Efficacy of Explicit English Instruction in Phonemic Awareness and the Alphabetic Principle for English Learners and English Proficient Kindergarten Children in Relationship to Oral Language Proficiency, Primary Language and Verbal Memory.
Author(s):
Roberts, Theresa; Corbett, Caro
Format:
Report
Publisher:
1997.
Language:
English
Abstract:
A study examined the degree to which children with limited English proficiency can benefit from English instruction in phonemic awareness and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Subjects were 27 kindergarten children in a suburban northern California school--16 spoke Hmong as their primary language and the rest were monolingual English speakers. The comparison class consisted of 29 students, 17 of whom spoke Hmong as their primary language. Students in the intervention class received 20-minute lessons on both phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle four to five times a week for eight weeks. Literacy instruction in the comparison class included a daily alphabet song or chant. Results indicated that: (1) students in the intervention group significantly improved in rhyming, segmenting, and blending skills from pretest to posttest; (2) students in the intervention class outperformed their comparison class counterparts on the phonemic awareness measures but not the letter name and letter sound measures; (3) English learners in the intervention class scored significantly higher than the English learners in the comparison class on rhyming and blending; (4) no significant correlations between English oral proficiency and phonemic awareness performance were seen; and (5) students in all classes showed significant improvement in understanding the alphabetic principle. Findings suggest that the intervention instruction was particularly beneficial to English learners, and that English language learners who are at the very initial stages of English language acquisition and who are from very low socioeconomic status backgrounds can learn phonemic awareness through explicit instruction. (Contains 21 references, and two tables and three figures of data.) (RS)