Phonological Awareness Development as a Discrete Process: Evidence for an Integrative Model

Abstract

The theoretical and practical implications of examining young children's acquisitions of phonological awareness skills with specific and differentiated processing tasks are explored in this study. The study presents data from 269 kindergarten children completing a phonological awareness protocol that provided information on 14 discrete phonological awareness skills. The data supported the assertion that phonological awareness develops in a gradual and continuous fashion and illustrated the importance of measuring phonological awareness while controlling for the effects of task difficulty, linguistic complexity, and phoneme position within syllables. In addition, three general patterns of literacy development were confirmed in these analyses that frame the integrated model of phonological awareness development.

Notes

^a Schatschneider et al. (1999) include a sixth level that involves blending phonemes into non-words, which is not represented in the SAPA.

^b Stahl and Murray's (1994) model regarding linguistic complexity also includes Level 4—Manipulate Cluster Onsets and Level 5—Manipulate Cluster Codas.

^aBlending Body Coda subscale was added to the SAPA after Fall data collection and completed by only the second cohort, n = 132, F(1, 131).

^bSample size was restricted to 187 due to failure to complete practice items, F(2, 185).

∗∗∗p < .001.