction characterized by an emphasis on reading and writing meaningful units of text) to determine the presence of activities that might possibly contribute to phonemic awareness development. In addition to their classroom learning opportunities, we also surveyed the children's home literacy experiences. Finally, we reviewed the observations and achievement data to identify possible patterns of interrelationship between phonemic awareness and reading and writing. Linguistic Terminology Before continuing, some explanation of the linguistic terminology we employed seems appropriate. At its most basic level, speech consists of continuously variable waves of acoustic energy. One step removed from the basic acoustic level is the phonetic level. At this level, speech is represented by phones, an exhaustive set of speech sounds. For example, the /p/ in pen and the /p/ in stop are technically two different phones, but this distinction is not perceived in everyday speech. It is the perceived distinctions such as the /p/ and /n/, referred to as phonemes, that are of interest to this discussion. Briefly, a phoneme consists of a group of phones that speakers of a language consider to be variations of the same sound (Balmuth, 1982, cited in Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Each phoneme is usually represented by one or two letters. Being cognizant that words are composed of phonemes (individual sounds) and that speech is a chain of these meaningless, yet perceptually distinct, sounds is referred to as phonemic awareness. Winsor & Pearson Phonemic Awareness 3 Because the English alphabet represents phonemes rather than the larger units of syllabaries and logographies, the beginning reader must learn to appreciate phonemes and their place in spoken and written language. Three tasks are conventionally associated with gaining that necessary appreciation: segmentation (breaking of words into syllables or phonemes), blending (linking phonemes together to form the usual pronunciation of words), and deletion (ability to omit one or more phonemes in pronouncing a word). The capacity to make one or all of these manipulations of the language constitutes the reference for phonemic awareness in much of the literature. Relationship Between Phonemic Awareness and Reading Despite extensive investigation, the exact nature of the relationship of phonemic awareness to reading and writing remains unspecified. Two observations, however, seem certain: a dependent relationship exists between phonemic awareness and reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Cunningham, 1989; Elkonin, 1973; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985) and a predictive relationship exists between invented spelling (attempts to encode prior to learning conventional spelling) and phonemic awareness development (Liberman, Rubin, Duques, & Carlisle, 1985; Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980; Mann, Tobin, & Wilson, 1987). We will review the evidence for each in turn. Traditionally, the dependent relationship between reading and phonemic awareness has been perceived in three ways: Phonemic awareness may be a prerequisite, a facilitator, or a consequence of reading. A fourth possibility, that phonemic awareness and reading have an interactive relationship, has more recently been proposed and demonstrated (Ehri & Wilce, 1987; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). That is, reading skill is dependent upon phonemic awareness while at the same time reading text contributes to phonemic awareness development. One of the most convincing studies showing phonemic awareness as a prerequisite for reading is that by Tunmer and Nesdale (1985). They hypothesized that if the knowledge is necessary, then it would be impossible to make progress in learning to read without it and subsequently, that all accomplished readers would have it. If, on the other hand, phonemic awareness is a facilitator, having the skill would ease acquisition of reading proficiency, but it should be possible to find readers who do not have it. They further reasoned that if phonemic awareness development is a result of learning to read, then training to increase awareness and prior differences should have no effect on acquisition of reading skills. Using a corpus of words containing equal numbers of real words and pronounceable pseudowords, they found no students who performed poorly on phonemic segmentation but well on decoding. There were, however, some students who were able to segment, but who were poor decoders. Thus, from their measurements of phonological segmentation and reading comprehension, they reasoned that the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading is not one of total sufficiency. Rather, they concluded phonemic awareness is necessary, but not alone adequate for the acquisition of phonological recoding skills. In a proposed model of literacy acquisition Juel, Griffith, and Gough (1986) agree that phonemic awareness is necessary, but not sufficient, for reading. From their longitudinal study of firstand second-grade children in which phonemic awareness was measured in a number of ways, they found that phonemic awareness strongly influenced year-end performance in spelling, word recognition, writing, and reading comprehension for both first and second graders. Juel et al. subsequently reasoned that children can be exposed to print, but still not develop knowledge of sound-symbol associations unless the phonemic awareness is in place first or occurs early in the print exposure. Juel et al. concluded that oral phonemic awareness training should be provided for all children entering first grade with poor phonemic awareness. Winsor & Pearson Phonemic Awareness 4 Although it has been demonstrated that phonemic awareness is a prerequisite to reading, this does not preclude its further development after initial reading success. In a longitudinal study of first-grade children, Perfetti et al. (1987) proposed that reading and phonemic awareness develop in tandem. It is possible, they contended, that a certain amount of reading ability can be acquired through visual memory without significant phonemic awareness, but that eventually reading of an alphabetic orthography requires phonemic awareness, and further, experience with print promotes phonemic awareness. So far, the picture appears quite clear: Some phonemic awareness is necessary in order to process print (decode) successfully and, in turn, decoding print contributes to greater understanding of the phonological properties of the language. The third hypothesized possibility, that readers acquire explicit knowledge of the phonological structure of the language as a result of le