JCPSLP Vol 18 no 2 July 2016

National Disability Insurance Scheme

The phonological awareness skills of education and speech pathology higher education students during their first semester of study Marleen F. Westerveld and Georgina Barton

Responding to the urgent call to address the need for appropriate preparation of professional teachers of reading, this preliminary investigation examined the phonological awareness knowledge of Bachelor of Primary Education and Master of Speech Pathology students in their first semester of study before and after their regular course work. This report outlines the results of the study and proposes ways of utilising this information to enhance tertiary teaching practices, with the ultimate aim of raising student performance in the area of phonological awareness. T he ability to read is an essential skill in today’s world. Skilled readers not only need to recognise or decode the written words, they also need to understand what those written words mean. Results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS; Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Drucker, 2012) showed that Australian students scored significantly lower than 21 other countries, with 24% of the Australian year 4 students performing at the low or below low international benchmarks (Thomson et al., 2012). This is concerning and, accordingly, the value of teaching reading in our primary schools has been well recognised by the Australian government including departments of education. In 2005, the Australian government initiated a National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy and identified the importance of “teachers adopting an integrated approach to reading that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension” to ensuring reading success (Australian Government, 2005, p. 11). A decade later, a report titled Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers , also known as the TEMAG report (Australian Government, 2015), indicated a continuing necessity for quality and explicit practices to focus on the teaching of reading in the early years and throughout schooling. Ferrari (2015), in a newspaper article summarising the views of Dr Louisa Moats, noted that “teachers’ lack of basic understanding of how language works is the underlying problem of teaching reading in schools”. In the last 20 years, Moats has been a keen advocate for improving the language-structure knowledge and skills (e.g., phonological, morphological, and syntactic

awareness) of literacy intervention specialists (Moats, 2014). The underlying rationale is that these professionals must have an explicit knowledge of language structure to teach their students to become capable readers (see Moats, 2014). This paper reports the preliminary phase of a planned longitudinal project aimed at improving the professional preparation of teachers and speech pathologists at an Australian university by tracking one aspect of their language structure knowledge, i.e., phonological awareness, during their first semester of study. Phonological awareness can be defined as the ability to consciously reflect upon and manipulate the sound structure of spoken words, at syllable (e / le / phant = elephant), onset-rime (r / oom = room), and phoneme (c / a / t = cat) levels (Stahl & Murray, 1994). Phonological awareness is crucial for early reading and spelling success (Stahl & Murray, 1994), and research has clearly established that a large percentage of children with reading difficulties demonstrate poor phonological awareness (Carson, Gillon, & Boustead, 2013). Phonological awareness should not be confused with phonics. Phonics is a teaching strategy that addresses how sounds are mapped to letters or symbols (e.g., what sound does the letter /s/ make?), whereas phonological awareness refers to the ability to recognise and manipulate the sounds in spoken language (e.g., what sound does the word snake start with? or how many sounds (not letters) in the word thought? answer = 3) (e.g., Gillon, 2004). Once children commence their formal school education, qualified teachers play an important role in young children’s reading development. Teaching of reading has been and still is a large focus in curriculum and policy, both in Australia and internationally (Australian Government, 2005; 2015). Apart from teachers, speech pathologists address literacy development with a range of clients – for example when working with children with spoken language impairment – who are considered at risk of long-term reading difficulties (Catts & Hogan, 2003). Considering the fact that phonological awareness is best taught explicitly, especially with children who have difficulty in literacy acquisition (Gillon, 2004), it stands to reason that both teachers and speech pathologists should display strong phonological awareness skills themselves. Alarmingly, however, research suggests that education professionals, including early childhood educators and primary school teachers generally present with poor phonological awareness skills (Carroll, 2006; Carroll, Gillon, & McNeill, 2012; Moats, 2003; Spencer, Schuele, Guillot, & Lee, 2008). Although results from Carroll et al.’s (2012) and Spencer et al.’s (2008)

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER- REVIEWED KEYWORDS HIGHER EDUCATION PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SPEECH PATHOLOGY TEACHER PREPARATION

Marleen F. Westerveld (top) and Georgina Barton

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 2 2016

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology