Keys to English Print:

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Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary Enhancement...in PDF (25 pages, 338 kb)

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND VOCABULARY ENHANCEMENT
Experiment in Preschool Literacy

By Paula J. Schwanenflugel, Stacey Neuharth-Pritchett, Jamilia Blake, Claire Hamilton, and M. Adelaida Restrepo
Photography by John Consoli

Children who come to school without the language skills for learning to read tend to display lower initial reading achievement (Adams, 1990; Elardo, Bradley, & Caldwell, 1977; Hart & Risley, 1992; Ninio, 1980; Roberts, Burchinal, & Durham, 1999; Teale, 1986), and poor initial reading achievement tends to be highly stable over the elementary school years (Juel, 1988). Thus, interventions designed to minimize risk for early reading failure are needed to break this cycle.

PAVEd (Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary Enhancement) for Success, a prekindergarten literacy study funded by the U.S. Department of Education Early Childhood Professional Educator Development program, focuses on the use of research-based practices to improve the preliteracy skills of young children. Data from this intervention project for young hearing students may be helpful in determining what constitutes useful preliteracy practices and in structuring effective classrooms for 4-year-olds.

In this program, our activities are grounded in the premise that early reading achievement is highly dependent on word decoding skills. Models of word decoding indicate that decoding in skilled readers involves the efficient activation of letter, phonemic, and semantic knowledge. Children who are inefficient decoders in early elementary school typically lack highly developed skills in one or more of these decoding components.

Models: Nathalie Devigne, Claudelle Pulger, and their students.

Early childhood educators do not agree with the assumption that explicit, formalized teaching aimed at pre-decoding skills should be carried out in prekindergarten to increase children’s school readiness. For example, in the joint position statement of the International Reading Association and National Association for the Education of Young Children, Neuman, Copple, and Bredekamp (2000) describe the teaching of explicit phonemic awareness for children under age five as “highly suspect” (p.8). However, emergent phonological awareness for children under age five has considerable value for predicting future reading achievement (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000; MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987). Similarly, formalized explicit instruction of the alphabet is often counter-recommended for preschool (McGee & Richgels, 1989; Ruetzel, 1992; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Wuori, 1999), yet alphabet knowledge at age 4 and 5 is highly predictive of early reading skills (Johnston, 1998; Lomax & McGee, 1987; Riley, 1996; Walsh, Price, & Gillingham, 1988).

We believe that Universal Quality Literacy Practices, e.g., storybook reading, alphabet knowledge, environmental print, and secure teacher-student relationships, are most important. We have worked hard to identify Experimental Quality Literacy Practices, developmentally appropriate ways to foster phonological awareness and vocabulary enhancement in 4-year-old students.

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Universal Quality Literacy Practices

WIDELY APPRECIATED LITERACY PRACTICES—AND HOW THEY ARE APPLIED IN OUR CLASSROOMS

• Environmental Print—The use of environmental print for the development of preliteracy skills tends to be a universal element of most preschool settings. Environmental print is defined as the print that is all around us, including the print on commercial signs, labels, road signs, products, and displays (Morrow, 2001). Early exposure to and explanations of environmental print are necessary for children to begin conceptualizing the importance of the use of written language as a means to obtain information, to express their needs, to announce events, and to communicate with others (Schickedanz, 1999).

  Limited research has highlighted the benefits of incorporating environmental print in classrooms. In one study, preschool children spontaneously used twice as much print in their play than they did prior to their teacher’s inclusion of environmental print materials in the classroom (Neuman & Roskos, 1989). Additional research has indicated that preschool children engage in more literacy acts that become more complex over time and have increased language routines with the inclusion of environmental print in class (Morrow, 1990; Neuman & Roskos, 1992; Vukelich, 1991).

  Preschool classrooms that are effective with their use of environmental print have specific characteristics. First, the environmental print materials are developmentally appropriate. Second, the materials are authentic (McGill-Franzen, Allington, Yokoi, & Brooks, 1999). For example, they include boxes or containers for the housekeeping area with authentic labels that children would recognize from their homes rather than the replicas from an early childhood toy company. Third, the environmental print materials have utility. If children cannot see their use, physically use them in their play, or have continuous access to them, they are unlikely to incorporate them into their play. Finally, children see adults or more capable peers engaged with the materials, giving them meaning.

• Book Reading—Reading storybooks aloud in a co-constructive manner to children is highly effective in promoting language and vocabulary development in preschoolers (Bus, van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; Dickinson & Smith, 1994; McKeown & Beck, in press; Valdez-Menchaca, & Whitehurst, 1992; Wasik & Bond, 2001; Whitehurst et al., 1988). Co-constructive readings include questions and discussion about the book as the reading progresses. Difficulties with a co-constructive approach include teachers who have not implemented it readily (Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998), adults who simply prefer reading straight through the text and not interrupting the flow of the story (Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Heath, 1983), and low verbal preschoolers who sometimes do not respond initially to the open-ended questioning (McKeown& Beck, in press). However, when children get used to this co-constructive style, classrooms are lively, participatory places that stimulate language growth.

  In our intervention, each child engages in a minimum of three large group and three small group reading sessions per week. Teachers and their aide support children’s engagement in the sessions using co-constructive reading approaches (Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Morrow, 1984; Whitehurst et al., 1994). Specifically, teachers begin reading by doing a “walk through the book,” encouraging children to offer ideas about what the book is about and providing a goal for reading. During reading, teachers ask questions that reflect three different concerns:

  • Competence questions that give students opportunities to practice skills they have already mastered, e.g., Can you find the (object) in the picture? Who said (phrase)?
    
  • Abstract thinking questions that ask students to summarize, define, explain, judge, compare, predict, take another point of view, or solve problems, e.g., What is (character) thinking? What will happen next? How do you think (a character) feels? How are (two objects) different?
    
  • Relate questions that link the text to the student’s experiences, e.g., How is (character) the same as you? What would you do if you could (action)?

  Teachers read the same book at least twice. Usually our teachers read a book once in a large group setting and then throughout the day in a small group setting. Typically, they will treat the small group reading as a center activity. A number of teachers have commented that children seem to become more focused on the books, more attentive and settled, and more interactive as the books are read two and three times. They now believe in this interactive and repeated way of reading books.

• Alphabet knowledge—Children’s alphabet knowledge before formal reading instruction begins is one of the best predictors of later reading achievement (Bond & Dykstra, 1967; Lonigan et al., 2000). Alphabet knowledge consists of elements such as letter-shape recognition, letter-name knowledge, letter-sound knowledge, letter-writing ability, and letter fluency. Many researchers believe that letter knowledge forms a conceptual base that supports phonemic awareness instruction (Ball & Blachman, 1988, 1991; Fuchs et al., 2001; McBride-Chang, 1999; Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Treiman, Tincoff, Rodriguez, Mourazki, & Francis, 1998). Alphabet knowledge does not guarantee that a child will learn to read successfully, but the lack of it seems to guarantee that the child will not learn successfully.

  Our teachers focus on upper and lower case letter names and sounds, emphasizing one or two per week. Based on a re-analysis we conducted of the Treiman et al. (1998) research, we have asked teachers to focus on easier letters first, b, d, j, k, p, t, v, z, then a, c, e, g, i, o, u, and then the difficult letters last, f, l, m, n, r, s, x, then h, w, y, q. Our teachers have readily adopted this ordering. Teachers use whatever means they like to teach the alphabet, as long as they do not focus unduly on neatness. Many of our teachers have children draw the to-be-learned letters into shaving cream smeared on a table or on dry erase boards. Other teachers also have a letter-of-the-week alphabet table for objects children bring from home that start with the letter. They connect the objects to print with a label written on an index card. Our teachers also have used alphabet books in their book-reading repertoire. Teachers connect their letter instruction to the functions of print at least some of the time, so an environmentally print-rich classroom is a key backdrop for alphabet instruction. Teachers collect children’s writings as a curriculum-based assessment of alphabet knowledge.

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• Relationship Orientation to Literacy—Children who have secure, positive relationships with parents and teachers have more adaptive social skills (Stein, Szumowski, Blondis, & Roizen, 1995; Wolters, Brouwers, Moss, & Pizzo, 1994) and engage in sustained and elaborate verbal exchanges with their teachers (Howes & Hamilton, 1992). Sustained interactions promote better language skills and higher achievement (Birch & Ladd, 1997; Ladd, Birch, & Buhs, 1999; Pianta, 1997; Pianta & Steinberg, 1992; Whitebook, Howes, & Phillips, 1989). Despite the obvious importance of secure child-teacher relationships, research has suggested that individual attention to children in preschool classrooms is rare. Typically only 10 percent of teachers’ time is spent with individual children (Layzer, 1993) and 81 percent of the time teachers do not even talk with children who are standing right next to them (Wilcox-Herzog & Kontos, 1998)! Thus, our intervention places emphasis on developing ways that teachers can foster the development of secure child-teacher relationships while also supporting children’s linguistic development. We call this aspect of the intervention Building Bridges.

  Building Bridges supports the formation of positive relationships between teachers and students by implementing a modification of Banking Time (Pianta, 1999) as part of their usual classroom processes. Teachers spend about five minutes with each child about three times per week in a small group setting (no more than five children). Children select the nature of the activity or the topic of conversation. Further, teachers use this time to elaborate on and expand their language interactions with children (Hart & Risley, 1995) while having a positive exchange of ideas.

  Finding these precious minutes can be difficult. Our teachers have found that the best time to initiate these conversations is during breakfast and lunch. Others have developed Talking Centers where children come and chat in a space dedicated to conversations between teacher and children.

  For children that use a language not spoken by the teacher or those who are minimally verbal, our teachers find that interacting nonverbally side by side, talking much as an adult might talk with a toddler (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986), works well. It is important to track these experiences to make sure that some children are not inadvertently overlooked.

  Some of our teachers have commented that through these conversations they can better relate classroom activities to individual children. Moreover, they feel better prepared to talk with the children’s parents at parent-teacher conference time.

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Experimental Quality Instruction Practices

PHILOSOPHIES AND STRATEGIES THAT WE ARE EVALUATING IN OUR CLASSROOMS

• Developing Phonological Awareness—Phonological awareness is defined as the awareness of, and ability to manipulate, the phonological segments in words at the phoneme, syllable, and rime level (Blachman, 1991; Treiman& Zukowski, 1991). Four-year-olds’ abilities to detect rhymes (Wood & Terrell, 1998; Lonigan et al., 2000), segment syllables (Badian, 1998; Duncan, Seymour, & Hill 1997), phonemes (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 2000), and blend syllables and phonemes (Majsterek & Ellenwood, 1995) are predictive of later reading and decoding skills. Indeed, because word decoding requires the underlying ability to map a written letter or letter sequence onto phoneme knowledge, phonemic awareness is considered a key for early reading achievement.

  Whether, how, and what to include in an explicit phonological awareness program for 4-year-olds is an issue. Some studies find benefits of programs that attempt to develop phonological awareness (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993), while others do not (Goldstein, 1976). Teacher implementation tends to be less successful than that of their researcher counterparts (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1995; Whitehurst et al., 1994). Studies finding long-term preventative benefits of phonemic awareness training in children are ubiquitous (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Brady, Fowler, Stone, & Winbury, 1994; Fuchs et al., 2001; Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Winikates, & Mehta, 1997; Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988; Schneider, Kuspart, Roth, Vise, & Marx, 1997; Tor gesen & Davis, 1996).

  We have implemented a phonological awareness program in a subset of classrooms to determine the value added by such programs when other universal quality literacy practices are followed. In these classrooms, teachers and aides have received training on how to use selected classroom activities from Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum by Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, and Beeler (1998). This program, designed for kindergarten and adapted for prekindergarten, seems effective in promoting phonological awareness in a game-like atmosphere (Lundberg et al., 1988; Schneider et al., 1997). Our own analysis of the preschool phonological awareness literature has led us to believe that some skills are more predictive of later reading achievement than others. Thus, we focused the program on activities that emphasize:

  • rhyme detection,
  • word and syllable segmentation,
  • word-initial phoneme detection,
  • syllable and phoneme blending in short words, and
  • letter-sound correspondence.
    

  Teachers spend approximately three to four weeks, at least three times per week, on each skill. Some teachers have children clap syllables for words shouted out by the teacher while lining up from recess. Others have them chant initial letter sounds for children’s names or vocabulary words while cleaning up.

  To supplement these activities, a computer-assisted phonological awareness instruction program, Earobics (Cognitive Concepts, 2000) is available. Teachers use the tracking system that comes with the program as a curriculum-based assessment of growth.

• Vocabulary Enhancement—We watched young readers decode a given word perfectly, but stumble and fail because they do not know what it means. When the child has difficulty retrieving the meaning of a given word, not only does comprehension suffer (Stahl, 1999; Snow et al., 1991) but also decoding skills (Schwanenflugel & Akin, 1994; Schwanenflugel & Noyes, 1996; McFalls, Schwanenflugel, & Stahl, 1996). The vocabulary learning processes appear largely the same between those who are deaf and those who are hearing (Lederberg, Prezbindowski, & Spencer, 2000; Lederberg & Spencer, 2001). Thus one way to promote reading readiness in both children who are deaf and children who are hearing is to ensure that they have the vocabulary to meet the demands of the reading task.

  Vocabulary enhancement can be promoted by storybook reading using repeated readings (Swanborn & deGlopper, 1999; Elley, 1989; Jenkins, Stein, & Wysocki, 1984; Robbins & Ehri, 1994; Senechal, 1997; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986), a co-constructive reading style (Dickinson & Smith, 1994), and explicit procedures that target new vocabulary before, during, and after readings (McKeown & Beck, in press; Wasik & Bond, 2001). We encourage teachers to read expository texts along with storybooks and alphabet books. Expository texts seem to promote the adoption of a co-constructive style in Head Start mothers (Pellegrini, Perlmutter, Galda, & Brody, 1990). Reading expository texts may ameliorate the difficulty many children face later when they encounter such texts again in elementary school (Duke & Kays, 1998; Caswell & Duke, 1998).

  In our program, teachers target vocabulary words and themes in a program that builds on vocabulary practices recommended by Wasik and Bond (2001). It is unclear just how much “value-added” will be obtained from this explicit vocabulary focus given an otherwise linguistically rich classroom. Thus, it is considered an experimental component to the program and is implemented in only some of the classrooms so that its effects may be determined separately.

  We include four key practices to enhance vocabulary:

  • a novel name-nameless category activity,
  • co-constructive, repeated book readings,
  • semantic verification questions, and
  • vocabulary-related extension activities.

  The teacher finds two vocabulary-rich books (one expository) related to her theme for the week and selects 10 target words and other background words from these books that are also related to her theme. This may sound more difficult than it is. Our teachers have found complex vocabulary even in simple, well-known books such as Big Red Barn (Bunting, 1979).

  The targeted vocabulary is introduced by using a novel name-nameless category presentation format. This format requires the teacher to present an unknown item among known items (Mervis & Bertrand, 1994) and query the children to guess which item represents the targeted vocabulary word. The teacher might present a picture of a baby, a car, and a pasture and ask the children to show her which one is the pasture. The presence of an unknown object among items that they know the name of encourages children to apply the new label to the unknown word. This is practically a failure-free way of introducing new vocabulary, because children already have the strategy embedded in their current vocabulary learning routines. Following this, the teacher reads the books as she does for storybook reading, but focuses on the target vocabulary as it appears in the text and discusses how the word’s meaning relates to context. One teacher has her students raise their hand when they hear a target word or a finger if it is a word from a previous week during the readings. Teachers follow up with queries that target vocabulary such as choral semantic verification activities (McKeown & Beck, in press), e.g., “A pasture is where we drive our cars—No!” and “A pasture has lots and lots of grass—Yeah!”

  Then the teacher initiates activities in the exploratory centers, where 10 target vocabulary words are used and extended to real contexts. We encourage teachers to include in the centers activities that might be used as a curriculum-based assessment of vocabulary growth, such as Vocabulary Bingo (Stark, Giddan, & Meisel, 1968) or Vocabulary Hopscotch using pictures drawn from the Internet. Throughout the week, children are encouraged to “get caught with the word” and teachers note on a vocabulary word log spontaneous use of target words.

  All of these preliteracy strategies are grounded in what research shows are effective practices for enhancing preliteracy skills. While we have worked exclusively with hearing children, we are confident that most of the practices are applicable to classrooms with deaf children, too.

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