Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.     

Implicit phonological awareness and early reading development in prelingually deaf children

This article reports on a longitudinal study of reading progress in a group of five-year-old deaf children and a group of hearing controls. All children were prereaders at the beginning of the study and the IQ of the two groups were matched. The deaf children varied considerably on a number of measures, including implicit phonological awareness, oral ability, and familiarity with British Sign Language and fingerspelling. Overall, the deaf children made significantly less reading progress than their hearing peers over the first year of schooling, and they also scored significantly lower on the test of rime and onset awareness. However, considerable variation in the reading progress of the deaf children was positively correlated with oral skills, rime/onset awareness, and language comprehension. Language comprehension, itself, was positively correlated with signing and fingerspelling. The deaf children were assessed again one year later, when learning to read continued to be very delayed, and the pattern of correlation was essentially the same. The implications of these findings for the education of deaf children are discussed.     

The effects of morphological versus phonological awareness training in kindergarten on reading development

The aim of this study was toinvestigate the long-term effects of twodifferent training programs in kindergarten onreading development. One group received aprogram focusing on the phonological structureof words, while a second group received aprogram focusing on morphology. Both groupsalso had some print exposure focusing onphonological or morphological elementsrespectively. During their last pre-schoolyear, participants received training for 30minutes per week for a total of 17 weeks. Acontrol group received no intervention but wasregularly visited by the researcher and hadextensive print exposure. Both trained groupsshowed improvements in phonological,morphological and reading skills in comparisonto the Control Group. The effects of trainingvaried according to mother's educational level:Children of relatively highly educated mothersentered the pre-school training with betterdeveloped metalinguistic abilities thanchildren of less well educated mothers.Significant interactions between the groups andthe mother's educational level, for some of theschool reading measures, indicated thatdifferent training programs had differenteffects on different groups of children.Children of poorly educated mothers profitedthe most from metaphonological training whilechildren of highly educated mothers profitedthe most from metamorphological training.     

The phonological awareness relation to early reading in English for three groups of simultaneous bilingual children

Reading and Writing - Phonological awareness is critical for early reading acquisition across alphabetic as well as non-alphabetic languages. The grain size of phonological awareness varies with...     

The role of morphological awareness in reading achievement among young Chinese-speaking English language learners: a longitudinal study

The present study examined the development of morphological awareness and its contribution to vocabulary and reading comprehension among young Chinese-speaking English language learners (ELLs). We focused on two aspects of morphological awareness: derivational awareness and compound awareness. Participants included 46 kindergarteners (younger cohort) and 34 first graders (older cohort) of Chinese descent in Canada at the beginning of the study. Children were administered a battery of English measures including derivational awareness, compound awareness, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and reading comprehension at two time points spaced 1?year apart. Results demonstrated a steady growth in Chinese-speaking ELL children??s derivational and compound awareness from kindergarten to Grade 2. Importantly, for the first graders, morphological awareness accounted for unique variance in vocabulary concurrently, and unique variance in both vocabulary and reading comprehension a year later. Generally speaking, the variance explained by morphological awareness increased with grade level, and derivational awareness accounted for more variance in vocabulary and reading comprehension than did compound awareness. These results underscore the emerging importance of morphological awareness, especially derivational awareness, in young Chinese-speaking ELL children??s English reading development.     

Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English

The development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English was investigated in the current study involving 412 Taiwanese and 256 American students in second, fourth, and sixth grades. The results from both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students indicate that the morphological awareness develops with grade level and is strongly related to reading ability. More proficient readers outperformed less proficient readers when asked to (1) recognize morphological relationships between words, (2) discriminate word parts having the same or different meanings, (3) select the best interpretations of low-frequency derivatives and compounds composed of high-frequency parts, and (4) judge the well-formedness of novel derivatives and compounds. Chinese students' acquisition of derivational morphology seems to lag behind that of compounding rules, which might reflect the nature of Chinese word formation in that there are far fewer derivatives than compounds in Chinese.     

Phonemic awareness and reading skill in hyperlexic children: A longitudinal study

Children with hyperlexia who learn to readspontaneously before the age of five are impaired inreading and listening comprehension but have wordrecognition skills well above their measured cognitiveand linguistic abilities. In a previous study, theauthor administered a battery of cognitive, academicachievement, and phonemic awareness tests to threechildren classified as hyperlexic. The findingsshowed that the levels of phonemic awareness of thesechildren were low and not commensurate with their wordreading skill. In the present study, the authorreevaluated the three children approximately 7–8 yearslater with the same battery of cognitive, academicachievement, and phonemic awareness tests as well asseveral additional measures of phonemic awareness. The results showed that all three childrens' levels ofphonemic awareness were still low and not commensuratewith their word reading skill. Other findings showedthat two of the children, both of whom had remained inspecial education classes since the previous study,continued to be voracious readers. The other child,who had always been in regular education classes, hadnot read very much for several years. Findings alsoshowed that the word recognition skills of two of thechildren, including the child who had always attendedregular education, had decreased by one to twostandard deviations.     

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.     

Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading

This paper reports two studies of young English‐speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross‐sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7‐year‐old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7‐year‐old children outperformed the 5‐year‐olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.     

A pre-school training programme for children with poor phonological awareness: effects on reading and spelling

An earlier paper published in this journal described the pilot study and first two phases of a longitudinal study that examined the possibility of preventing the emergence of written language difficulties, by addressing the ability of pre-schoolers to make phonological judgements (Layton, Deeny, Upton and Tall, 1996). The literacy development of the children involved in the study was assessed when they had been in mainstream education for approximately two years. It was discovered that there were no significant differences, in terms of written language achievement, between the children who had received phonological training while in nursery school and their peers in a control group whose training programme had not featured phonological awareness activities. These findings challenge the view that training pre-schoolers to attend to the sound structure of words promotes later literacy development. The results are considered in the context of other research findings, and then the study is discussed in both quantitative and qualitative terms, with some comment on the feasibility of identifying pre-schoolers at risk for literacy failure on the basis of poor phonological awareness.     

A longitudinal study of mathematical competencies in children with specific mathematics difficulties versus children with comorbid mathematics and reading difficulties

Mathematical competencies of 180 children were examined at 4 points between 2nd and 3rd grades (age range between 7 and 9 years). Children were initially classified into one of 4 groups: math difficulties but normal reading (MD only), math and reading difficulties (MD-RD), reading difficulties but normal math (RD only), and normal achievement in math and reading (NA). The groups did not differ significantly in rate of development. However, at the end of 3rd grade the MD only group performed better than the MD-RD group in problem solving but not in calculation. The NA and RD only groups performed better than the MD-RD group in most areas. Deficiencies in fact mastery and calculation fluency, in particular, are defining features of MD, with or without RD.     

Sensitivity to linguistic stress,phonological awareness and early reading ability in preschoolers

Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty‐five kindergarten children were tested on a battery of tasks that examined linguistic stress sensitivity and early reading ability. Results indicated that lexical stress, but not metrical stress sensitivity, is significantly related to phonological awareness and early reading ability. However, lexical stress is not able to predict unique variance in early reading ability once phonological awareness is controlled for. The relationships of both lexical and metrical stress sensitivity with phonological awareness and early reading development are discussed.     

Auditory processing,linguistic prosody awareness,and word reading in Mandarin-speaking children learning English

This study examined language-specific links among auditory processing, linguistic prosody awareness, and Mandarin (L1) and English (L2) word reading in 61 Mandarin-speaking, English-learning children. Three auditory discrimination abilities were measured: pitch contour, pitch interval, and rise time (rate of intensity change at tone onset). Linguistic prosody awareness was measured three ways: Mandarin tone perception, English stress perception, and English stress production. A Chinese character recognition task was the Mandarin L1 reading metric. English L2 word reading was assessed by English real word reading and nonword decoding tasks. The importance of the auditory processing measures to reading was different in the two languages. Pitch contour discrimination predicted Mandarin L1 word reading and rise time discrimination predicted English L2 word reading, after controlling for age and nonverbal IQ. For the prosodic and phonological measures, Mandarin tone perception, but not rhyme awareness, predicted Chinese character recognition after controlling for age and nonverbal IQ. In contrast, English rhyme awareness predicted more unique variance in English real word reading and nonword decoding than did English stress perception and production. Linguistic prosody awareness appears to play a more important role in L1 word reading than phonological awareness; while the reverse seems true for English L2 word reading in Mandarin-speaking children. Taken together, auditory processing, language-specific linguistic prosody awareness, and phonological awareness play different roles in L1/L2 reading, reflecting different prosodic and segmental structures between Mandarin and English.     

Prevalence,gender ratio and gender differences in reading‐related cognitive abilities among Chinese children with dyslexia in Hong Kong

Based on the data of the normative study of the Hong Kong test of specific learning difficulties in reading and writing, and the Test of visual‐perceptual skills (non‐motor)—Revised, 99 children aged between 6 and 10½ years were identified as children with dyslexia out of the normative sample of 690 children. By excluding 12 children known to score below average in IQ, 87 children, including 20 children not tested for IQ, could be regarded as children with dyslexia, yielding a prevalence rate of 12.6% and a boy:girl gender ratio of 1.6 to 1. The figures would become 9.7% and 2.0 to 1 if the 20 children were omitted from computation. However, gender imbalance could not be readily explained by gender differences in reading‐related cognitive abilities, as there were only minor and subtle differences. Regression analyses to evaluate the relative contribution of different cognitive abilities to reading and writing suggested that orthographic knowledge and naming speed were most important among children with dyslexia. Implications of the findings and the need for early intervention are discussed.     

Perceptual organization,phonological awareness,and reading comprehension in adults with and without learning disabilities

It is not clear from research whether, or to what extent, reading comprehension is impaired in adults who have learning disabilities (LD). The influence of perceptual organization (PO) and phonological awareness (PA) on reading comprehension was investigated. PO and PA are cognitive functions that have been examined in previous research for their roles in nonverbal LD and phonological dyslexia, respectively. Nonverbal tests of PO and non-reading tests of PA were administered to a sample of adults with postsecondary education. Approximately two thirds of the sample had previously been diagnosed as having LD. In a multiple regression analysis, tests of PO and PA were used to predict scores for tests of reading comprehension and mechanics. Despite the nonverbal nature of the perceptual organizational test stimuli, PO strongly predicted reading comprehension. Tests of PA predicted decoding and reading speed. Results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that integrative processes usually characterized as nonverbal were nonetheless used by readers with and without disabilities to understand text. The study’s findings have implications for understanding the reading of adults with learning disabilities, and the nature of reading comprehension in general.     

Self-esteem: A cross-cultural comparison of British-Chinese,White British and Hong Kong Chinese children

Total raw self-esteem scores of 1303 children, including Chinese children in Britain and Hong Kong and White British, were assessed by using the Self-esteem Inventory developed by Coopersmith (1967). Across all samples, the results show little differences between children of different ages, whereas statistically significant differences occur in the independent variables of ethnic groups, gender and educational aspiration. Despite the social disadvantages that the UK Chinese may face, they have significantly higher self-esteem than their Hong Kong Chinese counterparts, but have little differences from their White peers. This indicates that they are likely to have positive feelings and academic confidence in being themselves and as part of the host society. In contrast, Hong Kong children tend to have low levels of self-esteem, which may be caused by the more self-effacing and modest values in Chinese culture, a traditional authoritarian style of education or highly competitive pressures created by schools, families and society.     

Longitudinal effects of verbal ability,memory capacity,and phonological awareness on reading performance

This study addresses the longitudinal relationship among verbal ability, memory capacity, phonological awareness, and reading performance. Data from 92 German children were used to explore the exact relation among these variables. Indicators of verbal ability, memory capacity, and phonological awareness were assessed in kindergarten and again after the first grade. The interrelationships among these factors, and the subsequent influence they have on decoding speed and reading comprehension during the second grade were examined via structural equation modeling procedures. Overall, the results of the longitudinal analyses show that the relationship of memory capacity and phonological awareness remains stable over time, and that memory capacity predicts performance on phonological awareness tasks in both kindergarten and second grade. Phonological awareness proved to be a significant predictor of decoding speed, which in turn considerably influenced reading comprehension.     

The role of teachers’ cognitive support in motivating young Hong Kong Chinese children to read and enhancing reading comprehension

This study analysed the reading lessons of 35 Hong Kong Grade 2 Chinese teachers to investigate whether their instructional practices were related to their students’ motivation and reading comprehension scores. The reading lessons of the teachers were analysed according to the five dimensions of the Motivating Instructional Context Inventory. Students’ subjective reports on their motivation and their teachers’ teaching performance, and their reading comprehension scores were collected. Hierarchical linear modelling showed that students tended to have better reading comprehension scores when their teachers provided more cognitive support and used more motivating instructional practices to motivate them to read.     

Word and sentence level tests of morphological awareness in reading

Reading and Writing - Common tests of morphological awareness measure both morphology and syntax by requiring participants to fit words and pseudowords into sentences by adding or removing affixes....