Phonological Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge in Typically Developing English Language Learners Between the 3.6 to 6.6 Years

Abstract

The role of phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge in learning to read is well established in mono-lingual English speakers. However, it is under explored in the context of English Language Learners (ELL), especially in regions like India where the native language differs phonologically and orthographically from the target literate language, which is English. The present research explored phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge in typically developing ELL between 3.6 to 6.6 years. A total of 60 typically developing children, 20 each from Lower Kindergarten (LKG), Upper Kindergarten (UKG), and Grade I were selected from schools with English medium of instructions. The phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge was assessed and compared between the groups. The results indicate that English Language Learners (ELL) demonstrate substantial advancements in both phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge during the initial three years of formal education, highlighting the existence of considerable potential for further development.

Introduction

Reading is one of the vital life skills that one should possess to succeed in the competitive contemprory literate society. Unlike the acquisition of oral language skills, the development of reading proficiency is an instructive process that hinges on child’s exposure to hierarchical and systematic pedagogical instructions during early years of academic development. Typically, the initial stages of formal education focuses on the fundamental skills that are required to learn word decoding component of reading. Subsequently, there will be a gradual shift from word decoding to the more intricate realm of reading comprehension. This progression necessitates that a child attains a sufficient level of fluency in reading. The cognitive processes of word decoding essentially encompasses simultaneous processing of both phonological and orthographical information. Central to this process is the understanding that the spoken language composed distinct units, primarily individual words. These words, in turn, are composed of syllabic and phonemic constituents. Further complexity arises from the recognition that words may share common onsets or rhymes. The explicit awareness of these linguistic units, encompassing words, syllables, rimes and phonemes within spoken language, collectively constitutes the concept of phonological awareness.

Phonological sensitivity, often referred to as phonological awareness, constitutes a important emergent literacy skills significantly influencing the children’s reading development. Phonological awareness is operationally defined as the “conscious ability to detect and manipulate a wide range of speech sounds within the spoken language” (Schuele & Boudreau, 2008). Culminating evidences substantiates a reciprocal relationship existing between phonological awareness and reading in alphabetical languages (Andrea, Rose, & MaryAnn, 2018; Charles, Isabel, Laura, & Carol, 1987; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). More explicitly, individual differences in basic phonological sensitivity, as shown by appreciating awareness of words, syllable or rhymes influences the acquisition of individual variations in alphabetic reading skills. The subsequent exposure to print in alphabetical language demonstrated to be influencing the acquisition of individual variations in advanced phonological sensitivity specifically, phoneme awareness. This relationship is robust and has been corroborated through extensive research involving typically developing children (Catts, Gillispie, Leonard, Kail, & Miller, 2002; National Early Literacy Panel, 2008) as well as children with reading disabilities (Blischak, Shah, Lombardino, & Chiarella, 2004) indicate a strong and reliable relationship between phonological awareness and reading. In addition to phonological awareness another important emergent literacy skill that develops simultaneously with print exposure is orthographic processing. Prior to formal schooling during the emergent literacy period, a key facet of orthographic processing that serves as a predictor of children’s reading success is alphabetic knowledge. This entails the ability to recognize letters, their names, and their corresponding sounds in their written forms, often assessed through identification, production, and writing tasks (Elimelech & Aram, 2020; Piasta & Wagner, 2010). Generally, both phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge forms the foundational skills in developing reading skills. Their role in children’s development and their contribution to early and later reading success have been extensively studied, particularly monolingual English-speaking contexts,where children typically learn to read in the same language spoken at home. However, its important to note that these findings may not be readily generalizable to situations where children are learning to read in school in a language that is significantly different from their native languages, as is often the case in multilingual scenario of country like India. The phonologic and orthographical disparities between English, an alphabetical language, and many Indian languages, which are often alphasyllabic, pose unique challenge. Hence the direct conversion of grapheme to representing phoneme in English for a child whose mother tongue is not an alphabetic would be difficult. These considerations underscore the need for focussed reasearch in the Indian context, begining from early stages of literacy development.

Need

In India, there is clear upsurge in children who are admitted to the schools with English medium of instructions. This trend is driven by the perceived benefits of English medium of education. Despite being a foreign language, English serves as the predominant mode of communication in various professional contexts throughout the nation. Education in English is often seen as a pathway to enhanced employment oppurtunities, which, in turn, ensures economic advancement in one’s professional career. However, a significant portion of children admitted to English-medium schools comes from where English is not the mother tongue, and the language spoken at home signifcantly differs phonologically and orthographically from the English they are taught to read at school. In order to readily succeed in school, it is essential for children to possess certain fundamental skills, including proficiency in the language of instructions . While many children gradually acquire language proficiency during their schooling, some encounter challenges, specially those with language learning difficulties or dyslexia. Identifying such children presents a complex challenge, as it requires distinguishing whether their failures is attributable to language delay or language differences. Moreover, the development of emergent literacy skills in English Language Learners (ELL) is an aspect that is not widely acknowledged in Indian scenario. However, these skills plays an important role in identifying children who may be at-risk of developing reading disabilities. Further more, research on early schooling years of the Indian population is limited in scope. Hence the present study aims to explore alphabetic knowledge, and phonological awareness at different phonological unit size such as words, syllables, intra-syllable and phoneme in typically developing ELL between 3.6 to 6.6 years learning to read English in Indian context.

Method

In order to assess phonological awareness at various phonological linguistic unit size such as word, syllable, onset-rime and phoneme, and also to determine alphabetic knowledge during early years of education in English language learners in Indian context, there are no commercially available standardized assessment tool. Hence the present research was planned in 3 distinct phases.

• Phase 1: Designing an assessment tool

• Phase 2: Administration of designed tool

• Phase 3: Data analysis

Phase 1: Designing an assessment tool

In order to explore phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge in typically developing children in the age group of 3.6 to 6.6 years, initially various clinically relevant phonological awareness task were selected by reviewing the studies that focused on early literacy development in mono-lingual English speakers and also in English language learners. The tasks were also selected from commercially available standardized assessment tool developed for western population. The tasks were basically considered based on the two dimensions of assessment such as linguistic grain size and also cognitive operations required to complete the task. The cognitive operations such as blending, segmenting, rhyming, and also deletion were incorporated at word, syllable, onset-rime and phoneme level. Additionally, the orthographic processing was assessed using early emergence of alphabetic knowledge that includes the tasks such as letter identification for small and capital case and also letter-sound corresponding task. Subsequent to selection of the task, the stimuli were selected by pooling the vocabulary through the curriculum generally followed in nursery and Grade I children. In order to avoid taxing the children’s working memory, the stimulus words were selected based on the children’s familiarity and lexically concrete and can be represented pictorially. Later the appropriate pictures were selected which represents the stimuli at both sentence and word level depending on the task demands.

Content Validation: Once the tasks under each subtest were finalized, the appropriate test stimuli were selected from the prescribed curriculum for LKG, UKG, and Grade I children studying in English medium schools following the state syllabus, the stimuli selected under tasks word with representing picture were subjected for familiarity rating by teachers. The teachers were asked to rate the words based on the children’s familiarity of the stimuli using the 3 – point rating scale where “0” is unfamiliar, “1” may be familiar, “2” familiar and “3” highly familiar. Those words which were rated highly were selected. Once the initial set of stimulus was finalized, the test material was subjected for content validation by 4 Speech-Language Pathologists (SLP’s) who had 5 years of experience in the field. The appropriateness of the tasks, instruction, stimuli and the scoring system was rated by the expertsusing 3-point rating scale, where 2 is absolutely appropriate and 0 is absolutely inappropriate, and 1 is may be appropriate.. They were also asked to express their open-ended opinion or suggestions on structure and suitability of stimuli under each task. Further, based on the expert validation from the SLP’s the developed test material was further modified. Soon after the rating, content validity index (CVI) was computed. Following the rating, CVI was computed using the following formula. (1) $$\text{CVI \hspace{0.33em}}=\frac{\text{No of}\hspace{0.17em}\text{SLP’s\hspace{0.33em}providing\hspace{0.33em}desired\hspace{0.33em}rating}}{\text{Total\hspace{0.33em}no\hspace{0.33em}of\hspace{0.33em}SLP’s}}$$(1)

In the present study, ratings of 1 and 2 were considered as the preferred ratings because they show more relevance of a particular item (DeVon et al., 2007), reports the criterion point for CVI as 0.87. This criterion point for the present study was met only when the four SLP’s rated the particular items as either 1 or 2. Therefore those items were selected where the four SLP’s provided the rating 1 or 2. Those items which didn’t meet the criterion points were deleted or removed from the test material. Later the content validated material was subjected to pilot study on 5 children each from LKG, UKG, and Grade I to check the adequacy and feasibility of the material. The assessment instrument was then modified using the findings of the pilot study.

Test-retest reliability: Further test-retest reliability was established using intra-class correlation coefficient and found have good reliability (r = 0.87) of the tool in assessing both phonological sensitivity and alphabetical knowledge. The Table 1 indicates all the tasks that assesses phonological sensitivity and alphabetical knowledge.

Table 1. Tasks for assessing phonological sensitivity and alphabetical knowledge.

Phonological sensitivity	Number of stimuli	Alphabetical Knowledge	Number of stimuli
Sentence segmentation (SS)	10	Letter identification of small case (LIS)	26
Syllable segmentation (SyS)	13	Letter identification of capital case (LIC)	26
Syllable blending (SB)	10	Letter sound correspondence (LSC)	20
Initial syllable deletion (ISD)	10
Rhyme recognition (RR)	10
Rhyme production (RP)	10
Rhyme oddity (RO)	10
Onset-rime segmentation (ORS)	10
Onset-rime blending (ORB)	10
Body-coda segmentation (BCS)	10
Body-coda blending (BCB)	10
Phoneme segmentation (PS)	10
Phoneme blending (PB)	10
Initial phoneme deletion (IPD)	10
Final phoneme deletion (FPD)	10

Phase 2: Administration of designed tool

A total of 60 typically developing children in the age group of 3.6–6.6 years were included in the study. The participants were selected from 5 different English -medium schools in and around Mangaluru city. The sample size formula used was 2(Zα + Zβ) ² σ²/d²with 95% of power level. The selected participants were separated into three groups based on the curriculum standards in school and the age range. The Table 2 depicts the participant details such as standard, age range, mean age and total number of participants.

Table 2. Participant demographic details across the age groups.

Groups	Age range	Mean age	Total
LKG	3.6–4.6 years	3.8 years	20
UKG	4 4.7–5.6 years	4.9 years	20
Grade I	5.7–6.6 years	5.9 years	20
Total			60

The participants were selected based on the inclusion criteria listed below.

• Children fitting into the age and curricular standard criteria

• Children belonging to schools for typically developing children

• Children belonging to English medium of instructions

• Children from schools affiliated to Karnataka State Board for Grade I and following the similar curriculum for pre-kindergarten

• Children with normal speech and language development according to “Assessment of Language development” (Lakkanna et al., 2008)

• Children with the native languages such as Kannada/Byari/Tulu

• Children with parents having a minimum literacy levels of pre-university college

• Children reported to have average and above average academic performance by the class teacher

• Children who passed theWHO’s ten-question disability screening checklist for speech, language, sensory, emotional/behavioral, neurological, and cognitive deficits (Singhi, Kumar, Malhi, & Kumar, 2007).

Procedure: Initially, permission from school administrative authority was obtained to conduct the study within the school premises. Later the children who fit into the participant selection criteria were selected with the help of class teacher. Subsequently, an informed consent from the parents were obtained. A relatively , well-lit, noise and distraction-free room within the school premises was selected. The testing was carried out individually after building the rapport. . During the evaluation, each participant sat comfortably in a chair facing the examiner. The carrier phrase “listen carefully” was used to draw the participant’s attention prior to the presentation of the stimuli. The participants were familiarized with the task using practice items, followed by which, the actual testing was carried out. The phonological awareness assessment followed a fixed sequence and it began at word level followed bysyllable onset-rime, and ended at phoneme level. The responses were scored for accuracy, where the correct responses were scored ‘1’ and incorrect responses were scored as ‘0’ . The assessment procedures took approximately 30 to 40 min with a session break of 10 min.

Phase 3 – Data analysis

The data was analyzed using SPSS (version 17.0). Initially the raw scores were summarized in terms of mean, standard deviation and range of scores using descriptive statistics. The mean scores between the group was compared using one-way ANOVA and post-hoc Bonferroni test.

Result

The current study sought to investigate phonological sensitivity and alphabetical knowledge in typically developing ELL learning to read English in the early years of literacy acquisition. In order to assess the sensitivity of the children to different phonological unit size such as words, syllables, onset-rimes and phoneme, and alphabetical knowledge during Lower Kindergarten (LKG), Upper Kindergarten (UKG) and Grade I, an assessment tool was compiled. The compiled tool consists of various clinically and age appropriate tasks, stimuli, instructions and scoring system. Later, the content of the compiled material validated subjectively by four SLP’s in terms of appropriateness of the assessment material. A pilot study using a small sample of kids from LKG, UKG, and Grade I was conducted on the content-validated test, and the results were used to further develop the assessment tool. The finalized assessment tool was individually administered on 60 children, 20 children each from LKG between 3.6 to 4.6 years; UKG between 4.7 to 5.6 years; and Grade I between 5.7 to 6.6 years. The scores obtained for each task were then subjected to statistical analysis using the SPSS software version 17.0.

Phonological awareness

The present research explored phonological awareness of LKG, UKG and Grade I children at word, syllable, intra-syllable (Onset-rime) and phoneme levels.

Word awareness

Using a sentence segmentation task, the children’s understanding of how spoken language is composed of individual words was evaluated. The mean comparison using one-way ANOVA revealed, there was a main effect of age on the performance of sentence segmentation across the groups. The mean scores of LKG, UKG, and Grade I on sentence segmentation [F (2, 57) = 15.97, p < 0.000] was significantly different from each other. The subsequent post-hoc Bonferronis test revealed the mean scores of Grade I were significantly (p < 0.00) higher than LKG and UKG children. The performance of LKG children was significantly (p < 0.00) lower than UKG and Grade I, whereas the performance of UKG remained intermediate of LKG and Grade 1. The Figure 1 depicts the descriptive statistics of LKG, UKG, and Grade 1 on sentence segmentation task.

Figure 1. Mean and SD of LKG, UKG and Grade I children on word awareness tasks.

Note: SS – Sentence Segmentation.

Syllable awareness

The next fine-grained aspect of phonological unit subsequent to word is syllable. The children’s awareness to syllables in the spoken words was assessed using syllable segmentation (SyS), syllable blending (SB), initial syllable deletion (ISD) and final syllable deletion (FSD) tasks. The Figure 2 represent the mean and SD (Standard Deviation) of all the three groups on various syllable awareness tasks.

Figure 2. Mean and SD of LKG, UKG and Grade I children on syllable awareness tasks.

Note: SyS (Syllable segmentation); SB (Syllable blending); ISD (Initial Syllable deletion); FSD (Final Syllable Deletion).

One-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of age on all the syllable awareness tasks such as syllable segmentation [F (2, 57) = 143.97, p = 0.000], syllable blending [F (2, 57) = 27.62, p = 0.000], initial syllable deletion [F (2, 57) = 43.96, p = 0.000] and final syllable deletion [F (2, 57) = 60.04, p = 0.000]. The post-hoc pair-wise comparison using Bonferonnis test revealed that, the children from Grade I significantly (p = 0.000) outperformed the children from LKG and UKG on all the tasks except syllable segmentation, where There was no discernible distinction between (p = 0.94) between UKG and Grade I. The children from LKG performed significantly lower (p = 0.000) than UKG and Grade 1 on all the syllable awareness tasks, whereas the performance of UKG children remained intermediate of LKG and Grade 1 for all the syllable awareness task, except syllable segmentation where there was no statistical significance difference between UKG and Grade 1.

Onset-rime awareness

The intra-syllabic awareness which is the phonological sensitivity within syllables was assessed using rhyme recognition (RR), rhyme production (RP), rhyme oddity (RO), onset-rime segmentation (ORS), onset-rime blending (ORB), body-coda segmentation (BCS), and body-coda blending (BCB). The Figure 3 shows the performance of all the three groups on onset-rime awareness tasks in terms of mean and SD.

Figure 3. Mean and SD of LKG, UKG and Grade I children on onset-rime awareness tasks.

Note: RR (Rhyme Recognition); RP (Rhyme Production); RO (Rhyme Oddity); ORS (Onset-Rime Segmentation); ORB (Onset-Rime Blending); BCS (Body Coda Segmentation); BCB (Body Coda Blending).

The mean score comparison across the groups using one-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of age on all the onset-rime awareness task such as rhyme recognition [F (2, 57) = 10.34, p = 0.000], rhyme production [F (2, 57) = 75.00, p = 0.000], rhyme oddity [F (2, 57) = 123.90, p = 0.000], onset-rime segmentation [F (2, 57), p = 0.000], onset-rime blending [F (2, 57) = 76.23, p = 0.000], body-coda segmentation [F (2, 57) = 89.90, p = 0.000], and body-coda blending [F (2, 57) = 98.88, p = 0.000]. The post-hoc pair-wise comparison revealed Grade I children performed significantly better than LKG on all the onset-rime awareness task. The children from LKG performed significantly (p < 0.05) poorer than UKG and Grade I on all the onset-rime awareness tasks except rhyme recognition and rhyme production tasks, where the performance was similar between the groups. However, the performance of UKG children was intermediate between LKG and Grade I on all the task rhyme recognition and rhyme production tasks.

Phoneme awareness

Using phoneme awareness tasks including phoneme mixing, phoneme blending, initial phoneme deletion, and final phoneme deletion, the phonological sensitivity at the phoneme level was evaluated. The performance of all the groups is depicted in the Figure 4 in terms of both mean and standard deviation.

Figure 4. Mean and SD of LKG, UKG and Grade I children on phoneme awareness tasks.

Note: PB (Phoneme Blending); PS (Phoneme segmentation); IPD (Initial Phoneme Deletion); FPD (Final Phoneme Deletion).

The one-way ANOVA revealed significant main effect of age on all the phoneme awareness tasks such as phoneme blending [F (2, 57) = 30.98, p = 0.000], initial phoneme deletion [F (2, 57) = 7.42, p = 0.000] and final phoneme deletion [F (2, 57) = 28.88, p = 0.000] across the groups, whereas the children from all the groups failed obtain any scores for phoneme segmentation task. The post-hoc pair-wise comparison revealed Grade I children performed significantly better (p < 0.05) than LKG and UKG children, whereas LKG children performed significantly poorer than UKG and Grade I children on all the phoneme awareness tasks. However, the performance of UKG remained intermediate of LKG and Grade I children.

Alphabetic knowledge

The alphabetic knowledge was assessed using letter identification for both small case and capital case task and also letter-sound correspondence task. The performance of all the three groups across the tasks is represented using bar chart in the Figure 5, which indicates mean performance with SD.

Figure 5. Mean and SD of LKG, UKG and Grade I children on alphabetic knowledge tasks.

Note: LIS (Letter Identification of Small case); LIC (Letter identification of Capital case); LSC (Letter-Sound Correspondence).

One-way ANOVA revealed a clear significant interaction effect of age on alphabetic knowledge assessed using letter identification small case [F (2, 57) = 286.98, p = 0.000] and capital case [F (2, 57) = 275.34, p = 0.000] and also for letter sound correspondence [F (2, 57) = 71.91, p = 0.000] tasks. The post-hoc test revealed that, the children from LKG performed significantly poorer than UKG and Grade 1 on all the tasks of alphabetic knowledge. The performance of Grade I was significantly better than LKG and UKG on letter identification for small case and letter-sound correspondence task. However, there was no discernible distinction between Grade I and UKG on letter identification of small case and hence the performance revealed to be similar.

Discussion

The present research aimed to explore children’s phonological awareness at different phonological grain size such as words, syllables, onset-rime awareness and phoneme awareness along with alphabetic knowledge in typically developing children in the age group of 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children belong to the schools for English medium of instructions and from LKG, UKG and Grade I. The findings of the research are discussed under two separate headings such as phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge below.

Phonological awareness

Using a sentence segmentation test, the phonological sensitivity at the word level displayed a considerable developmental progression from LKG up to Grade 1. Amongst the groups, the children from LKG obtained lower scores, Grade I children obtained higher scores whereas the performance of UKG being intermediate. According to these findings, younger children were less responsive to the words in the sentences, however, they gain sensitivity as they progress to higher Grades. Because, the higher scores at higher grades indicates the elevated sensitivity to words by the end of Grade 1. These results suggest that, the children show sensitivity to word where they can recognize the clear boundaries of words in the clearly co-articulated continuous speech and segment them to depict the strong awareness that sentences are made up of words. The current study’s findings confirm the theory put forward by Tunmer and Bowey (1980) by showing a definite growth in word awareness abilities. As a result, it can be concluded that as children get older, their awareness of the borders between words in spoken language also grows. In addition, (Tunmer & Bowey, 1980) noted that young children pick up on the arbitrary nature of the word’s phonological manifestation as well as the understanding of the metalinguistic term ‘word’. This can be witnessed as the performance across the groups show a steady escalation of scores from LKG to Grade 1 indicating increasing trend in the development. The results also indicate that, the word awareness emerges as early at 3.6 years but continues to develop through UKG and Grade I. However, there was no ceiling even at Grade I indicating that, they continued to refine their ability to segment sentences into words beyond Grade I. In contrast, Waknis, Chintala, and Vanaja (2017), who evaluated sentence segmentation as well as other phonological awareness tasks in Marathi-speaking English language learners in upper kindergarten and Grade I students and reported no significant difference between the groups and the scores were at ceiling. They concluded that, there is no active development of word awareness. However, word awareness in the present study dipict gradual improvement with age, and devoid of ceiling effect to the scores even at Grade I.

The next fine grained aspect following word awareness is syllable awareness. The syllable awareness was assessed using syllable blending, segmentation and deletion tasks. The phonological sensitivity at syllable level for children between 3.6 to 6.6 years showed a clear developmental progression. Accross all the tasks, Grade I consistently exhibited superior performance, while LKG consistently demonstrated lower performance, and UKG consistently showed intermediate performance. However, the performance difference between UKG and LKG on syllable blending was not statistically significant but the mean scores of Grade I remained higher than UKG indicating the superior performance. Castles & Coltheart (2004) opine that learning how to recognize syllable boundaries inside multisyllable words is crucial during the early stages of reading development and is evident in the present research as children gradually showed increasing sensitivity to syllables. Unlike alphasyllabary language, alphabetic languages will not have clear boundaries between the syllables within the words. However, the children showed an increasing trend in the performance with age, which demonstrates that, the children are increasingly aware of syllables with age. They are able to discern the actual syllable boundaries within the words. The grade specific hierarchical complexity of the task for LKG from easy to complex was syllable blending, final syllable deletion, initial syllable deletion and syllable segmentation. Similarly, for UKG was syllable blending, syllable segmentation, final phoneme deletion and initial phoneme deletion, whereas for Grade I it was found to be final syllable deletion, syllable segmentation, initial syllable deletion and syllable blending. These results indicate that, the maturity of syllable awareness across the task is not uniform as the children grow. This variability can be attributed to the fact that, variability in the type of words used as stimuli. Because, most often children tend to perform significantly better for compound words than non-compound words and also the present material used lacks the homogeneity. Additionally, the performance also depends on the language proficiency of the children. As children mature, exposure to English language learning in school contributes to the enhancement of their vocabulary. This improvement aids children in retaining longer words in short-term memory while actively engaging with them. Overall, the results indicate that, the syllable awareness emerges as early as 3.6 years continues to develop, however matures beyond Grade I. Because the performance of Grade I children failed to approximate the ceiling scores on any of the task. However, the performance throughout the tasks was not significantly variable as was with LKG and UKG, indicating gradual stability in the development of syllable awareness. According to Treiman and Zukowski (1991), children from various cultures develop syllable awareness naturally prior to formal reading exposure and will master by the age of 5 or 6 years. This may be true for monolingual children, but the current findings contradict this because active development observed through all the age groups studied and ceiling was not observed even by Grade I.

The intra-syllabic awareness also called as onset-rime awareness assesses whether the children aware of words that can have similar onsets or whether they can rime. The present research employed onset-rime segmentation, onset-rime blending, rhyme recognition, rhyme production, rhyme oddity, body-coda segmentation, and body coda blending. The results revealed that, the performance of Grade I found to be superior, LKG found to be lower, whereas the performance of UKG remained intermediate. The children from LKG failed to respond for rhyme production and none of the groups responded for onset-rime segmentation task. The hierarchical complexity of the task from easier to complex for LKG were rhyme recognition, body-coda blending, and the performance was similar for rhyme oddity, onset-rime blending, body-coda segmentation, whereas rhyme production and onset-rime segmentation found to be most difficult as none of the children from LKG responded for the tasks. Similarly, for UKG, it was body-coda blending, similar performance on rhyme recognition and onset-rime blending, followed by rhyme oddity, body-coda segmentation, and rhyme production and finally onset-rime segmentation is the most difficult task. The performance of children from Grade I was comparatively higher from other but similar between rhyme recognition, rhyme oddity, body-coda blending followed by body-coda segmentation, onset-rime blending, rhyme production and finally onset-rime segmentation. The children failure to perform on onset-rime segmentation task even at Grade 1 is due to the poor sensitivity to phonemes of alphabetic languages which lacks the clear boundaries, however, the performance on body-coda awareness was better indicating the children were able to segment single syllable word at body of the word which includes initial consonants following vowel. It is similar to the syllables of children native language that depicts the boundary of the body of the syllable. Amongst rhyming task, rhyme production depends heavily on children vocabulary development. A comparable disparity in the development of rhyme awareness was recently documented by Waknis et al. (2017) in Marathi speaking upper kindergarten and first grade English language learners, because the children did not master rhyming skills even at the conclusion of Grade I. They also suggested that development will continue beyond Grade I. With regard to the delay in exposure to alphabetical language, this mismatch can be explained. In the present study, the children belong to the homes where English is not the native language and hence children failed to achieve adequate vocabulary to retrieve the rhyming words from the long-term memory. Overall, the children show increasing sensitivity to onset-rime awareness, but not completed by Grade I.In contrast to monolingual English speakers, exposure to English is typically limited at home and only occurs after attending school. Overall, the results point to the development of rime awareness as a continuum, starting before entering school and maturing after finishing primary school. Due to the inconsistent task, instructions, and stimuli among research, the general tendency across language cultures or studies cannot be directly compared.

The last fine grain aspect of phonological sensitivity is child’s awareness to phonemes which smallest unit of a language. The phoneme awareness was assessed using phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, initial phoneme deletion and final phoneme deletion. The results indicated that, performance except from phoneme segmentation LKG children performed lower, Grade I children performed superior, whereas UKG children performance was intermediate of other two groups. The hierarchical complexity from easy to complex for LKG were phoneme blending, final phoneme deletion, initial phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation. Similarly, for UKG children was equivalent performance on phoneme blending and final phoneme deletion followed by initial phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation remained as the most complex task. However, Grade I followed different trend, where final phoneme deletion observed to be easier than phoneme blending, followed by final phoneme deletion. However, they too failed to respond for phoneme segmentation. Researchers who have previously examined a few phoneme awareness tasks in monolingual English speakers have found that performance increases with age regardless of cognitive operations (Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, Barker, & Theodore, 1998; Margaretha, Vandervelden, & Siegel, 1995; Stahl & Murray, 1994) and also in English language learners in Indian context (Aarti & Vanaja, 2017; Jayashree, Chaitra, & Prathima, 2010; Sarika & Prema, 2011). The current study also showed a distinct developmental trajectory in phoneme awareness abilities that were evaluated utilizing a variety of cognitive operations, including segmentation, blending, and deletion.

The results of the present study indicate that, children acquire phonological sensitivity gradually with the age. The sensitivity to phonemes emerges as early as 3.6 years of age and continued to develop beyond Grade I as they did not achieve the ceiling scores. However, phoneme segmentation task remains as the most complex task which requires explicit awareness of phonemes. The development of phoneme awareness in typically developing children between the ages of 3 and 6 in India was examined by Jayashree et al. (2010). They used cognitive procedures as counting, blending, identification, replacement, deletion, and strangeness to evaluate just phoneme awareness. The findings showed that children only began to develop phonemic awareness skills after the age of 4, as the younger group (3 to 4 years) failed to respond to any of the examined tasks. However, the older group (5 to 6 years) scored better than the younger groups on all phoneme awareness activities, while the performance of the 4- to 5-year-olds was in the middle. Phoneme blending, phoneme identification, phoneme substitution, phoneme counting, phoneme strangeness, phoneme deletion, and phoneme segmentation were determined to be the steps in the acquisition process. They came to the conclusion that youngsters learning to read English in an Indian context only react to tests requiring phonemic awareness after the age of four. The linguistic activities necessary to perform phonemic awareness abilities also had an impact. In other words, it was discovered that blending skills were developing earlier than segmenting and manipulating skills, and phonemic awareness was complete even at the study’s upper age limit. According to their opinion, phonemic awareness skills continue to develop after the age of six.

Alphabet knowledge

The present research assessed alphabet knowledge using letter identification of both capital and smaller case, and letter-sound correspondence task. There is no published literature on alphabetic knowledge development in English language learners in Indian context to support or contrast the present findings. The results indicated that, the performance of LKG children found to be lower, performance of Grade I found to be superior, whereas the performance of UKG remained intermediate on letter-sound correspondence task, and letter identification of smaller and capital case, though there was no statistical difference between UKG and Grade I on letter identification, Grade I children outperformed UKG. However, the performance of UKG group performed intermediate of LKG and Grade I. The younger group failed to respond for letter-sound correspondence task. These results indicate that, the grapheme to phoneme correspondence emerges in LKG but continues to develop beyond Grade I, as they failed to achieve ceiling scores. However, it is not the case with letter identification, because the children scores approximated the ceiling by Grade I indicating the maturity in alphabet learning for both lower and upper case.

Conclusion

Based on these results it can be concluded that, the children who are learning to read English whose native language is orthographically and phonologically different from English becomes increasingly sensitive to different levels of phonological grain size such as word, syllables, onset-rime and phonemes with the age. These skills emerge as early as during kindergarten years and continue to develop beyond Grade I. The developmental sequence deciphered as word, syllable, onset-rime and phoneme awareness. The alphabetic knowledge also shows a clear developmental continuum, specifically letter-sound correspondence, whereas the letter identifications seems to mature by Grade I.

Limitations and Future Directions

Though the present research investigated children sensitivity to all the phonological unit size, restrict the cognitive operations to blending, segmentation and deletion. In order to get the clear picture of developmental aspects, it is essential to consider other cognitive-linguistic operations such as addition, substitution, identity, and isolation of target phonological units. The study involved small sample size, hence one needs to be careful while generalizing to larger population.

Disclosure Statement

We author do not have any conflicts of interest to disclose.