2.5 Acquiring Basic Reading Skills in First Language
2.5.2 The Bottom-Up Approach to Acquiring Basic Reading Skills in
A second route in dual route theory is phonological, whereby the printed words are converted into pronunciations through the application of letter- sound rules; namely recoding rules. This is reflective of the bottom-up approach to the acquisition of basic reading skills in L1.
The pronunciations are then used to enter the lexicon and retrieve meanings. As readers improve at phonological recoding, they automatically apply letter-sound rules to many different spelling patterns. They execute this process fairly rapidly although never as rapidly as visual word reading. (Ehri 1992, p 110)
Generally, it is thought that phonological recoding is not used to read words that the reader has read several times before. Usually unfamiliar, low frequent, difficult or nonsense words are read using phonological recoding. Once words become familiar in print they are read by sight.
In agreement, Stanovich (1986) states that once readers become familiar with printed words, they stop decoding them and read them by sight. Ehri (1992) provides an alternative explanation of sight word reading that does not eliminate phonological processes but only omits phonological recoding. Ehri (1992) claims that when letter-sounds are used initially to decode words they will be retained and will participate in the reading-by-memory operation.
Setting up a visual-phonological route into memory involves forming specific connections between visual cues seen in the word and its pronunciation stored in memory.
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The visual cues consist of a sequence of letters. The connection linking the letters to the pronunciation are formed out of readers' knowledge of letter-sound correspondence and other orthographic regularities linking print to speech (1992, p 114).
When readers see an unfamiliar word, they phonologically recode the word. This triggers the processor setting up a visual-phonological route of that unfamiliar word leading from its spelling directly to its pronunciation in memory. The moment such routes are set up, readers can look at spelling and immediately retrieve their specific pronunciations without resorting to translation rules and recoding. The critical connections that enable readers to find words in the lexical memory through the visual- phonological route are connections linking spelling to pronunciations rather than to meanings. Ehri (1992) believes that the connections between spelling and meaning are easily formed in the process of building visual-phonological routes, due to the fact that readers already know the connections between pronunciations and meanings from speech, and when spellings are connected to pronunciations, the connections, perhaps automatically, extend to meaning as well. The visual-phonological route consists of many systematic connections, which makes it much more stable and well established in memory, than the visual-semantic route.
If the dual route theory is correct in stating that sight words are read by a non-phonological visual route, then one would expect readers to learn to read both type of words, those whose spelling bears no relationship to sound and those which have systematic letter-sound correspondences, with equal skill. However, studies by Brooks (1977) and Spring (1978) indicate that this is not the case.
In his study, Brooks (1977) used artificial orthography and found that words having systematic letter-sound relations were read more rapidly than arbitrarily spelled words. Spring's (1978) study confirms these
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findings. Spring (1978) found that even after much practice, when letters related arbitrarily to words had presumably achieved sight-word status; phonologically spelled words were read faster than arbitrarily spelled words.
The findings of both studies indicate that systematic or arbitrary spelling of words makes a big difference in how readers learn to read the words by sight. Ehri (1992) explains these findings by noting that:
Letters in spellings are processed as symbols for phonemes in the pronunciations of specific words in the course of forming visual- phonological connections. As a result, spellings become amalgamated to pronunciations and are retrained in memory as orthographic 'images' of the words, that is, visual letter-analysed representations. These representations also become amalgamated to meanings in memory. It is this amalgam that is accessed directly when sight words are read and recognised by means of visual-phonological connections (Ehri, 1992, p 120).
Smith (1994), as well as Ehri (1992), believes that some 'procedures permitting the visual identification of words without the prior identification of letters also permit comprehension without the prior identification of words' (p 119). He describes three approaches to word identification. The first, the whole-word approach, is based on the premise that readers do not stop to identify individual letters (or groups of letters) in the identification of a word. This view claims that knowledge of the alphabet and of the sounds of letters is irrelevant to reading.
Supporting evidence for this approach is that words may be identified when none of their component letters can be clearly discriminated as mentioned before, in the logographic stage of Frith's (1985) model; for example, identifying a name on a roadside sign when just giving it a quick glance. In this case, word recognition does not depend on letter
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identification. Smith (1994) has shown that words can be identified as quickly as letters. And if entire words can be identified as quickly as letters, 'how can their identification involve spelling them out letter by letter?' (Smith 1994, p 120)
Smith (1994) goes on to say that what actually enables a skilled reader to identify a word is broad, acquired knowledge about the way in which letters are grouped into words. This knowledge of the way words are spelled is an alternative non-visual source of information to the visual information available to the reader. In other words, the reader knows the number of alternative ways in which a written word might be constructed. This knowledge includes the fact that when certain features occur in one part of a word, there are limits to the kinds of feature combinations in other parts of the word and to what the word as a whole might be. Thus a reader is able to make use of sequential redundancy among features, and as a result will be able to identify words with so little visual information that the identification of letters is completely bypassed. This phenomenon occurs due to the fact that the reader realises there are systematic correspondences between the letters of the alphabet and the phonemes of the phonological system (Tunmen and Bowey, 1984). To break the orthographic code, the beginning reader must figure out what phonemes go with what graphemes, which requires the ability to recognise the units of the written and spoken language. This point was mentioned before by Ehri (1992) and stressed by Bowey and Tunmer (1984) who claim that,
On first consideration, young children's inability to segment words into phonemes seems paradoxical, given that they can discriminate different speech sounds and use phonemic differences between spoken words to signal meaning differences. The difference, however, is that using a phonemic contrast to signal a meaning difference is not the same as realising that the relevant difference is
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a phonemic difference. The perception and analysis of the speech code is done intuitively and at a subconscious level while the analysis of written language requires an explicit and conscious awareness of the relationship that exists between alphabetic shapes and phonological segments (Tunmer & Bowey 1984, 158-159).
Goswami (1990) argues that it is most unlikely that the progress that children make in reading is determined by their sensitivity to phonemes.
On the contrary, their progress in learning to read is probably the most important cause of awareness of phonemes. Children are not particularly sensitive to the existence of phonemes in words at the time when they begin to learn to read, and if they do not learn an alphabetic script they continue to be insensitive to these phonological units for some time (Goswami 1990, p 26).
Goswami (1990) explains that awareness of sounds (or phonological awareness), which plays an important part when learning to read, is an umbrella term. She believes that since there are different ways of breaking up a word into its constituent sounds, there must be different forms of phonological awareness. The first way to break up a word is into syllables. Monosyllabic words, generally the first words learnt by beginning readers, are not relevant to this kind of awareness.
Another way involves much smaller phonological segments; that is, dividing a word into phonemes. The importance for the beginning reader of using the relationships between single letters and single phonemes, or 'grapheme-phoneme correspondences', has been widely recognised as crucial to success in learning to read.
Goswami (1990) suggests that there is a third and intermediate kind of phonological awareness. Words can be divided up into units that are larger than the single phoneme but smaller than the syllable. These units lie somewhere between a phoneme and a syllable (they are sometimes called 'intra-syllabic-units'). The terminology for the opening unit of a
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word is 'the onset' and the end unit 'the rime'. 'To know that there are categories of words which end with the same sound is a form of phonological awareness' (Goswami, 1990: 3).
The importance of phonological awareness in reading success is clear and when composing the pre- and post-intervention assessment for the dyslexic participants of my research, the three kinds of phonological awareness suggested by Goswami (1990) were taken into consideration and are discussed in Chapter 3, on research design and methodology.
The question then arises whether reading leads to phonological awareness or phonological awareness affects reading. If the experience of learning to read produces phonological awareness, then readers will only become aware of the constituent sounds in words after they have begun to learn to read. But, in fact, they are expected to detect and recognise these constituent sounds quite some time before they can read. Goswami (1990) reports that young children who have not yet learned to read, find it difficult to detect and manipulate phonemes, which might indicate of a lack of awareness of phonemes. Sutherland and Gillon (2005) claim, in this context, that preschool children with speech impairment experience more difficulty judging correct and incorrect speech productions of familiar multi-syllable words and show less performance in the ability to acquire nonwords as compared to children without speech impairment. Sutherland and Gillon (2005) conclude that performance on these tasks is correlated with phonological awareness ability.
Two experiments performed by Ehri and Wilce (1980) and Tunmer and Nesdale (1985) support Goswami's (1990) view. In the two experiments, children who had already mastered reading were asked to represent each phoneme in a word by a counter (Ehri and Wilce, 1980) or to tap out the number of sounds in real words and nonsense words (Tunmer and
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Nesdale, 1985). Both studies show that children use what knowledge they have of spelling sequences when they are given phoneme tasks of this sort. They count or tap out letters. Their route to phonemes is through the letters which represent them.
In other words, these studies support the belief that phonological awareness is acquired through the prior knowledge of the alphabet, and not the other way around. This approach to reading is a bottom-up one, where explicit knowledge about letters and syllables precedes reading, while an awareness of phonemes follows it. The bottom-up approach contrasts the top-down one where, as mentioned in the previous section, researchers believe that phonological awareness is acquired through teaching whole words. The bottom-up approach will be discussed again further on in this chapter in the section on dyslexia (reading disabilities). Table 2:2 compares the top-down and bottom-up approaches to learning to read.
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Table 2:2 Comparison of Approaches of Learning to Read
Learning to Read
Top-down approach 1. Readers begin to recognise words in their environment and form connections that are arbitrary but not phonological. 2. Readers learn the letter names or sounds. They use their
knowledge to form systematic visual-phonological connections between letters seen in words and sounds detected in their pronunciations. However, connections are as yet incomplete.
3. Readers acquire phonemic segmentation and phonological decoding skills and use this knowledge to form complete visual-phonological connections in learning to read sight words.
4. Readers link individual letters to individual phonemes and the sequence of letters is connected to the blend of phonemes.
Bottom-up approach 1. Readers are taught to make connections between symbols and sounds (grapheme-phoneme correspondences). 2. Readers are taught to blend the graphemes and phonemes
into words.
3. With experience, readers learn to decode more complex grapheme-phoneme correspondences on their own.
2.5.3 The Role of Phonological Awareness in Acquiring
Basic Reading Skills in First Language
This section deals with the importance of phonological awareness in acquiring basic reading skills in L1. This point is stressed by Anthony and Francis (2005) who claim that phonological awareness is the phonological processing ability most strongly related to literacy. Tunmer and Rohl (1991) explain that 'phonological awareness can be defined as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of speech' (1991; p 2). They argue with Goswami's (1990) view that phonological awareness is also the awareness of syllables, intrasyllabic units or phonemes by suggesting that phonological awareness is only the awareness of phonemes. They mention two conflicting views of the relationship
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between phonological awareness and learning to read an alphabetic orthography.
The first claims that phonological awareness is causally related to learning to read. Not only does it facilitate the acquisition of basic reading skills, but it is also necessary for learning to read. The second, and contrasting one, is that phonological awareness is a consequence of learning to read. According to the first view, some minimal level of explicit phonological awareness is necessary for children to be able to discover the systematic correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. This knowledge will enable beginning readers to identify unfamiliar words and to gain the levels of practice required for developing speed and fluency and accuracy in reading words. However, eventually beginning readers will need to develop a more advanced form of phonological awareness in order to acquire more specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences to recognise words that do not share common rime spelling patterns with other words.
Manis's and Morrison's (1985) study shows that knowledge of grapheme- phoneme correspondence is intimately related to the acquisition of basic reading skills; thus children must acquire phonological recoding skills. Phonological recoding ability in the beginning stages of learning to read predicts later reading achievement. Successful readers in strictly whole word reading programs are the children who score higher on tests of phonological recoding ability. This suggests that phonological awareness may be both a cause and consequence of learning to read. According to this view, beginning readers must achieve some minimal level of phonemic segmentation ability in order to acquire basic reading skills that, in turn, enable them to acquire the by-product skills of reading that provide the basis for performing more difficult phonological awareness tasks. This would explain why phonological awareness tasks that draw heavily on the by-product skills of reading can only be performed by children who have
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already acquired some reading skills. This point is in agreement with Tunmer's and Rohl's (1991) view of the relationship between phonological awareness and learning to read.
Morais
et al
(1987) appear to agree with the view that phonological awareness is crucial for reading but suggest that 'on the basis of the current knowledge, it may be claimed that alphabetic literacy and segmental awareness develop together, through a process of multiple reciprocal influences, at least to some level' (1987, p 539).Warren-Leubecker and Carter (1988) demonstrated that phonemic awareness consistently predicted reading better than any subtest of a reading readiness test or scores from a vocabulary test. Juel
et al
(1986) found that phonemic awareness accounted for almost half the variance in word recognition at the end of Grade 1. Mann (1986) found that pre- school training of phonological awareness facilitates the acquisition of reading and spelling skills in school.The fact that phonological awareness can be developed without using the letters of the alphabet does not necessarily mean that letters are unimportant. On the contrary; letters can serve as an effective system of representation of the elusive phonological structure. Hohn and Ehri (1983) found that phoneme segmentation was better learned by using letters rather than by using blank markers.
The discussion in this section confirms and reinforces the critical role that phonological awareness plays in learning to read in the first language.
The next section discusses theories which explain dyslexia. It is vital to understand what dyslexia is before discussing the difficulties faced by 'dyslexic students' when learning to read in their first, and then second, language.
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