Phonological Awareness Program: A longitudinal study from Preschool to 4th Grade

SHS Web of Conferences 16, 01002 (2015) DOI: 10.1051/shsconf/20151601002
C Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015 Phonological Awareness Program: A longitudinal study from Preschool to 4th Grade Inês Ferraz1,a , Margarida Pocinho2 , Alexandra Pereira3 , and Antónia Pimenta4 1 PhD Student, University of Minho, Institute of Education, 4704-553 Braga, Portugal Professor, University of Madeira, Department of Arts and Humanities, 9000-082 Funchal, Portugal 3 Rochinha’s Kindergarten Teacher, 9060-082 Funchal, Portugal 4 Rochinha’s Kindergarten Director, 9060-082 Funchal, Portugal 2 Abstract. This study aims to evaluate the effect of phonological awareness training program in preschool performance of 256 children in Funchal, Portugal. This is a longitudinal study from preschool (2005) to 4th grade (2011). It has an experimental design. The sample includes an Experimental Group (132 children) and a Control group (124 children). We pretend to answer the following research question: To what degree does training children in phonological awareness as early as preschool have short-term and longterm effects on the evolution of students’ competencies and disciplinary knowledge? A first evaluation done in 2006 on the effects of this program at the end of preschool education revealed that the Experimental Group presented significant improvements when compared to the Control Group on the considered dimensions. In 2011, the Experimental Group presented Math National Test higher significant results when compared to the Control Group. The Experimental Group’s Portuguese National Test presented better results than the Control Group one, but not significantly. This seems to indicate that Phonological Awareness Program can bring benefits and prevent long-term math school failure. 1. Introduction The acquisition of reading and writing is considered highly complex. These skills are a prerequisite for communication and social inclusion and also indicate individuals’ linguistic and cognitive abilities. The Portuguese National Assessment Tests Test results, performed by the 4th grade primary school students, according to data provided by the Office of Educational Assessment of the Portuguese Ministry of Education for the report of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) in 2006, reveal a poor performance of Portuguese children in tasks such as reading and writing. So it is considered urgent to create strategies that promote the acquisition and development of these skills. Data from PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), in 2011, also show that success in reading is linked to the knowledge of the sound of letters of the alphabet, which is provided by phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to listen, to recognize, and manipulate a e-mail: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Article available at http://www.shs-conferences.org or http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20151601002 SHS Web of Conferences sounds of language. This ability includes rhymes, syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual sounds or phonemes. To develop phonological awareness skills, we need to begin with more general types of listening skills and bigger pieces of language and gradually move to smaller and smaller sounds until children learn to listen and use individual sounds of language. Some authors defend that phonological awareness is a skill that allows consciously to reflect on and to manipulate the sounds that make up speech. This ability is subdivided into consciousness: syllabic, and phonemic [1]. To the acquisition of reading and speech is crucial to understand the alphabetic code. To read and write is necessary to recognize that words can be divided into syllables and phonemes. Therefore phonological awareness is considered a prerequisite for learning to read and write, so you can make the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is necessary to have a minimum of phonological sensitivity [2]. In the literature it is stated that children with a well-developed phonological awareness in preschool are more likely to become good readers, so it is crucial to bet on a preventive intervention in order that all children succeed in school. In several studies and programs developed with the purpose to educate and to tutor good readers, the idea that phonological awareness is crucial to children’s school success is evident. Some authors argue that the main concern of the school must go through the promotion of the development of phonic sensitivity aspects, in order to develop phonological awareness, since “the alphabetic code appeals for a cognitive ability that most children do not have when they are entering school, namely, the ability to consciously identify and isolate the sounds of spoken speech” (p. 7) [1]. The investigation of the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and literacy is more and more frequent. The number of studies on this topic has substantially increased, since one of the factors defined in the technical literature as crucial in the process of language acquisition is metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness has several abilities that help in learning how to read and to write: phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness. In the literature phonological awareness is described like the ability to recognize rhymes, to identify, to reconstruct, to segment, and to manipulate the sounds in spoken words. Morphological awareness is defined as an ability that reflects an intentional manipulation of the constituents of sentences. Syntactic awareness manifests itself in the ability to assess the grammaticality [3, 4]. The educator must have the perception that the emergence of syntactic awareness is acquired later than the phonological or morphological ones, because the child has difficulty in distancing himself/herself from the contents of the phrase in order to being able to focus his/her attention on the its formal aspects [5]. Phonological awareness is the most studied competence, and the research that has been carried out shows the importance of this skill for the acquisition of reading and writing competences. We saw in literature that when a child begins to master spoken language he/she also begins to give attention to the meaning and not to the sound of words, but as they grow their linguistic field also grows and they begin to recognize that words are made up of sounds that could be isolated and manipulated. Phonological awareness is the ability to perceive sounds regardless of their meanings [2]. Phonological awareness develops gradually as the child recognizes syllables, and phonemes. When children could separate items, they develop the awareness of the sound structure of language and this (...truncated)