Researchers examined the relation of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills — phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. They also examined potential moderators of the relations (grade level, orthographic depth of language, receptive vs. productive morphological awareness, inflectional vs. derivational vs. compound morphological awareness, and L1/L2 status). The review revealed that morphological awareness was, on average, moderately related to phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Importantly, morphological awareness had a stronger relation with word reading in orthographically deep languages than in orthographically shallow languages. The relation with vocabulary was stronger for upper elementary grades than for primary grades. The magnitude of the relation also varied by the nature of morphological awareness. These results underscore the importance of morphological awareness in language and literacy skills, and reveal a nuanced and precise picture of their relations.

The authors provide a concise summary of the key concepts and strategies that primary and early childhood teachers can use to support the development of phonological awareness and phonics in their daily instruction. They provide a summary of current research findings and apply those findings to practical classroom applications.

Two methods of decoding instruction were compared. Participants were kindergartners who knew letter sounds but could not decode nonwords. The segmented phonation treatment taught students to convert graphemes to phonemes by breaking the speech stream (“sss – aaa – nnn”) before blending. The connected phonation treatment taught students to pronounce phonemes without breaking the speech stream (“sssaaannn”) before blending. The CVC nonwords contained continuant consonants that could be stretched and connected. Following learning to criterion, students completed a transfer task to decode CVCs with stop consonants that are harder to blend because of intrusion from schwa vowels. Results showed that connected phonation training facilitated learning to decode as well as reading nonwords accurately on the transfer task compared to segmented phonation training. An error analysis suggested that breaking between phonemes caused students to forget initial phonemes during blending. Findings suggest how to teach decoding more effectively.

This study evaluated whether the sophistication of children’s invented spellings in kindergarten was predictive of subsequent reading and spelling in Grade 1, while also considering the influence of well-known precursors. Children in their first year of schooling were assessed on measures of oral vocabulary, alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, word reading, and invented spelling; approximately one year later they were assessed on multiple measures of reading and spelling. The researchers found a direct line from invented spelling leading to improved reading scores at the end of first grade. The study suggests that invented spelling integrates phonological and orthographic growth and is a unique predictor of growth in early reading skills, over and above children’s alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness.

This study suggests that the neural processing of consonants in noise plays a fundamental role in language development. Children who struggle to listen in noisy environments may struggle to make meaning of the language they hear on a daily basis, which can in turn set them at risk for literacy challenges. Evaluating the neural coding of speech in noise may provide an objective neurophysiological marker for these at-risk children, opening a door to early and specific interventions that may stave off a life spent struggling to read.

Preschool-aged children were randomly assigned to receive small group instruction in letter names and/or sounds or numbers (treated control). Alphabet instruction followed one of two approaches currently utilized in early childhood classrooms: combined letter name and sound instruction or letter sound only instruction. Thirty-four 15 minute lessons were provided, with children pre-and post-tested on alphabet, phonological awareness, letter–word identification, emergent reading, and developmental spelling measures. Results suggest benefits of combined letter name and sound instruction in promoting children’s letter-sound acquisition. Benefits did not generalize to other emergent literacy skills.

The Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research initiative studied the impact of the 14 preschool curricula on five student-level outcomes (reading, phonological awareness, language, mathematics, and behavior) and six classroom-level outcomes (classroom quality, teacher-child interaction, and four types of instruction).

This study tested a hypothesis about the growth of word knowledge in kindergarten/first-grade readers. It was predicted that (a) phoneme awareness develops in phases and (b) concept of word in text (ability to finger-point read) interacts with phoneme awareness in the development of early reading skill. Structural equation modeling showed that the longitudinal data fit the hypothesized model. The data also conformed to the predicted developmental sequence in a descriptive analysis of median performance change over time. The demonstrated relationship between phoneme awareness and concept of word in text, for its pedagogical implications alone, warrants further study.

In 1997, Congress asked NICHD, through its Child Development and Behavior Branch, to work with the U.S. Department of Education in establishing a National Reading Panel that would evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read. The 14-member panel included members from different backgrounds, including school administrators, working teachers, and scientists involved in reading research. The report summarized research in eight areas relating to literacy instruction: phonemic awareness instruction, phonics instruction, fluency instruction, vocabulary instruction, text comprehension instruction, independent reading, computer assisted instruction, and teacher professional development. The National Reading Panel's analysis made it clear that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates: explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, methods to improve fluency, and ways to enhance comprehension.

Abstract:
Low-income, inner-city children were involved in a two-year intervention delivered in the regular classroom by regular classroom teachers to develop phonological awareness and word recognition skills. For the treatment children, an 11-week phoneme awareness program in kindergarten was followed by a first grade reading program (extended to grade 2 for some children) that emphasized explicit, systematic instruction in the alphabetic code. Control children participated in the school district’s regular basal reading program. Both groups participated in a phonetically-based spelling program mandated by the district.

At the end of grade 1, treatment children (n = 66) significantly outperformed control children (n = 62) on measures of phonological awareness, letter name and letter sound knowledge, and three measures of word recognition, and reached marginal significance (0.056) on a fourth. They also significantly outperformed the control children on two measures of spelling. One year later, at the end of grade 2, the treatment children (n = 58) significantly outperformed the control children (n = 48) on all four measures of word recognition.

For the groups as a whole, there were no differences on the one measure of spelling re-administered at the end of grade 2. However, there were significant differences in spelling between the treatment (n = 16) and control children (n = 13) who remained in the bottom quartile of spellers at the end of grade 2 when partial credit was given for phonetically correct spelling, and significant differences in reading favoring these treatment children on all four measures of word recognition.

The methodological rigor of 39 studies of phonological awareness intervention was evaluated based on internal and external validity criteria. The internal validity criteria encompassed general design characteristics, measurement, and statistical treatment, while the external validity criteria included research hypotheses, participant selection and description, and generalization and maintenance measures. The most serious methodological flaws observed in many of the studies were (a) nonrandom assignment of participants to conditions; (b) failure to control for Hawthorne effects by providing alternate interventions to control groups; (c) insufficient or nonexistent assurance of fidelity of treatment; (d) poor measurement sensitivity; and (e) inadequately described samples. Only seven studies met two thirds or more of all the evaluative criteria, although all of these investigations demonstrated at least one fatal flaw. The reported findings are compared with those of two similar methodological reviews. Suggestions for improvement of future intervention research are provided.

One hundred twenty-two second- to fifth-grade (7- to 11-year-old) children with reading difficulties studied phonological awareness with or without explicit attention to articulation and with or without manipulation of sounds. They all studied identical phonics and read stories on the computer with speech and decoding support for difficult words. Regular-instruction controls received regularly scheduled language-arts or reading activities. After 40 hours of training, children in all three trained conditions outperformed controls on all tests except math. Conditions that manipulated sounds showed advantages over the condition without explicit practice manipulating sounds, but only on the two measures of phonological awareness. Articulatory awareness training yielded no unique benefits during this training period. Individual differences in response to treatment related to initial levels of phonological awareness, naming speed, IQ, and grade. The similar outcomes of the three conditions suggest that specific variations in good phonological training may be less important than once thought for most children with reading difficulties.

Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many different tasks, and task comparisons have been confounded by differing levels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergartners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task difficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were, in turn, compared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the measures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be more closely related to the factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from rimes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis.

The goal of this project was to evaluate the effects of training in phonemic segmentation and of instruction in letter names and letter sounds on kindergarten children's reading and spelling skills. Ninety students from three urban public schools in the U.S. were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group received training in segmenting words into phonemes, as well as training in correspondences between letter names and letter sounds (phoneme awareness group). The second group received only the training in letter names and letter sounds (language activities group). The third group received no intervention (control group). Results indicated that phoneme awareness instruction, combined with instruction connecting the phonemic segments to alphabet letters, significantly improved the early reading and spelling skills of the children in the phoneme awareness group. However, instruction in letter names and letter sounds alone did not significantly improve the segmentation skills, the early reading skills, or the spelling skills of the kindergarten children who participated in the language activities group, as compared with the control group.

In this study, of particular concern were these questions: Do the same children remain poor readers year after year? Do the same children remain poor writers year after year? What skills do the poor readers lack? What skills do the poor writers lack? What factors seem to keep poor readers from improving? What factors seem to keep poor writers from improving? The probability that a child would remain a poor reader at the end of 4th grade if the child was a poor reader at the end of 1st grade was 0.88. Early writing skill did not predict later writing skill as well as early reading ability predicted later reading ability. Children who become poor readers entered 1st grade with little phonemic awareness. By the end of 4th grade, the poor readers had still not achieved the level of decoding skill that the good readers had achieved at the beginning of 2nd grade. Good readers read considerably more than the poor readers both in and out of school, which appeared to contribute to the good readers' growth in some reading and writing skills. Poor readers tended to become poor writers.

Investigates the reliability and validity of tests that have been used to operationalize the concept of phonemic awareness. Indicates that a combination of two tests, one related to each factor, has greater predictive validity for the beginning steps in reading acquisition than does one test alone.

The Matthew Effects are not only about the progressive decline of slow starters, but also about the widening gap between slow starters and fast starters. In reading, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This report presents a framework for conceptualizing development of individual differences in reading ability that emphasizes the effects of reading on cognitive development and on "bootstrapping" relationships involving reading. It uses the framework to explain some persisting problems in the literature on reading disability and to conceptualize remediation efforts in reading.