This section discusses the relationship between phonological awareness and pronunciation accuracy. Various studies and conclusions are presented as follows.
Phonological Awareness and Spoken Language
Ouellette (2006) pointed out that there is no consensus about the nature of the relations between oral language and reading. Fowler (2010) thought that literacy may also influence one’s knowledge of spoken language. Edward, Munson, and Beckman (2011) stressed that the relationship between phonology and lexical knowledge can be best comprehended by reconstructing the association between the phonological system and the lexicon.
Print/decoding skills assist children in translating spoken language into print and vice versa.
Such skills are generally evaluated by tests of phonological sensitivity, letter identification, and letter-sound correspondence (Gest, Freeman, Domitrovich, & Welsh, 2004). Speech sounds are viewed as clear deterministic chains of articulatory and acoustic incidences, the same across contexts and speakers, which are expanded to phonological categories; in addition, phonological representations are learned through the dynamics of the
production-perception loop (Edwards, Munson, & Beckman, 2011). Anthony and Francis (2005) argued that aspects of articulation resulting in linguistically complex words influence the development o-f phonemic awareness as well. Then, Taibah and Haynes’
(2011) found that students’ speed and accuracy contributes to their oral reading fluency.
Generally speaking, fluency can be divided into three main elements: rate, accuracy, and expression (prosody) among which, up to now, accuracy and rate were most explored.
Fluent readers read with greater speed than non-fluent readers, so they are probably able to combine more words into an entire sentence within one breath. The sharp increase in pausing by less fluent readers might also be explained by the increased number of decoding uncertainties as text difficulties increase (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, 2010). Pikulski and Chard (2005) indicated fluency is a bridge of word decoding and reading comprehension. In 2000, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in the U.S.
stated that fluency skill, by definition, is composed of the capability to read quickly, accurately, and expressively.
Kershaw and Schatschneider (2012) examined latent interaction among decoding and linguistic comprehension in third grade students and also the potential predictors of passage fluency, working memory, and performance IQ in third, seventh, and tenth grade students.
To measure the students’ working memory, they asked students to read a true or false sentence loudly and then state whether it was true or false. The results showed that students developed each year from third to tenth grade. The third grade students’ reading
comprehension could be greatly explained by their decoding ability. However, the
contribution of linguistic comprehension significantly explained the tenth grade students’
reading comprehension. Thus, fluent decoding seems to be a critical predictor of reading comprehension across elementary, middle, and high school, and passage fluency is also predictive of seventh and tenth grade reading comprehension. If children can read quickly and accurately, they can easily access to their cognitive resources that aid their
comprehension (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, 2010).
Hulme, Snowling, Caravols, and Carroll (2005) illustrated the following relationships among phoneme awareness, reading, and letter-sound knowledge:
Before learning to recognize After learning to recognize printed words printed words
Figure 1.1. Model 1: Unidirectional relationship between phoneme awareness and reading Model 1, shown in Figure 1.2, is a path diagram illustrating a unidirectional causal relationship between phoneme awareness in pre-readers and later success in learning to read.
This figure also indicated phoneme awareness is important for language learners to develop their reading ability.
Before learning to recognize After learning to recognize Printed words printed words
Phoneme Awareness
Reading
Phoneme Awareness
Letter-sound Knowledge
Reading
Figure 1.2. Model 2: Relationships among phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and reading
Model 2, shown in Figure 1.2, is a path diagram illustrating bidirectional influences between phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge in pre-readers, with each skill having both direct and indirect effects on later success in learning to read.
According to Hulme, Snowling, Caravols, and Carroll (2005), in Model 2, the skills of phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge have a direct impact on reading, and phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge are correlated with each other. It is vital to specify that phonological awareness in Model 2 probably has a direct influence on later reading capability and an indirect impact on reading via letter-sound knowledge. To some extent, phonological skills are required for learners to start learning letter-sound
correspondences. As long as the letter-sound correspondences are learned, phonological skills, in turn, foster the development of phonological awareness. Preliterate phonological awareness and the phonological awareness developed from learning letter names and letter sounds in the alphabet can help children develop their reading literacy (Anthony & Francis, 2005).
It seems that the skills of phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge are
relatively independent before children learn to read, and phoneme manipulation ability and letter-sound knowledge are dissociative. Phoneme manipulation ability does not assure the understanding of letter-sounds; that is to say, children utilize the orthographic process to access the phoneme and its letter. Thus, a great deal of data reveal oral language
development, in some aspects, is the potential to learn to read (Hulme, Snowling, Caravolas, & Carroll, 2005).
As suggested by Anthony and Francis (2005), the development of phonological awareness is affected by linguistic complexities of word form, phoneme position, and pronunciation factors. The independent phoneme-position effect is evidence for this:
Children learn to recognize and manipulate the first consonant in a cluster onset (e.g., crest) or the final consonant in the coda before the medial consonant. Saliency and complexity of onsets in spoken language may influence the development of onset awareness and phoneme awareness. Children become relatively more or less sensitive to onsets than to phonemes within the onset under various circumstances of frequency of exposure to or variety and complexity of cluster onsets in their oral language.
Lee (2006) indicated that phoneme segmentation and phoneme deleting can better explain reading comprehension and pronunciation. Cooper, Roth, and Speece (2002) inferred that the connection between oral language and literacy is reciprocally developed instead of unidirectional, and basic linguistic knowledge and phonological awareness skill directly improve reading. They mentioned that the oral language skill of metalinguistic awareness represents a proportion of emergent literacy that has a well-developed connection to literacy learning. Particularly, the metaphonological skill of phonological awareness is important in early reading. Therefore, they investigated whether children’s general oral language skill, word reading, and background factors can predict significant differences in their phonological awareness skills. The participants were 52 children who were divided into two groups: capable readers from kindergarten to second grade and non-readers in kindergarten. The researchers concluded that general oral language skill accounted for most variance in the children’s phonological awareness and supported the development of early reading literacy. Other background factors were also taken into account, such as family literacy and social economical status (SES). They discovered a fundamental relationship among oral language skills, background factors, and phonological awareness skills. Oral language skills interplay with phonological awareness, and the background factors can predict oral language skills but not phonological awareness.
Velleman (2011) indicated interactions between early speech sounds development and other linguistic capabilities are found in both children with speech sound disorders and children with normally developed speech. The scant production of vocabulary by children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech, are likely the result of their lacking in precisely and smoothly articulate, recognizable words. Therefore, the potential determinant of either lexicon size and the refinement of phonological system could be partially shared cognitive-linguistic ability. The oral production of vocabulary by children with sounds disorders is measured by their lexicon size rather than their pronunciation accuracy, and, most importantly, phonological awareness and other higher-order phonological skill have apparently similar functions in both normally developed children and children with sounds disorders. Stoel-Gammon (2011) pointed out that children must be sensitive to the
connection between a certain sequence of speech sounds and a certain meaning; besides, they must have some knowledge of the articulatory movement that is needed to pronounce the target sequences.
Zamuner (2011) claimed that phonological forms influence words children pronounce and learn, and having knowledge of the sound forms and sound structures of a language is
vital before learners construct the lexicon or incorporate the knowledge in future
development in the language. Much evidence has revealed that children’s early language abilities can be influenced by phonetic structures, and their enjoyment of English learning may be determined by their English speaking ability or types of learning activities they engage in (Bleses, Basbøll, Lum, & Vach, 2011). More than half of the poor readers in Nag and Snowling’s (2011) study encountered problems in one or more aspects of oral language.
When children pronounce words inaccurately, they need more exposure to accurate English forms in order to correct the errors (Menn, Schmidt, & Nicolas, 2009).
Effects of Cross-Language Transfer between L1 and L2
In relation to language education policy, researchers have discussed how students’ L1 (not English) may influence their achievement in English education in elementary school (Wu, 2011). Compared with L1 learners, the L2 learners in Kieffer and Lesaux’s (2012) study had more restricted exposure to target vocabulary in their oral experiences. Johnson and Tweedie (2010) proved that phonemic awareness plays an important role in children’s early literacy in Malaysia. They also stressed that phonological awareness assists learners to identify and speak larger spoken units. Uchikoshi and Marinova-Todd (2012) asserted that extra English exposure can accelerate language learners’ awareness of complicate
phonemes. Moreover, for language learners, there will be potential L1 transfer in their phonological awareness. In regard to syllables and word structures, English is quite
different from many other languages in that it has a higher proportion of CVC words and a low proportion of words with more than two syllables (Stoel-Gammon, 2011).
Leong, Chen, and Tan investigated the orthographic knowledge of 108 EFL students in Hong Kong and found that phonological sensitivity and word identification (i.e., reading and spelling of regular and exception words) were intertwined. The data showed that
orthographic knowledge accounted for most performance in word identification, leading the researchers to conclude that the students exploited their orthographic and word-related knowledge much more than their insufficient phonological skills.
Ashmore, Farrier, and Pahlson (2003) expanded the idea that phonological awareness improves reading in the alphabetic system to non-alphabetic Chinese scripts. Chinese uses a logographic system in which the character is the smallest articulate unit. In Chinese, every character corresponds to a syllable, and speech sounds are recorded as syllables. In
addition, individual phonemes do not merely appear in the script. Over 80% of Chinese
characters encompass two proportions: One proportion is phonetic, and the other is semantic, and the phonetic part represents information about the articulation.
Ziegler and Goswami (2005) demonstrated that children whose spoken language has a large proportion of rime neighbors can easily develop onset and rime awareness (C_VC) before body-coda awareness. For instance, English-, French-, Dutch-, and German-speaking children can subdivide the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable into onset and rime (C_VC) prior to learning body-coda segmentation (CV-C).
Kehoe (2011) maintained that the biological element of phonology in speech motor skills and articulatory practice may accelerate other language development, and this is a cross-language effect on phonology and the lexicon. The portion that accounted for the most reading difficulties for Kannada was the phonological portion, and poor readers had difficulties in both syllable and phoneme level processing tasks in other alphasyllabaries like Korean (Nag & Snowling, 2011). Alphasyllabaries are constructed by
consonant-and-vowel spellings.
Sun-Alperin and Wang (2011) explored the correlation between L1 phonological processing and L2 reading in English learning by Spanish-speaking children, using various assessments such as the following: oral language proficiency, onset-rhyme detection, phoneme detection task, homophone choice task, real word reading, pseudoword reading, real word spelling, and pseudoword spelling. They concluded that Spanish phonological processing mutually affected bilingual reading, including English word reading and pseudoword reading, but Spanish orthographic processing did not predict English spelling performance. The study showed that the universal phonological processes used among alphabetic languages are pivotal in improving bilingual reading acquisition.
Ouellette (2006) wrote that reading comprehension seems to be engaged with the process of word recognition and other processes related to language comprehension.
Research on non-words and real-words inferred that children are sensitively aware of statistical properties in their language and that these properties impact both their accuracy of production and their construction of the mental lexicon (Stoel-Gammon, 2011). Sheu (2008) studied the association between EFL elementary school students’ phonological awareness and their spoken English. She discovered that phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation can efficiently assist the development of phonological awareness.
Ashmore, Farrier, and Pahlson (2003) recruited about 200 Chinese children of first and
second grade to explore whether phonological awareness instruction given in class would influence their phonological awareness and word reading performance. The results showed that phonological awareness training indeed improved the children’s phonological
awareness and word reading performance. Thus, English training and drills are important for improving children’s comprehension abilities (Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant. 2003). In conclusion, EFL learners may need extra assistance and training on their knowledge of phonology when they learn an L2. Besides, various features of L1 and L2 also influence the English achievement of EFL learners. Few previous studies have investigated the
cross-language effect on Taiwanese EFL language learners. It is hoped that our study will contribute to understanding this effect.