Explicit Instruction in Phonemic Awareness and Phonemically based Decoding Skills - Management Assignment Help

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Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms Janice F. Ryder Æ William E. Tunmer Æ Keith T.

Greaney Published online: 4 July 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group, with the intervention group being divided into four groups of three children each. The intervention program was carried out over a period of 24 weeks and comprised 56 highly sequenced, semiscripted lessons in phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills delivered by a teacher aide who received training and ongoing support from a remedial reading specialist. Posttests results showed that the intervention group significantly outperformed the control group on measures of phonemic awareness, pseudoword decoding, context free word recognition, and reading comprehension. Two-year follow-up data indicated that the positive effects of the intervention program were not only maintained but had generalized to word recognition accuracy in connected text. Keywords Phonemic awareness Decoding skills Reading difficulties Reading intervention Introduction Shankweiler and Fowler (2004) recently reviewed research with the purpose of providing answers to recurring questions about the role of phonological processes in learning to read. They drew several conclusions, two of which are particularly relevant to the present study: first, ‘‘phoneme awareness is key to reading an alphabetic system’’ (p. 488), and second, ‘‘explicit, systematic instruction in the J. F. Ryder W. E. Tunmer (&) K. T. Greaney College of Education, Massey University, Massey Campus, Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: w.tunmer@massey.ac.nz 123 Read Writ (2008) 21:349–369 DOI 10.1007/s11145-007-9080-z code relating spellings to pronunciations is necessary for most children’’ (p. 493). Similarly, from an examination of findings from a wide array of sources (e.g., studies of reading development, specific instructional practices, and effective teachers and schools), Snow and Juel (2005) concluded that explicit attention to alphabetic coding skills in early reading instruction is ‘‘helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some’’ (p. 518). Snow and Juel further noted that ‘‘the development of detailed orthographic representations is vital to the automatization of word recognition’’ (p. 511). Research has established that making use of letter–sound relationships to identify unfamiliar words is the basic mechanism for acquiring sight word (i.e., wordspecific) knowledge, including knowledge of irregularly spelled words (Adams, 1990; Adams & Bruck, 1993; Ehri, 1992, 1997, 2005; Gough & Walsh, 1991; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Hulme, Snowling, & Quinlan, 1991; Perfetti, 1992; Share, 1995; Tunmer & Chapman, 1998, 2006). The formation of sub-lexical, visuophonological connections between printed words and their spoken counterparts in memory provides the basis for fast, efficient recognition of words, which in turn frees up cognitive resources for allocation to sentence comprehension and text integration processes (Perfetti, 1985; Pressley, 2006; Share, 1995). A key question that remains, however, is the extent to which explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding strategies is needed by students. It is not possible to teach students all, or even most, of the letter–sound relationships of English orthography. In their influential theory of reading acquisition, Gough and Hillinger (1980) pointed out that there are simply too many letter–sound relationships for children to acquire by direct instruction. Rather, as the reading attempts of beginning readers with a firm understanding of the alphabetic principle become more successful, they will begin making greater independent use of letter–sound information (possibly supplemented by sentence context cues) to identify unfamiliar words in text. Phonologically recoding specific words a few times ultimately cements the orthographic representations of the words in lexical memory from which additional spelling-sound relationships can then be induced without explicit instruction (Share, 1995). Snow and Juel (2005) claimed that ‘‘phonics may be useful to children not because of the specific letter–sound relations taught, but because a phonics approach gives children the chance to discover the alphabetic principle, and provides practice looking closely at word spelling’’ (p. 516). Although children must rely on induction to acquire the spelling-sound relations necessary for learning to read, the amount of explicit phonics instruction required to ‘‘kick-start’’ the process of ‘‘self-teaching’’ (Share, 1995) may vary considerably across children. As Snow and Juel (2005) pointed out, ‘‘perhaps the key feature of classroom instruction ensuring that one child learns to read is systematic progress through a long list of letter–sound correspondence rules, whereas for another child the key feature is teaching just a few phonics rules but providing lots of interesting and increasingly difficult books for practice and self-teaching’’ (p. 517). For children encountering difficulty in developing the ability to intuitively perceive redundant patterns and connections between speech and print, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills is likely to be critical. 350 J. F. Ryder et al. 123 Consistent with this suggestion is a considerable amount of research indicating that children enter school with large individual differences in the experiences and competencies important in learning to read (Nicholson, 2003; Tunmer, Chapman, & Prochnow, 2003; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001). These reading-related skills include receptive vocabulary (promoted by shared reading and verbal interaction in the home), familiarity with ‘‘book’’ or ‘‘decontextualized’’ language and basic understanding of concepts and conventions of printed language (also promoted by adult storybook reading), knowledge of letter names and sounds (developed by exposure to ABC books and games), ability to produce preconventional spellings of words (developed by manipulating movable letters to form ‘‘invented’’ spellings; e.g., writing color as KLR, or fairy as FRE), and sensitivity to the subcomponents of spoken words (promoted by playing rhyming and sound analysis games and being read books that increase phonological sensitivity; e.g., pig latin, I spy, nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss books). Children who possess higher levels of these skills at school entry profit more from reading instruction, learn to read sooner, and read better than children who do not (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001). Of the various reading-related skills that develop in prereading children, phonemic awareness (the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic elements of spoken words) is one of the most important (Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004). New school entrants who experience ongoing difficulties in detecting phonemic sequences in words will not be able to fully grasp the alphabetic principle and discover spelling-to-sound relationships. Without specific intervention, the development of word recognition skills in these children will be impeded, resulting in negative Matthew (or poor-get-poorer) effects in reading achievement (Stanovich, 1986).

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