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JCPSLP
Volume 18, Number 2 2016
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
were found for the speech pathology students. Significantly
better performance at Time 2 was seen on two tasks:
(a) identifying the numbers of sounds in a word, and (b)
identifying the second sound in the word. Although we did
not set out to compare the phonological awareness skills
across student cohorts, the difference in progress made by
the two cohorts following one semester of university studies
is striking. The most likely explanation is that the semester
1 tutorials related to phonetic transcription helped improve
the speech pathology students’ phonological awareness
skills at phoneme level (see Robinson et al., 2011).
Regardless, as shown in Table 2, the percentage of speech
pathology students obtaining at least 80% correct on these
two tasks was still low (63% and 44%, respectively). One
possible explanation may be that the students need more
time to consolidate their skills and re-testing the students
on a yearly basis may help confirm if this hypothesis is
true, Taken together, more explicit teaching of phonological
awareness in both degree courses seems warranted.
Limitations
It is not clear if the results reflect the performance of the full
Bachelor of Primary Education cohort. Future research
should investigate ways of ensuring a higher percentage of
students complete the survey (or self-quiz – see
suggestions below). It is also not clear if the use of verbal
instructions as opposed to written instructions would have
influenced the results.
Recommendations and future directions
Based on the findings from this preliminary study, a change
in the current course work is recommended to ensure an
improvement in students’ phonological awareness skills.
Although there is limited evidence regarding the optimal
model for teaching phonological awareness (see Carroll,
demonstrating > 80% correct on these tasks. However,
lower levels of performance were found in both cohorts of
students when asked to identify sounds in words (total
number of sounds and second sound in a word). These
results indicate that students’ previous education had not
been successful in promoting phonological awareness at
sound-level (i.e., phonemic awareness). Of note, 85% of the
education students had just completed year 12 of high
school, whereas the Master of Speech Pathology students
had all completed a bachelor degree. The performance of
the education students is surprisingly similar to that found
by Carroll et al. (2012). Carroll and colleagues measured the
performance of 153 first-year New Zealand Bachelor of
Teaching and Learning students and reported a mean score
of 2.03 (SD 2.08) on the total number of sounds task. In the
current study, performance of the education cohort
measured 2.6 (SD 3.0). Taken together, these findings
indicate that regardless of the education system (or
country), phonological awareness at the phoneme level in
university students is low (at least at the outset of their
training course) and will need to be developed as part of
their degree courses, particularly when the teaching of
reading is emphasised in curriculum and policy (see also
Fielding-Barnsley, 2010).
In response to our second research question, which
posed whether exposure to their regular course work
during their first semester of study would enhance
students’ performance in phonological awareness,
we found no significant difference between education
students’ phonological awareness skills at Time 1 and
Time 2. This is concerning as results from Carroll et al.’s
(2012) study showed that third-year Bachelor of Teaching
and Learning students did not show significantly better
performance than their first-year peers. Different results
Table 1. Student performance (in number of items correct) at Time 1 and Time 2 with means (standard
deviations) and ranges reported
Question
Education
Time 1
Time 2
Speech pathology
Time 1
Time 2
n
111
68
30
27
1
No. of syllables
(max 10)
9.1 (1.4)
1–10
9.5 (.92)
6–10
9.6 (.67)
8–10
9.3 (1.0)
7–10
2
No. of sounds
(max 10)
2.6 (3.0)
0–10
2.0 (2.6)
0–10
5.4 (2.9)
0–10
7.9 (2.1)*
3–10
3
2nd sound in word
(max 5)
1.7 (.94)
0–4
1.8 (.90)
0–4
2.8 (.86)*
1–4
3.3 (.81)*
1–4
4
Last sound in word
(max 5)
3.8 (1.3)
0–5
3.9 (1.31)
0–5
4.0 (.89)
1–5
4.3 (.71)
3–5
Note:
* indicates the students showed significantly better performance (
p
< .05) at Time 2.
Table 2. Percentage of students obtaining scores of 80% or higher
Question
Education
Time 1
Time 2
Speech pathology
Time 1
Time 2
1
No. of syllables
91.9%
92.6%
100%
92.6%
2
No. of sounds
11.7%
10.3%
26.7%
63%
3
2nd sound in word
1.9%
3%
20%
44.4%
4
Last sound in word
73.9%
72.1%
76.7%
85.2%