The relationship between phonemic awareness, decoding and spelling performance of Greek secondary students with Learning Disabilities
Susana Padeliadu, Antoniou Faye & Patsiodimou Antonia Department of Special Education University of Thessaly
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Abstract Students with Learning Disabilities have been traditionally identified based on their reading problems, and most of the available research has focused on similar issues. However, there is a growing pile of data, showing that a) students with Learning Disabilities also face significant problems with their writing in all aspects, such as spelling, syntax, length of written production, and b) in some languages, which are less phonologically complex, the students’ writing difficulties are more severe than their reading ones. Furthermore, most of the available data refer to elementary age students with Learning Disabilities leaving the secondary level quite ill-described. Our goal in this study was to describe and analyze the types of difficulties and specific errors of students with learning disabilities in secondary education. 84 students formally diagnosed as having specific learning disabilities participated in the study. The evaluation of their writing was based on the analysis of two texts that the students produced and a list of words that they were asked to spell. Moreover, students were asked to make a plan for their writing, in order to evaluate the way they approach the writing task. The results revealed significant problems in both spelling and written production, while very few students were able to/and used an appropriate planning procedure before writing. The findings are discussed in the framework of appropriate instructional planning, especially for remedial instruction in secondary education. Special emphasis is placed on the need for direct writing instruction in secondary education and the enrichment of this instruction with appropriate learning strategies.
Keywords: secondary students, Learning Disabilities, phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling
The relationship between phonemic awareness, decoding and spelling performance of Greek secondary students with Learning Disabilities
One of the most important issues in the field of Learning Disabilities (LD) is the connection between oral language deficits and reading and spelling difficulties (Snowling & HayiouThomas, 2006). According to the phonological deficit hypothesis, and the support of several research studies (Share & Stanovich, 1995; Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1997) problems with processing phonological properties are a precursor of Learning Disabilities (Wagner, Torgesen & Rashotte, 1994, Stanovich, 1988, 1991, 2000). “The strong association between phonological skills and reading abilities (particularly decoding skills) suggests that children with phonological disorders of speech should be at risk of reading difficulties” (Snowling & Hayiou-Thomas, 2006, p. 114). There are three major dimensions involved that affect reading performance regarding phonology: (a) poor verbal short-term memory, which is mostly assessed with a digit span or with non-word repetition tasks`(Rapala & Brady, 1990; Stone & Brady, 1995); (b) slow lexical retrieval, which is operationalized as rapid automatic naming tasks (Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999, Wolf, Bowers & Biddle, 2000) and (c) poor phonological awareness, which is mostly operationalized as phoneme recognition and manipulation (Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1994, Torgesen, 1996). Especially phonological awareness which refers to conscious access, attention to and manipulation of phonological representations is strongly related to reading and spelling and consists a powerful predictor of Reading Disabilities (RD) (Snowling, 2000; Bruck & Waters, 1988; Rohl & Tunmer, 1988, Stanovich, 2000). The appearance of difficulties in written language has been connected inquiringly and theoretically with the existence of problems in the oral language of students with Learning Disabilities, which leads to the assumption that there is a structural base between oral and
written language (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris & Snowling, 2004, Catts, Fey, Tomblin & Zhang, 2002, Sawyer, 2006). Particularly oral syntactic skills are related to reading competence (Demont & Gombert, 1996, Rego & Bryant, 1993), while syntax performance is a powerfull predictor of Reading Disabilities (Bishop & Adams, 1990) On the other hand, morphology (in reading) is also strongly connected to spelling performance (Bear, Invernicci, Templeton & Johnstor, 2004), and deconding of multisyllabic words (Berninger, Abbott, Billingsley & Nagy, 2001). Especially adolescents with LD face rigorous problems in grammatical skills (Vogel, 1983) and conduct a significant number of morphological mistakes even in their oral expression (Nagy, Bergninger & Abbott, 2006). However, interventional studies have proven that phonemic awareness instruction and especially segmentation instruction of words into phonemes enhances students’ reading and spelling (Castiglioni Spalten & Ehri, 2003). There is research (Pennington, Cardoso- Martins, Green & Lefly, 2001, Bruck, 1992) supporting that phonological problems in students with LD may be independent of language. Nevertheless, it has been found that English speaking secondary students with LD face significant phonemic awareness problems in their language which is non-transparent (Bowey, 2005). On the other hand students learning to read in transparent languages may overcome phonemic awareness problems earlier than those who face reading problems in an opaque language (Castiglioni - Spalten & Ehri, 2003?). These contradictory findings led to the question whether in Greek which is a highly transparent language in reading and less transparent in spelling, phonemic awareness influences Learning Disabled students’ performance in reading and writing. In more detail, in Greek each grapheme corresponds to only one phoneme. Digraphs to phonemes correspondence is grammatical ruled- governed such as in the following example νερό / nero / (water). In Greek several phonemes correspond to a grapheme as for example the phoneme /e/
is transcribed by either the grapheme /ε/ as in the word κερί/ keri / (candle) or by the digraph /αι/ as in the word καιρός/ keros / (weather). Consequently, in spelling there are regular words with complete grapheme – phoneme correspondence, but there are also many irregular words with unpredictable spelling (words with “historical spelling”). It has been found that there is significant relationship between phonemic awareness and reading and spelling performance for beginning readers (Kariotis, 1997; Porpodas, 1992). The same finding has been also replicated for older elementary education students whose phonemic awareness, reading and spelling performance proved to be significantly related (Kotoulas & Padeliadu, 1999). Furthermore, the secondary students’ low phonemic awareness has also been well documented for students with LD who show deficits in reading and writing (Padeliadu & Antoniou, in press). The purpose of this study was to find out which different reading and spelling skills are underpinned by different phonological abilities of students with Learning Disabilities. Our goal was to explore the level and the role of phonemic awareness among secondary students diagnosed as having RD who have completed the traditional reading and spelling instruction in a highly transparent language. Specifically, our research questions where: What are the characteristics of formally diagnosed secondary students with RD regarding phonemic awareness, decoding and spelling and is there a relationship between these variables? Is phonemic awareness a positive and significant predictor of reading and spelling performance?
Method Participants and Procedures Participants were 84 7th to 9th graders with formal diagnoses of Learning Disabilities in reading (only diagnoses from public, diagnostic centers were considered) and who had Greek as first
language. Their mean age was 15.18 (SD = 2.02). The study was conducted under the approval of the Greek Ministry of Education and all students were assessed individually in 45-minute sessions where they participated voluntarily. All students were assessed with a Phonemic Awareness Measure (Cronbach’s alpha = .738) which consisted of tasks related to (a) Phoneme analysis (3 words), (b) Phoneme deletion (3 words) and (c) Phoneme reversal (3 words). They were also administered a Reading Measure (alpha = .862) which consisted of a Word List (25 words) and a Pseudoword list (25 words). At least, students were called to fill in a Spelling Measure (alpha = .914) by completing sentences with 43 words or by writing sentences that they were dictated (32 words / 4 sentences).
Results In order to proceed to the analyses of mistakes the variable phonemic awareness was analyzed in phoneme analysis, phoneme deletion and phoneme reversal errors while decoding was divided in word and pseudoword scores and was analyzed in specific decoding errors such as additions, omissions, reversals and substitutions of phonemes or syllables in both words and pseudowords. Spelling was estimated as a total score and also analyzed in phonological errors (additions, omissions, reversals and substitutions of letters that alter the phonetic output of the word), historical errors (wrong use of letters that do not alter the phonetic output of the word), morphological errors (based on grammatical rules) and stress errors (omission of accentuation mark or placement over the wrong vowel). Analyses were based on t-tests and bivariate correlations, thus the predictions of decoding and spelling competence from phonological awareness performance was materialized through linear regression analyses. Descriptive statistic and the t-test analyses of the results indicated that students were significantly better in phonological awareness (M = .60, SD = .28; in percentiles) than in decoding (M = .39, SD = .19) [t (80) = 6.578, p < .001] and spelling (M = . 28, SD = .16) [t (80)
= 9.662, p < .001]. Regarding phonological awareness secondary students with Reading Disabilities performed significantly better in phoneme analysis [t (76) = 4.674, p < .001] and phoneme reversal [t (78) = 4.088, p < .001] than in phoneme deletion. It seems that students with RD can easier compose words or reverse them by manipulating their phonemes than pronouncing a word after deleting a phonemic segment of it. Regarding decoding, as expected, students proved to be significantly better in word (M = .22, SD = .19) than in pseudoword decoding (M = .10, SD = .09) [t (83) = 17.432, p < .001]. With respect to spelling, historical type of spelling errors (M = .43, SD = .21) differed significantly (p < .001) from phonological (M = .13, SD = .13) and morphological spelling errors (M = .15, SD = .11) but they did not differ from stress errors (M = .40, SD = .34) [t (81) = -.849, p > .10]. Phonological spelling errors were also significantly more often conducted than the morphological errors [t (82) = 8.71, p > .05]. Nevertheless, significant correlations were found only between phonological awareness and decoding (r = .347, p < .001) even if phonemic awareness explained low amounts of variance in word and pseudoword decoding. This finding has also been replicated in the linear regression analysis. Regressing decoding skills on the linear combination of phonemic awareness produced an R2 = 5.30 for word decoding, suggesting that a small but significant amount of the variability in decoding can be explained by phonemic skills (bphonemic awareness
= 3.84, p < .05).
Discussion Results of this study showed that students with Learning Disabilities in secondary education faced deficits in phonemic awareness, a result that is in line with other studies on the phonemic awareness of secondary students (Nagy, Bergninger & Abbott, 2006; Vogel, 1983). This finding supports the Phonological Deficit Hypothesis (Share & Stanovich, 1995; Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1997). Particularly, Reading Disabled secondary students
faced significant decoding and spelling problems despite their low phonemic awareness deficit. The fact that pseudoword decoding was significantly lower than word decoding was a consistent finding within the Non-word Reading Deficit in Specific Reading Disorders which indicates that students with Reading Disabilities face difficulties in decoding words without meaning. On the other hand, the most common spelling errors were related to historical spelling and stress usage. The significant correlation between phonemic awareness and word decoding along with the finding of the predictive value of phonemic awareness for the decoding ability are consistent with the claim that deficient development of phonological decoding strategies is a leading cause of reading difficulties. Regarding spelling, phonemic awareness and spelling ability were not significantly correlated. It seems that students base their spelling skills more on the grammatical information and less on the phonological one. This may be explained by the nature of the Greek language itself, which is characterized by less transparent orthography. Although phonological deficits do not appear to be language specific but general, as it has been shown, the consequences of such deficits in reading and spelling may be language specific and should be dealt with as such. This study’s findings lead to a dual conclusion: (a) as phonemic awareness deficit and low non-word reading ability persist over time, it seems that their assessment can contribute to Reading Disabilities screening and to a diagnosis not only for elementary but also secondary students; (b) there is a need for a combination of phonemic awareness instruction with strategies of morphological analysis, etymology, and generally orthographic pattern analyses of the internal structure of words into sublexical units, for spelling improvement and historical errors’ reduction. It can be concluded that the role of phonemic awareness towards reading achievement is significant even in secondary education since phonemic awareness and reading skills are significantly related.
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