JCPSLP Vol 18 no 2 2016

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 2 2016 85
Survey
The survey, previously validated in a study by Carroll et al.
(2012), consisted of a range of questions testing
phonological and morphological awareness. For the current
report, students’ responses to four questions addressing
phonological awareness (at syllable and sound/phoneme
level) were analysed. The full questions are provided in the
Appendix. The survey was given to the students at the start
of the tutorial and no further instructions were provided. In
contrast to the procedure used by Carroll et al. (2012),
students were provided with multiple choice options (as
opposed to open answer questions).
Regular class instruction
During their first semester of study, Bachelor of Primary
Education students typically spend one 2-hour tutorial out
of 12 focusing on phonics and one 2-hour tutorial on
phonological awareness and teaching phonics (Hill, 2012,
chapters 6, 10 and 11, respectively) in a course focusing on
early years literacy. In the Master of Speech Pathology
program, first-year students attend a 3-hour workshop that
focuses on phonological awareness ( including
development, assessment, and intervention) during their
first semester of study. In addition, the concept of
phonological awareness is addressed in a problem-based
learning case (in week 8) about a school-age girl with
language-learning difficulties, who demonstrates poor
phonological awareness skills.
Results
Student responses from paper copies of the survey were
entered into Survey Monkey® by independent research
assistants. Responses were downloaded from Survey
Monkey into Excel and exported into SPSS (PASW, 2012).
First, we wanted to determine the level of performance at
the start of the year as well as the percentage of students
who showed mastery of skills (i.e., performance of at least
80% correct on each skill) at Time 1. As shown in Tables 1
and 2, although students generally performed well on the
syllable identification task (mean scores of 9.1–9.6 out of
10), a high percentage (43% to 88%) of the students
struggled with tasks requiring the identification of the
number of sounds in words (i.e., phoneme awareness).
To determine if there were significant differences in
performance between the Time 1 and Time 2 scores,
independent samples t-tests were used. The samples
were considered independent as we did not gather data to
match Time 1 to Time 2 responses. As shown in Table 1,
students studying speech pathology showed significantly
better performance on two measures: identifying the
number of sounds in a word (Question 2), t(55) = –2.485,
p < .001 and identifying the second sound in a word
(Question 3), t(55) = –2.218, p = .031. No other significant
differences (p < .05) in performance were found in either
group of students.
Finally, we wanted to determine the percentage of
students who showed mastery of skills at Time 2. As
shown in Table 2, there seemed to be a noticeable increase
in performance at Time 2 in the speech pathology students
when asked to identify the number of sounds in a word.
Discussion
The results from this study showed that, at the outset of
their respective training courses, cohorts of teacher
education and speech pathology students demonstrated
adequate levels of performance on tasks measuring
identification of syllables in words and identifying the final
sounds in words, with at least 73% of students
research showed that speech pathologists performed
much better than teachers or early childhood educators,
variability in performance was observed, with some
speech pathologists showing unacceptably poor levels of
phonological awareness.
Considering that previous research has demonstrated
the education professionals’ relatively poor performance
on phonological awareness tasks in particular, it is not
surprising that research into the phonological awareness
skills of pre-service teacher education students shows
similar results (Carroll et al., 2012; Fielding-Barnsley,
2010; Purvis, McNeill, & Everatt, 2015). Overall, results
suggest very low levels of phonological awareness at
the phoneme (i.e., sound) level in pre-service teacher
education students. Moreover, a recent study by Carroll
and colleagues (2012) showed that although Bachelor
of Education students in New Zealand improved their
phonological awareness performance over the three years
of study, their level of phonological awareness at the end of
their 3-year degree course was still poor (e.g., mean score
of 3.2/10 on the phoneme counting subtest. Research
into the phonological awareness skills of speech pathology
students is more limited. One fairly recent study of the
phonemic awareness skills of speech pathology students
was conducted by Robinson, Mahurin, and Justus (2011).
A total of 43 undergraduate students in communication
disorders completed subtests of the Comprehensive Test
of Phonological Processing (CTOPP; Wagner, Torgesen,
& Rashotte, 1999), during the first two days of class
associated with a course in phonetics. Although these
researchers did not report the range in scores, mean
performance on the Segmenting Words subtest (requiring
the student to segment words into phonemes) was
8.26 (standard score) with a SD of 2.70 indicating that a
considerable percentage of the students obtained below
average (i.e., SS ≤ 7) on a test of phoneme segmentation.
The current study aims to address the important issue
of adequately preparing our next generation of literacy
professionals by investigating the phonological awareness
skills of Australian Bachelor of Education and graduate-
entry Master of Speech Pathology students at Griffith
University. We aimed to (a) determine initial levels of
performance at the start of the year, (b) evaluate whether
these skills improved following exposure to their regular
university courses during their first semester of study, and
(c) determine what percentage of students would show
mastery of skills at the end of the year.
Method
Ethics permission was obtained from Griffith University
(EDN/16/14/HREC).
Participants
Students enrolled in English Education 1: Reading and
Writing in the Early Years (across three campuses) and
Communication and Swallowing Disorders 1 were invited to
participate if they attended the tutorial during which the
surveys were administered. Out of a total of approximately
450 Bachelor of Education students, 111 completed the
survey at Time 1 and 68 at Time 2. A total of 30 (out of 35)
Master of Speech Pathology students completed the
survey at Time 1; at Time 2, there were 27 responses.
Data collection
Students were asked to complete a written survey (approx.
7–12 minutes) during class-time. There were two data
collection points: (a) at the start of semester 1 (weeks 1 or 2)
and (b) towards the end of the semester (weeks 12 or 13).