APPENDIX
II: TWO CORE PROCESSES
Note: text in red
and bold reflect my emphasis.
"For the first time, we now have
guidance-based on evidence from sound scientific research-on
how best to teach children to read"
Duane
Alexander, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development
(http://156.40.88.3/new/releases/nrp.htm)
Table
of Contents
Phonemic
Awareness
Processing Sound/Letter Combinations
The
Importance of Phonemic Awareness & Processing Sound/Letter
Combinations
The Importance of (the
above) to Early Success in Reading
Phonemic
Awareness:
It’s
the hottest topic in education. So many studies
have been published in the most highly respected education
journals that there’s hardly an educator alive who hasn’t
heard the term phonological awareness or its related term, phonemic
awareness. But what is this thing?
From the: National
Reading Panel Report (http://www.nrrf.org/rdg_panel_rpt.htm)
Phonemic
awareness is knowledge that spoken words are made up of tiny
segments of sound, referred to as phonemes.
For example, the words "go" and "she" each
consist of two phonemes. Phonemic awareness is often confused
with phonics, which refers to the process of linking these
sounds to the symbols that stand for them, the letters of the
alphabet.
From
the: Committee on the Prevention of Reading
Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council
(http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/prdyc/ch2.html)
Spoken
words can be phonologically subdivided at several different
levels of analysis. These include the syllable (in the
word protect, /pro/ and /tEkt/); the onset and rime
within the syllable (/pr/ and /o/, and /t/ and /Ekt/,
respectively); and the individual phonemes themselves
(/p/, /r/, /o/, /t/, /E/, /k/, and /t/). The
term phonological awareness refers to a general
appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their
meaning. When that insight includes an understanding
that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes, this
finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness.
Children
with phonemic awareness are able to
discern that camp and soap end with the
same sound, that blood and brown begin with the
same sound, or, more advanced still, that removing the /m/ from smell
leaves sell.
It is also important to
clarify the difference between phonological awareness and
phonics. Phonics
is the term that has long been used among educators to refer to
instruction in how the sounds of speech are represented by
letters and spellings, for instance, that the letter M
represents the phoneme /m/ and the various conventions by which
the long sounds of vowels are signaled. Phonics, in short,
presumes a working awareness of the phonemic composition of
words. In conventional phonics programs, however, such awareness
was generally taken for granted, and therein lies the force of
the research on phonemic awareness. To the extent that children
lack such phonemic awareness, they are unable to internalize
usefully their phonics lessons. The resulting symptoms include
difficulties in sounding and blending new words, in retaining
words from one encounter to the next, and in learning to spell.
From:
"Onsets
and Rimes": Their Relation to Effective Phonics Information
by Dr. Patrick Groff Professor of Education Emeritus San
Diego State University NRRF Board
Member & Senior Advisor (http://www.nrrf.org/45_onsets_and_rimes.html)
Experimental
research on children's conscious awareness of speech sounds in
spoken words has been carried out for at least twenty years.
This manifest sensitivity to speech sounds is called phonemic
(or phonological) awareness (PA). It now is
well-established that children who have developed PA gain
written word recognition skills better than do children who lack
PA.
Moreover, it is found that PA is best taught in a direct and
systematic fashion. We now know that school beginners' lack of
PA is far more detrimental to their progress in learning to read
than is their lack of experience with print, as preschoolers.
It
thus is apparent that PA is a prerequisite to phonics
instruction.
Processing
Sound/Letter Combinations:
From the: Committee
on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council
(http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/prdyc/ch2.html)
Visual
processes initiate word identification and immediately trigger
other processes that complete it, including, most importantly, phonological
decoding processes, which
concern the correspondences between printed letters and the
sounds of the language, especially phonemes, the
small sound units within spoken and heard words. The research on
reading in alphabetic writing systems has developed an important
consensus that phonological decoding is a routine part of
skilled word identification.
Word
identification research has provided information about how words
are understood as well as how their phonological form is
initially identified from print.
Addressing
the early stages of learning to read, researchers argue that
children move from a prereading stage, marked by
"reading" environmental print (logos, for example,
such as MacDonald's or Pepsi), into true reading through an
intermediate stage, referred to as phonetic cue reading (Ehri,
1980, 1991; Ehri and Wilce, 1985, 1987). In this intermediate
stage, the child begins to use the phonetic values of the names
of letters as a representation of the word. For example,
children can learn to read the word "jail" by picking
out the salient first and last letters, j and l, and associating
the letter names, "jay" and "ell" with
sounds heard when the word "jail" is pronounced. This
kind of reading is viewed as a primitive form of decoding (or
what Gough and Hillinger, 1980, called
"deciphering")--decoding because it uses systematic
relationships between letters and speech segments in words, and
primitive because it is a strategy that ignores some of the
letters and also because it maps letter names rather than the
phoneme values of the letters. In the
full decoding or deciphering stage, children begin to attend to
all letters and to map them to phonemes. Although these phonemes
are not always the right ones, the child is then in the stage of
full productive reading, because he or she is applying the
alphabetic principle very generally across encounters with words.
The Importance of Phonemic Awareness and Processing
Sound/Letter Combinations:
From
the:
National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development – 1997
Synthesis of Research on Reading (http://www.nrrf.org/synthesis_research.htm)
Converging evidence from all research centers show that deficits in
phonemic awareness reflect the core deficit in reading
disabilities.
Lack of phonemic awareness seems to be a major obstacle for learning
to read.
This is true for any language, even Chinese. About
2 in 5 children have some level of difficulty with phonemic
awareness. For about 1 in 5 children phonemic awareness does not
develop or improve over time. These children never catch up but
fall further and further behind in reading and in all academic
subjects.
Phonemic
awareness is the most potent predictor of success in learning to
read--even more powerfully predictive than I.Q.
Conversely, lack of phonemic awareness is the most powerful
determinant of failure to learn to read.
Moreover,
if the letter-sound code (phonics) is not taught, all reliable
studies concur that poor readers and nonreaders will not become
fluent readers. The most significant predictor of
comprehension is the ability to decode isolated words rapidly,
accurately, and fluently.
From the: Committee on the Prevention of Reading
Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council
(http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/prdyc/ch2.html)
The
theoretical and practical importance of phonological awareness
for the beginning reader relies not only on logic but also on
the results of several decades of empirical research. Early
studies showed a strong association between a child's ability to
read and the ability to segment words into phonemes (Liberman et
al., 1974). Dozens of subsequent studies
have confirmed that there
is a close relationship between phonemic awareness and reading
ability, not just in the early grades (e.g., Ehri and
Wilce, 1980, 1985; Perfetti et al., 1987) but throughout the
school years (Calfee et al., 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995).
Furthermore, as we discuss in Chapter
4, even prior to formal reading instruction, the performance
of kindergartners on tests of phonological awareness is a strong
predictor of their future reading achievement (Juel, 1991;
Scarborough, 1989; Stanovich, 1986; Wagner et al., 1994).
…
research repeatedly demonstrates that, when steps are taken to
ensure an adequate awareness of phonemes, the reading and
spelling growth of the group as a whole is accelerated and the
incidence of reading failure is diminished.
Moreover,
as we discuss in later chapters of this report, numerous studies
have shown that learning to read can be facilitated by providing
explicit instruction that directs
children's attention to the phonological structure of words,
indicating that phonological awareness plays a causal role in
learning to read (see Chapter
6). On the other hand,
instruction in alphabetic literacy, particularly regarding the
correspondences between letters and phonemes, in turn appears to
facilitate further growth in phonological (especially phonemic)
awareness.
Theorists
such as Share (1995) have argued that becoming skilled in
phonological decoding provides the child with a self-teaching
mechanism that, along with oral vocabulary knowledge and
context, is useful for learning to read words that they have not
previously encountered. After a few such correct decodings,
these words can be recognized quite automatically. In
thinking about the process of learning to read and about how
best to frame early reading instruction, it is important to bear
in mind these powerful reciprocal influences of reading skill
and phonological awareness on each other.
These
early connections between print and speech forms can drive a
rapid transition to real reading. Indeed, the combination of
these print-sound connections along with phonological
sensitivity are critical factors in reading acquisition
(Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Ehri and Sweet, 1991; Juel et al.,
1986; Share, 1995; Tunmer et al., 1988). Studies by Stuart and
Coltheart (1988) and Stuart (1990) illustrate the importance of
these early phonologically based approaches to reading. Stuart
(1990) added to these results by finding that the level of a
child's phonological sensitivity corresponded in some detail to
the level of achievement in word reading.
CONCLUSION
: The achievement of real reading
requires knowledge of the phonological structures of language
and how the written units connect with the spoken units.
Phonological sensitivity at the subword level is important in
this achievement. Very early, children who turn out to be
successful in learning to read use phonological connection to
letters, including letter names, to establish context-dependent
phonological connections, which allow productive reading. An
important mechanism for this is phonological recoding, which
helps the child acquire high-quality word representations. Gains in fluency (automaticity)
come with increased experience, as does increased lexical
knowledge that supports word identification.
The
most powerful interventions that have been identified for
reading disabilities to date consist of a combination of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, explicit instruction in
sound-symbol relationships or in mapping sound to print (the
alphabetic principle),
and direct and integrated instruction in text reading and
comprehension.
In
addition to correlational evidence, there have been a number of
longitudinal training studies showing that the relationship
between phonemic awareness and reading progress is causal. The
most famous of these studies, presented in Bradley and
Bryant’s seminal paper in 1983, was described by Coltheart
(1983) as the "first clear evidence of the mental
procedures important in the early stages of learning to
read" (p. 421). Subsequent intervention studies (Ball &
Blachman, 1988, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1990,
1991, 1993, 1995; Cunningham, 1990; Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis,
1994; Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Tangel &
Blackman, 1992) obtained similar results, and those that
employed follow-up have noted the endurance of the effects.
In
a number of these studies, the teaching of phonemic awareness
has occurred in conjunction with letter-sound instruction, a
process described by Hatcher et al. (1994) as a "phonological
linkage" (p. 42). Children
in dual-input programs demonstrate more improvement in reading
and spelling than those exposed to a solely oral phonemic
awareness program. Presumably
the reason for this advantage lies with the manner in which
phonemic awareness provides a signpost to beginning readers that
there is a logic to the reading process (Liberman,
Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). Ehri (1998) asserts that
it is not until students appreciate how our alphabet is designed
to represent speech in phonemic form that most phonemic
awareness development occurs.
Share
(1995) has argued that without the induction of the alphabetic
principle, skilled reading (implying the use of a generative
strategy capable of decoding novel words) will not occur.
His view is supported by the finding that dyslexic adult readers
(even those with strong orthographic capacities) still
demonstrate phonemic awareness deficits, and struggle to decode
novel words (Bruck, 1992; Hulme & Snowling, 1992; Pratt
& Brady, 1988; Siegel, 1993; Solman & Stanovich, 1992).
Share
and Stanovich (1995) assert that mature orthographic strategies
are developed through multiple examples of success in decoding
phonologically. If one accepts this view, then whole word
strategies should not be emphasised, and the
instructional focus for older
students must still be placed on ensuring letter-sound
correspondences, blending and segmenting, and
practice. It is further argued that
only through such laborious serial letter-by-letter decoding can
precise letter-order become entrenched in the orthographic
representation that forms the basis for accurate spelling
(Adams, 1990; Ehri, 1998; Jorm & Share, 1983; Williams,
1991). Thus, phonics instruction continues to play an
important role for older children and adults.
National
Center to Improve the Tools of Educators
Emergent Literacy: Synthesis of the Research (http://idea.uoregon.edu/~ncite/documents/techrep/tech19.html)
Letter
knowledge, which provides the basis for forming connections
between the letters in spellings and the sounds in
pronunciations, has been identified as a strong predictor of
reading success
(Ehri & Sweet, 1991) and has traditionally been a very
important component of reading readiness programs (van Kleeck,
1990). Knowing the alphabet and its related sounds is associated
with beginning literacy. In fact,
letter knowledge measured at the beginning of kindergarten was
one of two best predictors of reading achievement at the end of
kindergarten and first grade - the other predictor was phonemic
segmentation skill (Share, Jorm, Maclean, and
Matthews, cited in Ehri & Sweet 1991).
From
the: U.S. House of Representatives - Committee on Education and
the Workforce September 26, 2000:
Testimony
of Donald N. Langenberg, Chairman of the National Reading Panel
(NRP) (http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/106th/fc/literacy92600/langenberg.htm)
To
become good readers, children must develop phonemic awareness,
phonics skills,
the ability to read words in text in an accurate and fluent
manner, and the ability to apply comprehension strategies
consciously and deliberately as they read.
Testimony
of Ms. Linda Butler, Professional Development Specialist •
NICHD Early Interventions Project, Washington, DC
(http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/106th/fc/literacy92600/butler.htm)
Many
teachers have seen immediate and dramatic improvement in their
classes when they apply research-based methods. A very important
focus of coursework has been in-depth study of phoneme
awareness, phonics, and the structure of the English language.
Testimony
of Mrs. Pam Barret First Grade Teacher and NRRF 1998 Teacher of
the Year (http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/106th/fc/literacy92600/barret.htm)
In
order to read, the student must learn phonics, which is the
sound to symbol association and the skill of blending these
sounds together to make a word. In addition, they need to
understand phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear
sounds within a spoken word, and to understand that the sounds
correspond to letters. This is a vital precursor to
phonics.
The
Importance of Phonemic Awareness & Phonological Processing
To Early Reading Success:
From:
What
Reading Does For The Mind: By Anne E. Cunningham and Keith
E. Stanovich – Published in the American Educator/American
Federation of Teachers Spring/Summer 1998 (http://www.aft.org/publications/american_educator/spring_sum98/cunningham.pdf)
The
term “Matthew effects” is taken from the Biblical passage
that describes a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer phenomenon.
Applying this concept to reading, we see that very early in the
reading process poor readers, who experience greater difficulty
in breaking the spelling-to-sound
code, begin to be exposed to much less text than
their more skilled peers.
From
the standpoint of a reciprocal model of reading development,
this means that many cognitive differences observed between
readers of differing skill may in fact be consequences of differential
practice that itself resulted from early differences in the
speed of initial reading acquisition. The increased reading
experiences of children who master the spelling-to-sound
code early thus might have important positive
feedback effects that are denied the slowly progressing reader.
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