The importance of letter knowledge in the relationship between phonological awareness and reading

Previous correlational and experimental research has found a positive association between phonological awareness and reading skills. This paper provides an overview of studies in this area and shows that many studies have neglected to control for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, pre‐existing reading skills and letter knowledge. The paper reports on the results of a longitudinal study that took account of these variables when examining the relationship between phonological awareness and reading for a group of children during their first two years at school. Children showed rhyme awareness before they began to read but were unable to perform a phoneme deletion task until after they had developed word‐reading skills. Concurrent and predictive correlations between phonological awareness scores and later reading were often significant and remained so after adjusting for verbal ability or phonological memory. Controlling for letter knowledge, however, reduced most correlations to nonsignificant levels.     

The relationship between children's reading motivation and reading competence

It has been found that motivation is very important to children’s reading competence.This paper intended to study intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and find their relationship with children’s reading competence.In order to do so,previous investigations about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were critically reviewed,and their results were discussed in this paper.     

The relationship between reading comprehension strategies and reading attitudes

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between levels of reading comprehension strategy use, reading attitudes, and the amount of reading per year among elementary school students. The study was conducted with 1316 students (649 girls and 667 boys) attending the fourth and fifth grades of 15 elementary schools in Denizli, Turkey. Stratified Sampling Method was employed to obtain data using Reading Attitude Scale (RAS) and Reading Comprehension Strategies Scale (RCSS). The analyses indicate that reading attitude is a significant predictor of the level of reading comprehension strategies used by students (R² = 0.44). The findings show that there is a negative and low-level relationship (r = ?0.054) between daily time spent reading and the level of strategy used, and a positive and low-level relationship (r = 0.01) between the level of strategy used and the number of books that a child reads per year.     

The role of phonological and syntactic awareness in second-language reading: The case of Spanish-speaking learners of French

Spanish-speaking learners of French, aged 9 to 11 years old, were tested after approximately 7months of French instruction to explore the contribution of phonological and syntactic awareness in L2 in 4 components of L2 reading, taking oral competence in L2 andreading in L1 into account. Phonological tasksin L2 better explain decoding. Word recognitionthrough the visual route is best explained bythe corresponding ability in L1. Sentencecomprehension is best explained by oralcompetence in L2, although it is stronglycorrelated with syntactic awareness. Finally,text comprehension is explained by thecorresponding ability in L1, althoughcorrelations with syntactic awareness and oralcompetence are strong. Theoretical implicationsare derived from these findings, and questionsrelative to the subjects' age and level ofbilingualism as well as methodological issuesare discussed.     

A prospective study of the relationship between phonological,semantic and syntactic skills and specific reading disability

Although it is well established that a relationship exists between specific reading disability and spoken language difficulties, the nature of that relationship remains controversial. In the study reported here, the performance of poor readers was firstly compared with that of matched good readers on a series of spoken and written language tasks on three assessment trials 12 months apart, and secondly to that of younger average readers. Five experimental tasks were used to measure the readers' phonological processing skills, and three subtests from the CELF-R were selected to measure the students' syntactic and semantic skills. Reading accuracy and comprehension ability were assessed by the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability-Revised. The results showed that 8–10-year-old poor readers performed poorly in all three linguistic areas concurrently, and that these difficulties persisted. However, the important finding from this study was that while the good readers demonstrated no significant difference between their phonological processing skills and their semantic/syntactic skills, the poor readers' ability did differ according to skill area. The poor readers' phonological processing skills appeared to be particularly impaired, a finding which was further enhanced by results from the reading-match comparison. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of reading disability.     

The developmental relationship between bilingual morphological awareness and reading for Chinese EFL adult learners: a longitudinal study

The present research aimed to explore the developmental relationship between bilingual morphological awareness and reading for Chinese natives learning English as a foreign language (EFL learners). Pre- and post-tests were conducted with in an interval of 9 months. Morphological and reading measures in Chinese and English were administered to 139 participants. The results confirmed the intra-language correlations between morphological awareness and reading. The study also demonstrated that the contribution of English derivational awareness to English reading was higher than that of English compound awareness. Chinese compound morphology was found to explain a greater amount of variance of English reading in posttest than pretest. The results indicate the relationship between bilingual reading and morphological awareness was subjected to the similarities between the two languages in terms of morphological features as well as language proficiency.     

The etiological relationship between reading disability and phonological disorder

The present study investigated the etiological relationship between two disorders: dyslexia or reading disability (RD) and phonological disorder (PD). These disorders manifest at different ages and have typically been studied by researchers in different disciplines. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that the disorders overlap at symptomatic, cognitive, and etiological levels of analysis. In previous studies, each disorder has been found to be heritable, and there is also evidence that RD and PD run together in families, but no studies to date have documented whether there is a shared genetic influence between the two disorders. The present study examined this question in a sample of RD and non-RD twins. Subjects with a history of PD were identified and the etiological relation between the two disorders was examined. Results indicated that in the present sample, RD and PD are each heritable on their own. Further, even when correcting for RD, the two disorders were found to be coheritable, indicating that the finding of cofamiliality of RD and PD is at least partially driven by genetic influences. The implications of these results for the conceptualization, identification, and treatment of these two disorders are discussed.     

The connection between phonological,syntactic and semantic skills and children’s reading and spelling

In recent years two radically different views have dominated discussions about the way in which children learn to read and write. The first view is that the crucial hurdle in learning to read is the discovery of how to do the correct phonological analysis. The second view is that the crucial factor is the use of context, and that children use what they know about the meaning — and particularly the semantics and the syntax — of the passages that they are reading to help them decipher and learn about difficult written words. Learning to read is ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’ according to this view and children set about it in much the same way as they set about learning to speak. Thus according to the first view children’s semantic and syntactic skills will determine their progress in reading and according to the second it will be their phonological skills. We present longitudinal evidence about a group of children in their first year at school which shows that both kinds of skill do play a part, but that they make entirely different contributions. Semantic and syntactic skills determine how well children make use of the context of what they are reading. Phonological skills affect their use of letter-sound relationships.     

The relationship between language and reading in bilingual English-Arabic children

The connection between language and reading is well established across many languages studied to date. Little is known, however, about the role of language in reading in Arabic??a Semitic language characterized by diglossia??in which the oral and written varieties differ across language components. This study examined the relationship among multiple components of language, namely, phonology, morphology, and vocabulary and reading outcomes in 83 bilingual English-Arabic children. Results revealed associations between phonological awareness skills across English and Arabic. These associations did not hold for morphological awareness skills. Results also revealed that for Arabic and English, phonological awareness predicted word and pseudoword reading accuracy and vocabulary predicted reading comprehension. These findings are consistent with the tenets of the extended version of the Triangle Model of reading, which underscores the importance of multiple language components in predicting reading outcomes. Implications for future research, early intervention, and instruction with bilingual children are highlighted.     

The relationship between phonological awareness and the development of orthographic representations

A training study was conducted to investigatethe relationship between phoneme segmentationability and the development of orthographicrepresentations. Five-year-old children withvarying degrees of phoneme segmentationability were taught to read ten new words byrepeated presentation of the words onflashcards. It was found that those childrenwho were most well equipped to perform phonemesegmentation tasks acquired this new readingvocabulary significantly faster than those whowere less phonemically aware. A series ofpost-tests was implemented to discover thenature of the internal orthographicrepresentations which the children had createdfor the words learned. The results of thesepost-tests demonstrated that the children whowere most phonemically aware had alsointernalised the most detailed orthographicrepresentations, despite needing fewerlearning trials. Salient letters fororthographic storage were predictable from thechildren's phoneme segmentation abilities. This paper provides strong support for thethesis that phonemic awareness is related toorthographic storage as well as alphabeticreading techniques.     

Metalinguistic awareness and reading strategies

Annals of Dyslexia -     

Phonological awareness and reading acquisition

Recent research has suggested the importance of oral language ability in learning to read. It was proposed that the young child's awareness of the phonology of his language would greatly influence early reading success. The results revealed a strong relationship between the first grader's reading performance and two measures of his phonological awareness, invented spelling and phoneme segmentation abilities. Development of phonological awareness was not related to the child's sex, intelligence, socioeconomic status, or chronological age within a 12-month span. A third measure of phonological awareness, auditory analysis skills, was found to have less predictive value. The results suggest that an understanding of phonological relationships above and beyond that required for ordinary speaking and listening enables the beginning reader of English to make contact with his alphabetic writing system at the phonemic level. Instruction at the appropriate age level should facilitate this understanding.     

Distinctive patterns of relationship of phonological awareness and working memory with reading development

The purpose of this study was to assess the contributions of specific components of verbal and nonverbal working memory and of phonological awareness to the prediction of reading achievement. One hundred and three children from grades 1, 2, and 3 were administered a measure of phonological awareness, four measures of working memory, four measures of academic achievement, and a measure of verbal intelligence. Separate multiple regression analyses controlling for the effects of age, sex and verbal intelligence showed that tests of verbal memory and of direct recall significantly predicted reading and spelling achievement whereas tests of backward recall significantly predicted only pseudoword identification. Phonological awareness was also found to relate significantly to reading and spelling achievement even when working memory was partialled out. Thus, phonological awareness and measures of working memory predicted specific and significant amounts of variance in reading and spelling achievement. Further, none of these measures were specifically related to arithmetic achievement. The specific roles of phonological awareness and working memory in reading development are examined in the discussion.     

The relationship between prior knowledge and situational interest when reading text

To examine the relationship between prior knowledge, situational interest, and recall, 34 college students read 15 paragraphs that contained varying amounts of fictional material, rated how interesting they found each paragraph, and were later assessed on how much of the information they retained. Five of the paragraphs contained fictional items that were accessible, and five paragraphs contained fictional items that were inaccessible. Results indicated that the relationship between prior knowledge was curvilinear but varied based on the accessibility of the novel information. For accessible materials, interest first increased as prior knowledge decreased, but then decreased sharply as prior knowledge lessened. For inaccessible materials, interest did not significantly increase, and decreased at a higher level of prior knowledge relative to accessible materials. Overall, people found accessible materials to be more interesting than inaccessible materials, and interest was not a significant predictor of performance on recall or recognition tasks when prior knowledge was controlled.     

The relationship between the phonological strategies employed In reading and spelling

This paper summarises a longitudinal study which examined the relationship between the abilities of young children to read and spell phonologically. Empirical evidence of Bryant and Bradley (1980) and Cataldo and Ellis (1988) to show that children acquire the ability to use a phonological strategy for spelling before the ability to use an equivalent strategy for reading is confirmed. Implications for the teaching of reading are discussed.     

The relation between morphological awareness and reading and spelling in Greek: a longitudinal study

The aim of this longitudinal study is to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The target group (N = 404) consisted of children, aged 6–9 years at the start of the project, who learn literacy in Cyprus. Because there are no standardized measures of morphological awareness for Greek Cypriot children, morphological awareness measures were developed and validated. A concurrent analysis of the first wave of data collection showed that morphological awareness made a unique contribution to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The longitudinal analyses showed that morphological awareness predicted performance in reading eight months later, even after partialling out grade level, verbal intelligence, phonological awareness and initial scores in reading and spelling. This study makes theoretical, empirical and practical educational contributions. It shows the long term and specific relation of morphological awareness with reading in Greek and establishes the plausibility of a causal link between morphological awareness and reading, which must be tested in further research using intervention methods. In practice, this study contributes valid measures for assessing morphological awareness in Greek as well as a new measure of spelling skill.