| Learning to read is often challenging for many students. The beginning reader is required to accomplish some very difficult tasks in transforming letters into recognizable words, a process that involves phonological awareness and other metalinguistic abilities. Although studies have shown a relationship between cognitive style and broad measures of reading, its effect on phonological and metalinguistic awareness remains unclear. The purpose of the study was to investigate: (1) the effect of cognitive style on phonological awareness, (2) the effect of cognitive style on metalinguistic awareness, and (3) the relationship between phonological awareness and metalinguistic awareness.;Twenty nine 6-year-old analytic and wholistic students were administered the Phonological Awareness Assessment Protocol, a measure of phonological awareness and the Quick Test of Phonological Awareness, a measure of metalinguistic awareness. Data were analyzed using T-tests and Pearson correlation.;Results show that analytic students performed significantly better than wholistic students on phonological and metalinguistic awareness. On aspects of phonological awareness, analytic students performed better than wholistic students on word rhyming, syllable segmentation, phoneme substitution, phoneme blending, as well as fine grain and coarse grain phonological awareness. Analytic-wholistic differences in phonological awareness encompass early acquired rudimentary phonological awareness skills as well as later emerging and more demanding phonemic awareness abilities. Analytic students also performed better than wholistic students on two components of metalinguistic awareness, metasyntactical and metapragmatic awareness. Furthermore, findings showed positive correlation between phonological and metalinguistic awareness.;Findings suggest that wholistic students may experience phonological- and metalinguistic-awareness-related reading problems that: (1) involve word decoding and reading comprehension, (2) occur across both simple and complex text, and (3) affect both the early and later stages of reading acquisition. Since, minority students tend to be more wholistic than their mainstream peers, findings may also partially explain the genesis of the minority-majority reading achievement gap. Present findings have important implications for the setting of educational policy by federal, state, and local governments, the nature of classroom reading instruction, and the provision of reading-related services by speech-language pathologists. |
