Study On The Correlativity Between English Phonological Awareness And Reading Competence Of University Students

The culmination of over two decades of research has affirmed the importance of phonological awareness and its relation to reading acquisition. In English speaking countries, there has been a substantial amount of research which demonstrates that phonological awareness is essential to early reading success. In China, the research results from the western countries are applied in primary and secondary school English teaching, however, the subjects of phonological awareness researches are often children with little attention paid to Chinese university students who occupy a large number of Chinese English learners and study English intensively for many years. So to examine the correlativity between phonological awareness and reading competence of university students will be crucial. Given Chinese and English are quite different language systems with Chinese an ideography system and English a phonography system, such studies are definitely needed.This study was designed to investigate the correlativity among various linguistic levels (syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, phoneme awareness and word spelling competence) of phonological awareness and their correlativity with reading competence. The subjects who participated in the study were 54 sophomores of non-English majors randomly chosen from five classes of different majors. Phonological awareness, i.e., syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, phoneme awareness and word spelling competence was determined by eight measures including syllable counting, syllable deletion, onset-rime detection, phoneme counting, phoneme comparison, phoneme detection, pseudo-word spelling and pseudo-word reading. The results of various statistical analyses revealed that: (1) measures of phonological awareness had a strong correlation with one another; (2) measures of phonological awareness were significantly correlated with measure of reading competence with phoneme awareness a better predictor than onset-rime awareness which in turn was a better predictor than syllable awareness; (3) word spelling ability is the best predictor among the four predictors of reading competence.This study demonstrated that phonological awareness and reading competence are significantly correlated with each other, and word spelling competence is important variable contributing to reading achievement, therefore to improve students'phonological awareness and word spelling competence should become the top priority in English curriculum. In order to improve the students'reading competence, the English teacher should be aware that incorporating phonological instruction in English teaching curriculum is not only necessary but also urgent.