Improving phonological awareness and word reading in a later learned alphabetic script

A meta-analysis of training effects on English phonological awareness and reading in native Chinese speakers

Enhancing English phonological awareness is critical in promoting native English speakers' reading development. However, less attention has been paid to the role of phonological awareness development for English language learners in a logographic context. This meta-analysis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of training native Chinese speakers' English phonological awareness and reading across age groups. Thirty-three articles, including 37 independent samples, were identified as training studies that reported English phonological awareness as an outcome measure, and 16 articles, including 17 independent samples, featured training studies that reported reading as an outcome measure. Results based on a random-effect model revealed the effect sizes for overall English phonological awareness (including English syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, and rhyme awareness) and overall reading (including word reading and pseudoword reading) were g = 0.651 (n = 3137) and g = 0.498 (n = 1506), respectively. Specifically, instructional training exerted a small impact on word reading (g = 0.297), moderate effects on syllable awareness (g = 0.468) and pseudoword reading (g = 0.586), a medium to large effect on phoneme awareness (g = 0.736), and a large impact on rhyme awareness (g = 0.948). The moderator analyses yielded several significant findings. Regarding the English phonological awareness outcome, programs integrating lexical semantic knowledge exhibited the largest trend in enhancing native Chinese speakers' skills. Among all age groups, upper elementary students benefited most from instructional training. Furthermore, more intensive training had a greater impact than less intensive training. In terms of the reading outcome, similar to English phonological awareness findings, upper elementary students realized the greatest improvements. Additionally, unpublished articles indicated a larger training effect on reading than published ones. These findings provide practitioners with guidelines for delivering effective instruction to promote phonological awareness and reading ability for English language learners in a logographic language context.

Extracting phonological patterns for L2 word learning: the effect of poor phonological awareness

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of Chinese-speaking six-grade students took a multi-trial L2 (English) word learning task after being exposed to a set of familiar words that rhymed with the target words. Children's PA was measured at grade 3. Children with relatively poorer L1 PA and those with better L1 PA did not differ in identifying the forms of the new words. However, children with poorer L1 PA demonstrated reduced performance in naming pictures with labels that rhymed with the pre-exposure words than with labels that did not rhyme with the pre-exposure words. Children with better L1 PA were not affected by the recurring rime shared by the pre-exposure words and the target words. These findings suggest that poor L1 PA may impede L2 word learning via difficulty in abstracting phonological patterns away from L2 input to scaffold word learning.

The development of phonological awareness: effects of spoken language experience and orthography

Phonological awareness, the ability to analyze spoken language into small sound units, has been shown to be affected by the individual's early orthographic experience (alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic). Past studies, however, have not differentiated the effect of script alphabeticity from that of spoken language experience, which covaries strongly with the phonological properties of the language. The present study compares younger, pre-reading to older, literate children from different linguistic backgrounds on their phonological awareness. Hong Kong and Guangzhou subjects both spoke Cantonese. The latter subjects had early experience with Pinyin (alphabetic) in addition to their logographic Chinese reading; the former read only logographic Chinese. New Zealand subjects spoke English and read the Roman alphabet. Results showed that: (1) the Hong Kong and Guangzhou pre-readers performed very similarly at all levels of phonological awareness; (2) the New Zealand pre-readers outperformed their Hong Kong and Guangzhou counterparts on onset, rime, and coda analyses; (3) the Guangzhou reading children outperformed their Hong Kong counterparts on onset and coda analyses. Whereas finding (3) reflects an effect of alphabeticity in the first learned script, finding (2) in combination with finding (1) indicates an effect of early spoken language experience independent of orthography. The fact that orthographic and spoken language experience both impact on the development of phonological skills implies a mediating function of phonological awareness in integrating sound information derived from reading and perceiving speech.