Is there a causal link from phonological awareness to success in learning to read?
Section snippets
Introduction: phonological awareness and its association with reading
Broadly defined, phonological awareness refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words (Goswami and Bryant, 1990, Mattingly, 1972). It encompasses awareness of the most basic speech units of a language – phonemes – as well as larger units such as rimes and syllables. The “awareness” component of the term is as important to the definition as the “phonological” component, for the skill is proposed to involve, not simply unconsciously discriminating speech sounds (such
Longitudinal studies
Longitudinal studies of the relationship between phonological awareness and reading involve measuring phonological awareness at Time t1 and correlating it with reading and/or spelling performance at Time t2 and beyond. No such longitudinal correlational design can ever conclusively establish a causal link between two factors, because of the much-cited third variable problem (see e.g. Bryant and Goswami, 1987, MacMillan, 2002). For example, although phonological awareness at Time t1 might be
Training studies
Numerous phonological awareness training studies have been conducted, with a huge variety of aims, methodologies and outcomes (as clearly evidenced in the recent meta-analysis by Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999). In assessing these studies for the present purposes, we once again established a set of requirements that would need to be fulfilled if clear support for the strong causal hypothesis were to be obtained. Some of these requirements concern aspects of the design or methodology of the studies,
Discussion
In this review, we sought to scrutinize the huge and varied body of research on phonological awareness and literacy acquisition in the context of a single, fairly specific question: Does phonological awareness encompass a set of purely spoken language skills that precede and directly affect the process of reading and spelling acquisition? We felt that this question deserved re-examination given that, in our view, the major significance of phonological awareness lies in its status as a possible
Acknowledgements
This paper and the ideas behind it have benefited greatly from the insightful and constructive comments of several experts in the field. We are particularly grateful to Brian Byrne, Veronika Coltheart, Nancy Jackson, Michael Johnston, Sachiko Kinoshita, John Marshall, Kate Nation, Richard Olson, Conrad Perry, David Share, Morag Stuart and three anonymous reviewers.
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