Dyslexia: Phonological Awareness can Predict Reading Skill

Children first learn words by listening to them and only later by reading them. Listening discrimination, that is, accurate discrimination between two similar sounding words is learnt through day-to-day experience. We have observed, for example, that children as young as three who grow up in an English-speaking environment, but in a household where the parents’ mother tongue is not English, soon begin to correct their parents’ English diction. While children acquire a foreign language very easily, it is not the same with parents, who may be unable to reproduce words exactly as they are spoken by the native speakers of that language.

As listening discrimination is developed through incidental and planned experiences, parents and educators can assist its development in children. One way is through the pairing of words that differ only in one speech sound, for example, bad-bat, tap-tat. The child is asked to identify the difference in sound. There are other interesting ways of making children pay attention to the difference between closely sounding words. We could put two different dolls in front of the child and say, “This doll says bad but this doll says bat. Which one says badV Or, using the same dolls—”This doll ate and this doll eight. Which doll atcT

An important consideration when addressing difficulties in listening (auditory) discrimination is the elimination of a possible difficulty in speech perception. This is why auditory discrimination tests are useful in detecting whether or not the speaker is engaged in appropriate phonological coding. Phonological coding can also be tested by tasks that test phonological awareness.

Phonological Awareness can Predict Reading Skill

First of all, what does phonological awareness mean? Essentially, it is the ability to translate letters into sounds or phonemes. A phoneme is any of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another, for example, m and c in mat and cat. Phonemic awareness includes grapheme-phoneme correspondence, which is the ability to pronounce phonemes that are printed. The following are some of the important ways of estimating a child’s phonological awareness:

Identification

Ask the child to tap every time a different phoneme (sound) can be heard or read in a word. Ask the child to tap the number of syllables in the words put, potty, nut, nutty, span, separate, dance, and return. Similarly, ask the child to say here and hen and then ask where in the word does the huh sound occur. Continue by giving words such as where, free, sat, and paper, and ask which one has the sound er.

Phoneme manipulation

Ask the child to take away the first sound from the words phase, star, and get. Similarly, ask the child to take away the last sound of the words water, flat, and gap. Then ask the child to take away the middle sounds in words, for example, the b sound in table, the n sound from window and the eh sound from bread.

Sound blending

Provide the sounds that constitute a word and then ask the child to put it together: a-ni-mal.

Children’s performances in tests of phonemic awareness as well as rhyme detection help predict the level of reading ability. However, what is more important is that in pre-readers, the results predict children’s success in reading in later years. Therefore, experienced teachers and educational psychologists who do research in reading emphasize that children should be encouraged to create the sound of the word from its printed form and, conversely, clearly spell out spoken words. The separation of the sounds in a word and the appreciation of the sequence or succession of these sounds is beneficial for teaching how to read.

Children spontaneously generate rhymes, even nonsense rhymes, by the age of two-and-a-half. They just love making songs that have no meaning at all but which bristle with rhymes and alliterations. Rhymes usually refer to words with endings that sound the same, whereas alliterations are words that have similar-sounding beginnings (Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper). We know that rhymes are easier than alliterations for children to detect. JusMhink of some of the more popular rhymes for children found in the books by Dr Seuss, They play all day, they fight all night, or others such as Mr Brown went to town and Jack Sprat could eat no fat.

Children also notice how hard it is to pronounce groups of words that have both alliteration and rhyme together, as in She sells sea shells by the seashore. Considering the same example, children also become aware of phonemes as easily as rhymes and alliterations. We do not have to teach them sound discrimination formally if they are exposed to word games. In fact, much of language is learned through play. Language learning is a serious affair; to paraphrase Jerome Burner’s remark—some things are so important in life that they can only be learned through play.

Let us summarize the main thoughts about phonological awareness or phonological coding:

1. Remember that the terms phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonological coding are sometimes used interchangeably. All of them refer to the ability to translate letters and patterns of letters into phonological forms. This ability includes what is called the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, that is, the ability to pronounce phonemes that are written down.

2. Not only are single letters pronounced, but also groups of graphemes and groups of phonemes have correspondence. For example, b-e-a-d is bead, but b-r-e-a-d is pronounced differently. Hence, it is not always easy to pronounce whole words in a foreign language although we can certainly pronounce each letter. A name like Krywanuik certainly involves the translation of groups of graphemes into groups of phonemes, but if you do not know the language such correspondence is never accurate. Try explaining to a person, who does not know English, how to say minute in wait a minute and minute details.

3. The ability to translate letters or patterns to sound can be acquired because of certain general principles that we develop through analogies. Without this generalization we will not be able to read new words at all. English has several regular words but a great many irregular ones too and, therefore, analogies do not work very well when speaking what foreigners consider a nonphonetic language. Some examples of words that cannot be pronounced analogically are bead and dead, put compared with but, and tough and though. The same pattern of letters has a completely different pronunciation.

4. So, how is it that children can read made-up words? They must be engaged in analogical mechanisms. In languages that are significantly more phonetic than English, such as the languages of Spain and Italy, which are close to Latin, or the languages of India, new words are pronounced successfully by using the principles of phonological coding. This is because spelling-to-sound relation is, almost always, regular in these languages. Someone with dyslexia in the phonetically regular languages would have difficulty in sound blending (for example, con-ver-sa-tion) and may be identified as an unusually slow reader.

5. We must remember that phonological awareness increases as children begin to receive formal instruction. And yet, even before children go to school, the pre-reader is able to do a number of phonological tasks, such as elimination or addition of phonemes, surprisingly well. Research in this area supports the notion that children acquire phonological awareness long before learning to read. The experiences that children have when they are learning rhymes do play an important part in their growing awareness that words and syllables can be made into smaller units of sound. Although we know that teaching rhyme prepares children to read, when combined with spelling, it has the best effect on enhancing reading ability.

Tasks for Assessing Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness, or phonological coding, can be measured in several ways. In tests of phonological coding we include items from each of the six types of task listed.

Tasks usually used:

• Rhyme production or nursery rhyme tasks
• Oddity tasks
• Blending tasks
• Syllable splitting tasks
• Phoneme manipulation tasks
• Phonemic segmentation tasks

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