may be the single most powerful determinant of the success she or he will experience in learning to read and of the likelihood that she or he will fail.’
(Adams, 1990, p.304) In 2000, the National Reading Panel was established by US Congress to research how best children learn to read. After conducting a meta-analysis of controlled
experimental reading studies published in peer-reviewed journals, they produced their report, Teaching Children to Read (2000). This was, and still remains, the largest and most influential research carried out on the teaching of reading to date. The report identified phonemic awareness – along with fluency, vocabulary, phonics and reading comprehension – as one of the five essential components of beginning reading instruction. Closer to home, the joint report published in 2010 by the Education and Training
Inspectorate (ETI) in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland Department of Education and Skills Inspectorate on How Best to Promote and Improve Literacy and Numeracy in our Schools (DES, 2010), recommended that ‘teaching and learning in literacy are effective when teachers are given the opportunity to become skilled in
identifying early reading difficulties and developing expertise to help promote children’s phonemic awareness’ (p. 5).
Phonemic awareness acts as an important bridge between spoken language and written language (Stahl & Murray, 1994; Torgesen et al., 1994; Bus & Van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Catts, Fey, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2002) and an awareness of the individual phonemes in words is critical for grasping the alphabetic principle of the English language and learning how to use it (Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004). The premise here is that if children cannot hear the individual sounds in spoken words, they will struggle to map these sounds onto the letters of the alphabet when they are introduced. Without the development of phonemic awareness, the alphabetic code can be entirely arbitrary, particularly for struggling readers, with the task of dealing with the symbol system often becoming
overwhelming (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). Snow et al. (1998) state that ‘because phonemes are the units of sound that are represented by the letters of the alphabet, an awareness of phonemes is key to understanding the logic of the alphabetic principle’ (p.52).
Knowledge of the alphabetic principle is directly linked to word recognition, and, in particular, to decoding. Decoding is an aspect of word recognition that gets particular attention when a child is in the beginning stages of learning to read. It relates to a reader’s ability to make meaning from print by recognising printed symbols, attributing a speech sound to them and blending them together in a fluent manner. It is often referred to as ‘sounding out’ the printed word. Scarborough and Brady (2002) define decoding as ‘the process of applying one’s knowledge of the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes to determine the pronunciation, and hence the identity, of the word represented by a particular letter sequence’ (p. 324). Phonemic awareness has been acknowledged as playing a pivotal role in a child’s ability to decode in the early stages of reading (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bryant et al., 1990; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2000; Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Carson et al., 2013; Cunningham, 1990; Ehri et al., 2001;
Gillon, 2004; Lonigan, 2003; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Torgesen et al., 1994; Troia, 1999), as it aids the reader in attributing speech sounds to otherwise arbitrary, meaningless symbols. In the early stages of learning to read, the majority of the printed words
encountered by a child are new, and accessing a word by way of phonological representation is particularly important.
Consequently, the ability to identify, blend, and segment the sounds of spoken language at the phoneme level assists children when letters are introduced and helps them to see the connection and relationship between phonemes and graphemes, otherwise known as the alphabetic principle. The long-term effects of children entering school with low levels of phonemic awareness have been documented and research has found that poor readers who enter first grade with poor phonemic awareness are very likely to remain poor readers at the end of fourth grade as their lack of phonemic awareness skills contributes to the slow acquisition of decoding skills (Juel, 1988).
Phonemic awareness, therefore, contributes to early reading development in several important ways:
It provides children with a platform to understand that the sounds in spoken words can be represented in print (Al Otaiba, Kosanovich & Torgesen, 2012; Torgesen, 1998).
It enhances children’s ability to recognise regular phoneme-grapheme relationships, which consolidates the development of phonological representations that support decoding (Al Otaiba et al, 2012; Ball, 1993; Goswami & Bryant, 1990).
It helps children to decode words that are partially irregular, by sounding out the regular phoneme-grapheme components with the word and deducing possible word meanings from this (Al Otaiba et al, 2012; Ehri, 1992). For example, if a child comes to an unfamiliar word and can recognize only the
initial sound that is associated with the first letter(s), an understanding of phonemic awareness allows the child to search his/her vocabulary for word possibilities beginning with that particular sound.
The role that phonemic awareness plays in learning to read provides a strong rationale for researchers, teachers and policy makers to ensure instruction in phonemic awareness is included as part of early reading classroom practice.
The explicit and systematic, teacher-led phonological awareness programme created and implemented in this dissertation focuses primarily on developing children’s phonemic awareness skills. While attention is also given to instruction of the larger phonological awareness skills (eg. syllabification and onset-rime), the programme moves through these skills quickly in order to arrive and provide the majority of instruction at the crucial phoneme level. The programme includes instruction in phoneme identification, blending and segmentation skills; however, the manipulation of phonemes is not included in the programme as, developmentally, it is considered too difficult a skill for junior infants to perform (Moats, 2003).
2.4 Reciprocal Relationship between Phonemic Awareness and Print Knowledge