A Study Of The Relation Between Phonological Awareness And Reading Ability

The discovery of the relationship between phonological awareness and the process of learning to read is one of the most important contributions of the last 30 years of research in the domain of the acquisition of literacy (Silba, Alves-Martins, 2002). Phonological awareness has been reported to be the best predictor of later reading success for children learning alphabetic writing systems and is also a good indicator for distinguishing learning -disabled and normal children (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Lennox & Siegel, 1995). And the most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al 1994). In the recent two decades, in western countries, phonological awareness has been a very heated research problem in the area of Educational Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Developmental Psychology and Psycholinguistic Psychology (!!!,2001). In English-speaking countries, the training of phonological awareness is an important part in English teaching, especially in elementary school.However, in China, whole language approach has dominated English teaching in middle school these years and thus "meaning first" method has become one of the most important teaching methods in English class. However, some basic training of language skills has been neglected such as decoding and spelling words and so on. Furthermore, the research and training of phonological awareness is almost blank. As a result, the incorrect pronunciations and lack of phonological awareness lead to some senous problems in reading and spelling. For example, many senior students can not read an unfamiliar word according to English Notation or spelling rules; they can not remember English words according to the correspondences between the printed forms of words and their sounds; many of them just read a passage word by word at a lower reading speeding; there are also so many spelling errors because of their incorrect pronunciations that their examination scores are badly affected and so on.The aim of this research is to train students' phonological awareness by the method-integration of phonological awareness combined with letter-sound instruction on the base of the model Sound Foundation, which was adopted by Byrne & Fielding Bamsley in 1991 and has deep foundation of the theory -phonological awareness and phonics. During this experiment, the experimental procedure is divided into two steps: in the first step, letter-sound instruction is conducted intensively, systematically and explicitly which is integrated with phonological awareness training. In the second step, the regular program is held in experimental class; besides, phonological awareness training and letter-sound instruction, which is differentfrom the control class, are conducted in each unit when learning new words and expressions. The test tasks are also divided into two periods in the whole experiment. In the first period, pilot and posttest about students' comprehensive ability are given in the form of standardized examination. In the second period, pilot and posttest about the tasks of phonological awareness, word and non-word reading and reading comprehension are held. The data of the students' performance was analyzed by using SPSS 10.0. The result of the experiment was presented as following: phonological awareness training combined with letter-sound instruction is helpful to promote students' phonological awareness; phonological awareness is also an important predictor of reading for Chinese students in Junior Middle School. Therefore, this study gives us such implication: the training of phonological awareness combined with grapheme-phoneme instruction should be conducted in Junior Middle School; a better result by this method is expected in such poor areas where th...