by Rollanda E. O'Connor , Joseph R. Jenkins , Norma Leicester , Timothy A. Slocum Stanovich (1991)
Called the "specification of the role of phonological processing in the earliest stages of reading acquisition . . . one of the more notable scientific success stories of the last decade" (p. 78). Phonological skills involve manipulations of the phonological constituents of spoken words in tasks such as blending, segmenting, and rhyming. Students who learn to read well can rhyme at approximately age 4 (Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1988) and blend and segment orally presented words and sounds by the end of the 1st grade (Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). But most poor readers, by the end of the 2nd grade, still cannot blend or segment words as well as normally reading younger children (Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987). These findings have excited much of the reading research community because they seem to identify specific competencies causally related to early reading success. A causal linkage would have implications not only for the scientific understanding of reading development but also for possible early educational intervention for students at risk of reading failure.
Recent training studies have attempted to tease out a causal link between phonological skills and learning to read by studying normally developing kindergarten children who either did or did not receive some aspect of phonological awareness training (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Cunningham, 1990). Both studies indicated reading advantages for children in phonological treatments, but at the same time they left many unanswered questions about the children who might be expected to benefit from phonological training, the skills to select for training, and the way that phonological training interacts with reading instruction. For example, the subjects in these experiments were children who likely would learn to read efficiently whether or not they received phonological instruction. Both studies were conducted with kindergarten children who received other prereading and sound/symbol instruction, in addition to training in phonological manipulations. If phonological skills interact reciprocally with beginning reading instruction, as suggested by Ehri and Wilce (1987), then reading instruction may have artificially bolstered the effect of phonological training. Finally, training activities combined several phonological manipulations, obscuring the effects of individual skills and the relationships among them.
Researchers commonly select normally achieving children (excluding children who fall more than 1 standard deviation below the mean on cognitive measures) or older subjects (2nd grade through adult) for training studies of phonological awareness and reading (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Cunningham, 1990; Vellutino, 1979; Williams, 1979). If phonological skills are necessary for reading acquisition, it makes sense to teach children these essential skills at a developmentally appropriate level before they receive reading instruction. To investigate the feasibility of such instruction, we sought subjects who might be expected to experience difficulties at the beginning stages of reading instruction - young children with learning disabilities.
What, specifically, should be taught in a program of instruction in phonological awareness? Researchers are in disagreement about which auditory phonological skills are most directly related to the initial stages of reading and what the relationships might be among them (Lewkowicz, 1980; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Yopp, 1988). Part of the difficulty lies in the inconsistency among studies concerning which subskills, in which formats, should be included within the larger categories of rhyming, blending, and segmenting. In the category of blending, for example, some studies examined the blending of continuous sounds (Sssaaammm = Sam); others considered onset-rime (S - am = Sam), join the ending (Sa-m = Sam), or totally separated sounds (S - a - m = Sam); and others insisted on using only pseudowords, whatever the task. Segmenting and rhyming include a similarly large range of skills. For our study, we selected three tasks within each category (rhyming, blending, segmenting) to reflect the variety of tasks found in other research.
For training in any of these tasks to affect reading acquisition, however, children would need to generalize their new knowledge about blending, segmenting, or rhyming to words they eventually encounter in print. The first small step toward that broader transfer is generalization from the sounds and words used in training activities to novel sounds and words. The next step is application of knowledge learned through a trained phonological task to a new phonological task.
Correlations among most phonological skills are high (Yopp, 1988), suggesting that the skills develop together. However, because these correlations are derived from studies that used children who have developed these skills "naturally" ..
RHORI ANDIKA
PHONOLOGY
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