While intently drawing a picture for his mother, 3-year-old Ian paused momentarily, looked up from his unfolding masterpiece, and proclaimed, "Hey-doodle and boodle. That matches!" Two-year-old Sarah, always eager to charm those in her presence, held up her favorite snack and declared with a grin, "Look! It a deanut-dutter danwich." Daniel, who exhibited the typical articulation errors of a 21/2-year-old, could not correctly pronounce his younger brother's name. After several attempts, he gave up and said with much chagrin, "'Nafan' is too hard to say. It has a 'th' in it." (See van Kleeck & Bryant, 1983 and van Kleeck & Schuele, 1987, for these and other examples.)
Delightful vignettes such as these illustrate that even toddlers are capable of making insightful observations about the sound characteristics of speech, sometimes with humorous results. Their explicit knowledge of, and ability to manipulate, the sound structure of spoken language is known as phonological awareness or metaphonological capacity. Children frequently engage in a variety of oral language activities that require phonological awareness. These include rhyming (e.g., cat-mat), alliteration (e.g., lazy lions like to lounge at lunch), blending sounds (e.g., d-o-g - dog), isolating sounds (e.g., fish - f-ish), segmenting words into their constituent sounds (e.g., chip - ch-i-p), deleting sounds (e.g., stand - sand), and substituting sounds (e.g., tap - map).
As young children playfully exploit the phonological properties of language, they fortify the underpinnings of literacy. For the beginning reader, word identification processes play a prominent role in deriving meaning from print. To decode, the written word children must map individual speech sounds onto their letter counterparts (Adams, 1990; Catts, 1991; Juel, 1991; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1991). Likewise, in the case of rudimentary spelling, the child has to encode discrete sounds into single letters or letter combinations. Thus, accurate decoding and encoding, facilitated by phonological awareness, provide children entree into the realm of literacy. For instance, children must be able to discriminate and isolate the phoneme 'f' in words such as fish, foot, and fork before they fully understand that the grapheme 'f' represents this sound.
In recent years, phonological awareness has garnered much attention, both by researchers and by educators, because of its direct link with the acquisition of basic literacy skills. Studies have clearly demonstrated that children who perform well on sound-awareness tasks often become successful readers, whereas children who perform poorly on these tasks later struggle with word identification and spelling (Adams, 1990; Blachman, 1984, 1989; Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980; Mann, 1984, 1993; Share, Jorm, MacLean, & Mathews, 1984; Stanovich, 1986; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). In fact, phonological awareness in kindergarten has been established as the single best predictor of reading and spelling achievement at the end of first and second grades (Mann, 1993; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987).
In particular, phonemic awareness-the knowledge that spoken words are composed of individual sounds and the ability to manipulate these sounds-is fundamental for success in beginning reading. Phonemic awareness enables children to grasp the alphabetic principle, the concept that letters in written words correspond more or less to sounds in spoken words (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985; Rozin & Gleitman, 1977). With the alphabetic principle as a foundation, children's early reading and spelling efforts, in turn, augment the development of their phonemic awareness. Thus, the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is reciprocal (Ehri,1987; Perfetti et al., 1987; Torgesen et al., 1994; Wagner, 1988).
Children at risk for reading failure and those identified with dyslexia usually perform significantly more poorly than their normally achieving peers on measures of phonological awareness (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Fox & Routh, 1980; Rosner & Simon, 1971; Zifcak, 1981). These difficulties persist even after years of traditional classroom literacy instruction, often into adolescence and adulthood (Gerber et al., 1990; Rogan & Hartman, 1990).
Although children who are poor readers may make gains in their reading achievement with phonics instruction, these gains may be associated with better sight-word recognition and comprehension rather than improvements in metaphonology and analytic decoding skills (Alexander, Anderson, Heilman, Voeller, & Torgesen, 1991; Ball & Blachman, 1988, 1991). Recently, though, a growing number of intervention studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of explicit phonological awareness training for children both with and without disabilities (e.g., Elkonin, 1973; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991; Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988; Tangel & Blachman, 1992; Torgesen & Davis, 1996; Torgesen, Morgan, & Davis, 1992; see Troia, in press, for a review of methodological concerns related to these intervention studies). Research findings indicate that most children who receive such instruction make substantial headway in both decoding and spelling proficiency (e.g., Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993, 1995; Fox & Routh, 1976; Slocum, O'Connor, & Jenkins, 1993; Treiman & Baron, 1983, Williams, 1980).
Although direct instruction may be desirable or necessary for some children, phonological awareness skills generally develop quite naturally during early childhood. Within a literate cultural milieu, young children engage in many routine behaviors and activities that foster the awareness of sounds in speech. These include:
These behaviors and activities promote increasingly complex forms of metaphonological competence, from simple rhyming and alliteration to phonemic segmentation and blending (the developmental continuum of phonological awareness skills will be reviewed later, in the context of intervention programming). Indeed, approximately 80% of children seem to effortlessly acquire insight into the phonological structure of language without explicit teaching (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). Often, these children go on to experience success in traditional classroom reading and spelling curricula. The remaining 20% are not so fortunate and either need direct intervention in phonological awareness or require specialized reading/language arts instruction.
The specific objectives of an intervention program will depend on the nature and severity of the metaphonological weaknesses the child exhibits. Thus, a thorough assessment of the child's phonological awareness abilities is important.
Before discussing specific assessment instruments, a few general caveats are in order.
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