Teri Swanson, Ph.D.
Sweetwater Union High School District, San Diego, CA.
 
Reading or literacy is the predominant focus of education departments at the federal and state levels, as well as in all local school districts across the state. California students who have failed to become adequate readers have made the news. Schools and districts are scrambling to retool and find ways to resolve their literacy problems. With our training and educational background in phonology, phonetics, language, and diagnostics, speech-language pathologists have many of the tools necessary to become an important literacy resource in educational settings. We can intervene to prevent many literacy problems as well as treat established reading and spelling difficulties due to phonological awareness deficiencies.
 
What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the conscious awareness of the sound components that form words. It has been well established in the literature that phonological awareness is the strongest, most reliable predictor of reading and spelling success in young children. It is prerequisite to early stages of reading and spelling acquisition, and is often the “culprit” when something goes wrong in literacy acquisition.
 
There are many sub skills in the continuum of phonological awareness: rhyming, alliteration, syllable splitting, sound blending, phoneme segmentation and manipulation; however, it is phoneme segmentation that allows a child to initially understand the logical of an alphabetic written language. The strategy or logic of representing sounds in words with letter symbols is the construct of an alphabetic system. To use it, one must perceive the individual sounds that compose words in order to know which letters to use to spell words; otherwise the assignment of letter to words is arbitrary, not based on logic. Conversely, when children approach a written word, they must be able to recall the sounds represented by letters and blend them together to read the word. If children cannot perceive and blend sound segments in words, they often rely on visual memory and recognition to read and spell. This imposes a ceiling on the lexicon they can acquire. Their spelling is often described as bizarre. These students have no reliable strategy to decode unfamiliar words. Children not only need knowledge of sound-symbol association (phonics) but also phonemic awareness to know how to use this letter/sound knowledge. Research has shown that kindergarten and first grade children who are poor in phonological awareness skills become unsuccessful readers and spellers (Adams, 1990; Ball & Blachman, 1991;Bradley & Bryant, 1983). Once the negative downward spiral of failure begins, about mid-first grade (Stanovich, 1983), relatively few pull out of the decline without appropriate intervention.
 
Researchers have demonstrated that in the normally developing population, 30-37% of first grade children begin their school experience with insufficient phonological awareness to become successful readers (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Lundberg, Frost & Peterson, 1988). Studies have indicated that, with instruction on phonological awareness in kindergarten, all but about 6% of first grade students have sufficient phonological awareness to become successful readers and spellers by second grade (Lundberg et al, 1988). From these results it is reasonable to project that, with collaborative phonological awareness instruction provided by speech-language pathologists in kindergarten classrooms, reading difficulties could be prevented in approximately 30% of the population. With this intervention, the speech-language pathologist is not only advocating for students who would otherwise experience a significant lifetime handicap but also reducing her future caseload of children who would otherwise have literacy delays. Further, it has been established that good reading ability facilitates the development of complex forms of higher-level language functions in semantics, syntax, and morphology. It behooves us to focus on metaphonologically based literacy development.

Phonological Awareness and Reading

In order to approach remediation, it is important to understand the interaction between phonological awareness and early literacy acquisition. Reading ability develops through different stages as it grows and matures. These stages are inherently different from, but necessary to, each other in the progress through each succeeding level of development. Each stage is commonly referred to as “reading.” Jeanne Chall’s (1983) stages are helpful and explicit.

• Stage 0-Preliterate: Prerequisite skills including phonological awareness should develop from birth to age 6.
  
• Stage 1- Decoding: Children learn to use symbols to represent sounds in mechanics of reading and spelling. Grades 1-2.
  
• Stage 2-Fluency or Automatically: Children practice decoding until visual recognition of familiar words takes over and becomes automatic. They become confident in decoding. Grades 2-3.
  
• Stage 3- Comprehension: Children no longer have to focus on How to read but can focus on what they read. Grades 3-4.

Liberman (1990) reported that about 75% of children will learn to read, “ no matter how helpful the instruction is.” The aim of any reading the instruction is to assist children in becoming comprehensive readers, but not all methods include instruction in phonological awareness. This may not be important to anyone except those who are unable to learn to read any other way (Stedman & Kastle, 1987). If these children fail to develop phonological awareness, their decoding and spelling are inaccurate and inefficient. They are not able to achieve fluency because they are not able to achieve fluency because they are struggling to decode. Reading is painful and becomes and activity to avoid. This means poor readers get less practice than successful readers. The discrepancy only gets wider as the years progress (Lundberg, 1994; Stanovich, 1986). Students with poor phonological awareness and decoding skills tend to stay stuck in Stage1, unable to move into the next developmental stage unless there is appropriate intervention.

Intervention

The treatment of metaphonologically-based literacy problems involves helping students become aware of the sound segments in words, perhaps representing them with tokens initially. When it is clear the child can segment sounds from blended sequence, the next step is to transfer that skill to phonetic spelling and reading using letter symbols. Making children aware of spelling rules will assist then in developing orthographic reading and spelling proficiency as well. It is good practice to apply their newly developed literacy skills to actual reading/writing activities such as reading decodable books, writing dictated sentences or keeping a journal as soon as possible.
 
The collection of pre- and post-test data on these children is, of course, standard practice among professionals in our field. To advocate for our clients and our profession, it is crucial to share our data with administration and teaching personnel. Children once thought of as literacy delayed who have begun to keep up with their peers are good news, An annual or semiannual written account of gains in literacy for parents, teacher and principals may be rewarding and enlightening, If you have collaborated with classroom teachers in your efforts to alleviate or prevent metaphonologically-based literacy delay, be sure to gather pre-and post-test data. Include accounting for the percentage of reading successes in second grade among students who receive metaphonological instruction in kindergarten. Remember to share your results and successes. School districts are receptive to hard data. They may want to know what your “secret” is. In the process, you advocate for your profession and your position as a literacy resource as well as for the students who need your services. You become a valuable team member when you alleviate the difficulties teachers face in teaching poor readers. Every time you “teach a teacher” how to deal with this problem, you contribute to the betterment of the lives they touch, the school system, and the communities in which we work and live.

References

• Adams, M. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
  
• Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49-66.
  
• Bradley, L.,& Bryant, P. (1983). Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A casual connection. Nature, 30, 419-421.
  
• Chall, J.S. (1983). Stages of reading development. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  
• Harris, R. (1998). Marketing mean building new relationships. CSHA Magazine, 26:8, 14.
  
• Liberman, I., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F., & Carter, B. (1974). Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journal of Experimental Psychology 18, 201-212.
  
• Liberman, I., & Shankweiler, D. (1985). Phonology and the problem of learning to read and write. Remedial and Special Education,6, 8-17.
  
• Lundberg, I., Frost J., & Peterson, O. (1988). Effects of and extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 255-281.
  
• Lundberg, I. (1994). Reading difficulties can be predicted and prevented: A Scandinavian perspective on phonological awareness and reading, In C. Hulme & M.
  
• Snowling (Eds.). Reading development and dyslexia (pp. 180-199). San Diego, Ca: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
  
• Stanovich, K. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.
  
• Steadman, L., & Kastle, C. (1987). Literacy and reading performance in the United States from 1880 to the present. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 8-46.