Time Well Spent: Phonemic Awareness Training or Paired Associate Learning for Children with Language Impairments?.

Abstract This paper addresses several inconsistencies in the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia in relation to children with language impairments. Results from studies in the reading and language literature inform readers of the critical elements of phonemic awareness that predict later reading success. These elements combined with explicit instruction of paired associations of phoneme-grapheme symbols are critical to generating reading curriculum that is efficacious and parsimonious for children with language impairments. Introduction Special Education Teacher to Class: "Ok, now everyone take out your safety pencil and a circle of paper. This week I hope we can finish our work on the letter A. Bart: "Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo! " (The Simpsons Episode #155-802, Production Code: 3F23, "You Only Move Twice"). The wisdom of Bart Simpson evokes a smile and a chuckle from many of us, but it also makes us stop and think; perhaps he has a point. More and more children are coming to school with limited literacy experiences and those that exhibit language impairments are at even greater risk for later reading problems. For these children, learning to break the alphabetic code of our English writing system is critically important to becoming proficient readers. Fortunately, there exists a substantial body of research that predicts prereaders' later reading success with phoneme awareness. But as Bart so aptly reminds us, time is of the essence. Is our time well spent training phonemic awareness tasks to children with language impairments or is there a more efficient way to advance their language and literacy skills? Language Disorders and Reading Problems The connection between language disorders and reading problems (i.e. dyslexia) is well documented in the reading research. In fact, the term, dyslexia once described as a visual deficit (i.e. word blindness) has been redefined as ". a specific language-based disorder of constitutional origin characterized by difficulties in single word decoding, usually reflecting insufficient phonological processing abilities (Lyon 1995). However, confusion remains within the scholarly community as to the nature of a phonological processing disorder. For reading researchers, a phonological processing disorder is defined as the speed and accuracy of the phonological processor to map a phonemic unit to an orthographic pattern (Adams 1994). A child who has difficulty representing, storing or retrieving phonemes will have problems with grapheme phoneme correspondences which are fundamental to reading alphabetic systems (Bradley and Bryant 1983; Brady, Shankweiler, and Mann 1983; Snowling , Bowlby, and Howell 1986; Vellutino 1979). Moreover, researchers in language development define the term, phonological processing deficit as the inability to produce speech rather than to hear phonological segments in speech (McGuinness 2005). Researchers in neuroscience view a phonological deficit as a secondary condition to a primary auditory deficit that involves misperceptions of short or rapidly varying sounds (Tallal 1980; Tallal, Miller, and Fitch 1993). Given the specific rhetoric of these separate fields of study and the immense amount of new information related to dyslexia, it is not surprising that many teachers and researchers alike hold varying assumptions about the nature and the treatment of reading problems. The Development of Phonemic Awareness An analysis of reading research studies conducted by the National Reading Panel (2000) revealed the critical role of phonemic awareness in later reading success. Phonemic awareness is the ability to understand that phonemes exist as elements of language that can be manipulated and abstracted from the language stream. Stanovich (1992) prefers the term, phonological sensitivity to describe a continuum of sensitivity from larger phonological units to smaller ones. …