A Review of the Relationship Between English Phonological Awareness and Word Spelling Ability

李芳媛 薛小姣

Abstract：There have been historical reviews focused on English native childrens PA （phonological awareness）.Few studies have started to explore the correlation between English PA and word spelling ability of Chinese middle school students until recent decades.This paper emphasizes on the historical review of the relationship between them.

Key words：phonological awareness （PA）；word spelling；review；relationship；Chinese EFL

1 Introduction

Since 1964，when the concept of PA was officially brought out by Bruce，the significance of PA and its effects on language learning have long been researched.

Previous researches pointed out that PA is indispensable in mastering a foreign language.For instance，Huang and Hanley （1994） asserted that there was a positive relationship between phonological awareness and word spelling ability.

2 Key Terminologies

2.1 Phonological Awareness （PA）

There is a consensus that PA is mostly defined as a language learners sound sensitivity to the phonological structure of words and refers to the ability to recognize，discriminate and manipulate the sounds in a language.For instance，Treiman （1992） asserted that PA was the comprehension of different ways in which spoken language could be divided into smaller units and manipulated.

Goswami，Bryant （1990） and Treiman （1985，1992） brought out that PA consists of syllables awareness，onsets and rimes awareness，and phonemes awareness.

Figure 1 shows the hierarchical structure and depicts how to separate different levels from the word “reset”.It has two syllables.The onset is /ri/ and the rime is /set/.The spoken form of the word consists of five phonemes，/r/，/i/，/s/，/e/ and /t/.

2.2 Word Spelling Ability

Hodges （1984） defined word spelling ability as the process of converting spoken form of a word to written form，attempting to transcribe the sounds of a word into alphabetic letters.

3 Literature Statistics from 2003 to 2017

This study has collected and processed statistics about the papers published on Chinese Journal Full-text Database （CNKI） from the year 2003 to 2017，relating to “phonological awareness”.After scrutinizing，we excluded papers those do not fit the purpose and the need of this present study.

As is shown from Table 2，only a small proportion of attention are contributed to the study of the relationship between PA and word spelling ability.

4 Previous studies on the relationship of PA and word spelling ability

4.1 Abroad

Ball and Bachman （1991） designed an activity called “Say-It-and-Move-It”，in which teachers taught English phonemes systematically and progressively.The activity showed that PA improved the accuracy of spelling.

Ball & Blaehrnans study （1991） indicated that kindergarten children might segment words into phonemes after receiving teaching and training.That meant PA could be improved by intervention.

Other researchers had concluded that PA had a unique causal link to the acquisition of early vocabulary spelling skills （Wagner，1997）.Nation & Hulme （1997） asserted that word spelling was not a mechanical memory and copying process of the written forms of English words，but a comprehensive process referring to PA.

Hecht and Linda Close （2002） took integrated computer aiding teaching about phoneme segmentation and blending to children.They found that PA could improve word spelling abilities.

4.2 Previous studies at home

SU （1995） held the opinion that in English orthography rules，low-level PA was the main reason of poor word spelling ability among English students.Participants were asked to write and spell in listening and spelling tasks.The results indicated that a learners PA level to some extent was decisive to English word spelling ability.

DING Ji-pong and PENG （1998） examined the developmental features of Chinese childrens English phonetic awareness and its influence on English word spelling.The experiments on students of BNU Experimental Primary School had shown that Chinese children developed PA in the process of English learning，the ability to segment syllables into onset and rime was developed earlier，and the ability of phonemic segmentation was later.

In a study about spelling scores in Taiwan，SU （2001） examined adult English learners relationship between PA and their spelling skills.The results showed that students PA level could predict their spelling achievements.

YAN Rong，YU Guo-liang and ZhANG Lei （2002） conducted a two-way survey of PA and vocabulary recognition ability in 64 bilingual children through parallel speech and lexical processing tasks.The results showed that bilingual children had multiple correlations between different levels of PA and vocabulary spelling and recognition in two languages and that PA had a predictive power on the ability of word spelling.

XU Li （2015） went through an empirical study，he drew conclusions as follows： the effect of the enhancement of English phonetic awareness helped English learners to improve their spelling ability，and thus achieving the correct spelling to enlarge their vocabulary.

In conclusion，studies both at home and abroad indicate that PA is closely related to English word spelling abilities.

5 Implications

5.1 Pedagogical Implications

According to “Junior High School English Curriculum Standards” （published by Chinese Education Ministry），Chinese middle school students should master basic rules of pronunciation and some phonetic knowledge as well as 1500～1600 words and at least 200 idioms or collocations.Thus，mastering a vast number of English vocabularies is indispensable for successful school performance.

According to this review，explicit PA training plays an active role in the development of English ability.Teachers should pay more attention to the phonetic instruction and should enhance their skills on PA training in the actual classroom.

5.2 Implications for future research

A lot of previous studies have demonstrated that there is a relationship between English performance and PA.Yet，most of those studies focused on the correlation between childrens PA and their reading development rather than word spelling ability.The exact role of different components of PA in word spelling has not yet been precisely investigated.

Moreover，PA studies were mostly conducted among younger native learners.Consequently，it is necessary to deeply dig out the relationship of PA and the ability of word spelling as well as the further impact on English teaching and learning process.

References

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作者简介

李芳媛（1991—），女，新疆省库尔勒市人，扬州大学硕士研究生在读，研究方向：学科教学（英语）。

薛小姣（1986—），女，江苏省扬州市人，讲师，博士，主要研究方向为英汉语音学和二语习得研究等。