A Study On The Correlation Between English Phonological Awareness And English Reading Comprehension Ability

Phonological awareness refers to the ability of dividing words into smaller phonological units including syllables, onsets and rimes and phonemes. Among the studies on phonological awareness, the correlation between phonological awareness and reading is an important part. However, most of the researches center on native English speakers, few of the researches was done on Chinese English learners. So, this paper aims at studying the relationship between phonological awareness and reading comprehension ability.This study adopted the research method of phonological awareness tests and a comprehension test, followed by the correlation analysis between them. The subjects were89junior grade one students from a middle school in Jiangxi Province. Based on the pilot study of the phonological awareness, this study made use of Hulme’s onset-rime awareness test, syllable blending test and phoneme blending test revised from Roswell-Chall’s phoneme blending test for the native English speakers. Then, reading comprehension tests extracted from English Test were used to test the participants’reading comprehension ability. The reliability coefficient of the phonological awareness was0.829.The results of this study are as the follows. First, junior grade one students perform best on onset-rime awareness, then on syllable awareness and last on phoneme awareness. Second, junior grade one students’ phonological awareness has strong correlation with their reading comprehension ability. The correlation coefficient is0.603(p<0.01). Among subcategories of phonological awareness, syllable awareness has the strongest correlation with reading comprehension, phoneme awareness the second and onset-rime awareness the last. The correlation coefficients were0.562(p<0.01),0.552(p<0.01) and0.378(p<0.01) respectively. Third, through regression analysis, it can be seen that students’ total scores on phonological awareness have strong predictive power on their reading comprehension ability. Among subcategories of phonological awareness, syllable awareness has the strongest power on reading comprehension ability, phoneme awareness the second and onset-rime awareness the last. From the results of the study, we can see that the development of learners’ phonological awareness follows a certain order. Besides, phonological awareness correlates highly with reading comprehension, and phonological awareness has predictive power on reading comprehension ability.Based on the above findings, this study provides English teachers and English learners the following implications. First, in English teaching, developing or training Chinese English learners’ English phonological awareness should follow a certain order. Second, English teachers can improve students’reading comprehension ability by cultivating or training their phonological awareness.