Correlational Study Of Phonological Awareness And Reading Ability In EFL Learning

Research of more than two decades has affirmed the importance of phonological awareness and its relation to reading acquisition. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Mattingly, 1972). It encompasses awareness of the most basic speech units of a language-phonemes-as well as larger units such as syllables. The present thesis attempts to examine the correlational relationship between different linguistic levels of phonological awareness and reading ability in EFL learning. The hypotheses of the present study are: first, in EFL learning, different linguistic levels of phonological awareness correlate with the learners' reading ability. Second, among the different linguistic levels of phonological awareness, phoneme awareness is a better indicator of reading ability than onset-rime awareness, which, in turn, is a better indicator of reading ability than syllable awareness. Put differently, phoneme awareness, onset-rime awareness and syllable awareness as indicators of EFL learners' reading ability, constitute an implicational hierarchy. Third, deletion task is a better predictor of reading ability than are detection and oddity tasks.The instrument used in the present study is adapted from Swan (1997) and Hulme (2002). 91 participants, who were systematically sampled, were administered different tasks tapping awareness of three linguistic levels of phonological awareness (syllable, onset-rime and phoneme awareness). The reading section of College English Test (CET-4, 2002) is used for testing learners' reading ability. Findings from empirical investigation are as follows: different linguistic levels of phonological awareness correlate with the reading ability in adult EFL learners. The weight of correlation varies. Phoneme awareness is a better indicator of reading ability than is onset-rime awareness while syllable awareness is the weakest indicator of reading ability. Among measures of different tasks of phonological awareness, initial-final phoneme oddity, detection task and onset-rime deletion task emerge as strong indicators of reading ability.Broadly, research findings yielded by the present study are congruous with those previous studies indicating that word recognition theories are applicable in EFL situation. Heterogeneity of phonological awareness is also affirmed. Learners' reading experiences, their mastery of mappings about the relationships between aural and visual input and various cognitive demands of the tasks are the major factors contributing to the diverse correlations between different linguistic levels phonological awareness and reading ability.Correlations between different tasks of phonological measurement are not completely consistent with earlier findings. The result, we speculate, is due to the deletion task of phoneme, which is far beyond the learners' current ability.