The effects of Socioeconomic Status on Phonological Awareness, Letter Knowledge and Lexical Retrieval in Arabic speaking children

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank to my supervisor for supporting me throughout my project and giving his valuable suggestions. Also, thanks to all my friends and family for their utmost support and inspiration.

DECLARATION

I, (Your name), would like to declare that all contents included in this dissertation stand for my individual work without any aid, & this dissertation has not been submitted for any examination at academic as well as professional level previously. It also represents my own views & not essentially those which are associated with the university.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTII

DECLARATIONIII

LITERATURE REVIEW1

Phonological awareness (PA)1

Defining Phonological awareness1

The Development of Phonological Awareness2

Test batteries in English4

PAT4

PIPA4

PA Tasks8

Complexity of units in PA tasks9

The rhyming subtest contains both discrimination and production components11

Continuum of Complexity of Phonological Awareness Levels13

Method for assessing PA - Developmental trajectory: units, methods and rough ages16

Is PA a unitary ability/ construct?22

REFERENCES25

LITERATURE REVIEW

Phonological awareness (PA)

Phonological awareness has been extensively studied in the last three decades. Nonetheless, from a historical perspective, the role of phonological awareness in literacy is a relatively new area of research. Instructors of reading had previously assumed that if children are able to produce oral language, they are able to effectively encode and manipulate all of the individual speech sounds that comprise that language, thus possessing phonological awareness abilities. However, research that emerged in the mid-1970s began to change this way of thinking. Researchers were able to show that many children required some degree of direct instruction in phonological awareness before they were able to successfully blend sounds into words for reading or to break words into sounds for spelling. Recent evidence shows a link between deficits in phonological awareness and the incidence of reading disabilities. These findings have begun a shift in the methodology of literacy instruction and have spurred continued research into the role of phonological awareness in reading and spelling (Anthony & Francis, 2005, Pp. 255).

Defining Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness includes not only the ability to attend to and manipulate phonemes, but also the general ability to recognize the sound structure of a language. It begins as the broad ability to tune into the sounds and rhythm of a language and develops into an ability to perceive, analyze, and manipulate the sounds or phonemes within spoken words. In pure form, phonological awareness is an auditory skill based upon the auditory processing of phonemes. Phonological awareness encompasses a broad subset of skills, including general listening, rhyme, word awareness, syllable awareness and phonemic awareness. referencePhonological awareness can be divided into shallow-level tasks and deep-level tasks. Activities such as dividing words into syllables, identifying word boundaries, and generating rhymes are considered to be shallow-level phonological awareness skills (Arab & Moghaddam, 2001, Pp. 140).

Training in these skills provides the foundation for a deeper level skills. Most researchers agree that while these skills are necessary, training at this level alone will not have an impact on reading or spelling ...