Lit Symposium 2009 Poster

New Zealand Educators’ Phonological Awareness Knowledge Jane Carroll, Gail Gillon PhD & Brigid McNeill PhD Educators involved in supporting children’s literacy development are expected to facilitate children’s phonological awareness development and provide explicit feedback as part of the learning journey. Study Aim: To investigate the phonological awareness skills of New Zealand teachers and those training to be teachers within primary classrooms Participants: Speech-language Therapists (SLT; n=34) Employed by the Ministry of Education and

experienced in working in New Zealand schools. Resource Teachers of Literacy (RTLit; n=19) Experienced teachers with a Post Graduate Diploma in Literacy Education. Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour (RTLB;n=23) Experienced teachers with a Post Graduate Diploma in Special Needs Resource Teaching. Primary Teachers (n=134) Experienced junior school teachers working in mainstream New Zealand schools in a range of socio-economic areas. Teachers’ Aides (T.Aide; n=48) Employed by schools to assist teachers in oral and written language instruction in junior school classrooms. Most of the teachers’ aides indicated that they had no formal qualification and “learnt skills as they worked”. Early Childhood Educators (ECE; n=20) Experienced early childhood educators working in mainstream New Zealand Early Childhood facilities in a range of socio-economic areas. Third Year Bachelor of Teaching and Learning Students (3YrBT; n=99) In the third year of their undergraduate degree in teacher training. First Year Bachelor of Teaching and Learning Students (1stYrBT; n=153) In the first year of their undergraduate degree in teacher training.

All participants were recruited during their participation in an oral language / literacy workshop with the exception of the Bachelor Of Teaching and Learning students who participated as part of a lecture on phonological awareness within their usual university programme. Assessment Measure: The Love and Reilly (1995) Phonological Awareness Test

This test is designed to be administered to adults prior to in-service training in phonological awareness. All participants sat the test under the same test conditions. The test takes 20-25 minutes to administer and has six subtests: Three phonemic awareness Three phonological awareness - identification of how many - syllable sounds - alliteration - the second sound - rhyme - the last sound Participants were required to write down responses on a score sheet. They self marked their responses and recorded their total score correct. Test forms were checked independently by two speech-language therapists to ensure the accuracy of the marking and total scores recorded. There was 98% agreement between the two examiners’ scores.

Results: Figure 1

Phonological Awareness Test Total Figure 1 illustrates the performance of each Scores professional group on the Phonological Awareness Test. (Love and Reilly, 1995).

Total Score

The performance of the professional subgroups (on each of the 6 subtests of the Phonological Awareness Tasks were compared. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (Wilks’ Lambda) showed a significant group effect [F = 14.340 df 42,000 p <.001]. Univariate F tests showed significant group difference on each of the subtests at p<.001. SLT.

RTLit.

RTLB Teacher T.Aide ECE 3rdYrBT 1stYrBT

Number of Words with Phonemes Correctly Counted: Subtest Two

Figure 2

Qualitative analysis of errors made by the participants revealed common error patterns e.g. consonant blends were considered as one sound; confusion about what a ‘sound’ is - some segmented the words at syllable, onset or rime levels rather than phonemes.

ANOVA [F = 46.639 df 7,522 p.<.001] Words Correctly Identified N=10

Figure 2 illustrates the ability of each group to segment words into phonemes accurately.

SLT.

RTLB Teacher T.Aide ECE 3rdYrBT 1stYrBT

Number of Words with the Second Figure 3 illustrates the ability of each group to Phoneme Correctly Identified: record the grapheme for the second phoneme in Subtest Three.ANOVA [F = 49.379 df 7,522 p.<.001] words accurately. Qualitative analysis of errors made by the participants revealed participants segmented the words at syllable, onset or rime levels rather than phonemes. E.g. for the word ‘Scream’ the second sound was correctly recorded as ‘c’ or ’k’ and incorrectly recorded as ‘e, ea, r, m, eam, cream, ream, cr, ka, a, re, ce’.

Second Phoneme Correctly Identified N=6

Figure 3

RTLit.

SLT. RTLit. RTLB Teacher T.Aide ECE 3rdYrBT 1stYrBT

Conclusion Speech-language therapists showed the strongest phonological awareness skills which is a likely reflection of their instruction in phonology. The phoneme segmenting skills of all the groups other than the speech-language therapists, were variable which may impact on classroom and specialist literacy instruction. It would seem timely that further instruction is integrated into in-service and pre-service training for educators and paraprofessionals who are involved in the provision of phonological awareness and literacy instruction development to better understand the phonological structure of words and to enhance their own competency in performing phonological awareness tasks.