Phonological approach to reading

This study focuses on the case of written languages using an alphabetic system. An alphabet is a reversible code according to which units of sounds are represented in writing by visual symbols, called graphemes (Stainthorp, 2003, p.212). The unit of sound on which the alphabetic code is based can be the phoneme -which is the smallest unit of the spoken language able to signal a change of meaning- as is the case in Indo-European languages for instance, including English, Spanish and Finnish (ibid.).

In languages using an alphabet, ‘spelling’ refers to the operation of turning the sounds or words of the spoken language into symbols, also called the process of encoding. On the other hand, ‘reading’ consists of the opposite operation, that is to say decoding the symbols of the alphabet back into sounds to recover the words (McGuinness, 2004, p.37).

Therefore, what the new reader has to do is acquire the ability to translate from visual structures (graphemes) to sound structures (phonemes).

The phonological approach to reading takes its name after the field of phonology which studies the system of phonemes of languages (Stainthorp, 2003, p.210). According to the phonological approach, literacy instruction should first develop the learner’s ability of listening and recognizing the phonemes of the language he or she intends to read. Indeed, people are not usually aware of phonemes spontaneously. Then the student needs to learn the relations between the phonemes and the graphemes of the language; in other words, the student needs to learn how to link phonemes to letters (McGuinness, 2004, p.35). In this fashion, it is believed that the learner can become an independent reader rapidly.

When presented with a word, a sentence or a text to read, the learner should first sound out each independent phoneme of the word –using the correspondences between

phonemes and letters that have been taught. The learner then blends the phonemes together into the word, and then finally checks the outcome. Overtime, this process of segmenting the phonemes, blending them together and checking for meaning becomes automatic and is not apparent anymore. Nevertheless, it is still taking place. This is called

‘automaticity’ and implies that the reader will require less processing capacity to read.

Consequently, more attention will be available for comprehension (McGuinness, 2004, pp.161-162).

A direct implication of the phonological approach to reading is that the difficulty of acquiring this skill is related to the attributes of each language. Transparency refers to the extent to which the system of mapping of the correspondences phonemes-letters that the language contains is regular, uniform and consistent (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999 cited in Stainthorp, 2003, p.214). In a transparent alphabetic system, each letter corresponds to one unique phoneme, and vice versa. In this case, it is much easier and faster to learn the correspondences of the system, and the student can learn to read fast and early (ibid.) as is the case with the Finnish, Italian and Spanish languages (Ojanen, 2007, pp.5-6).

As the phonological approach to literacy recommends to teach reading through phonology, it also usually views readers’ different abilities as a reflection of what researchers call the phonological processing skills. In his research Phonological processing abilities and reading competence: theory and evidence, Li (2010, p.26) defines phonological processing abilities as ‘an individual’s mental operations pertaining to phonological information, especially the use of the sound structure of one’s spoken language, in learning to decode written language’.

Phonological processing abilities can further be divided in three subskills: phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming. Li (2010, p.26-38) describes phonological awareness as the skill related to one’s sensitivity to the sound structure of the language -in other words, the ability to manipulate the phonemes of the language, by for instance isolating, segmenting or blending them. As a consequence, learners presenting deficits in phonemic awareness are likely to have decoding difficulties which, if not addressed, can make them unsuccessful readers. Indeed, the decoding problems often lead these learners to be exposed to less text in class, eventually having both less opportunities to practice reading and lower motivation to do so.

Li (2010, pp.45-46) differentiates phonological awareness from phonological memory, explained as the process of coding letters into phonemes so as to be efficiently stored in working memory. Therefore, according to the phonological approach, deficit in phonological memory also leads to the development of reading disorders in so far as the reader presenting a phonological memory deficit will be unable to hold the letter-sound correspondences in the phonological working memory to be blended into words.

Finally, rapid naming is defined as the efficiency of retrieval of the phonological information from the long-term memory. Rapid naming is often tested for instance by showing pictures of objects to children and asking them to name the object represented as fast as possible. As such, it is more a skill related to semantic processing, that is to say to the reading comprehension side of literacy acquisition, rather than to the decoding process in itself (Li, 2010, p.47-48).

Hence, the phonological approach is concerned with developing phonological awareness –the ability to manipulate phonemes- in the student, so that he or she can rapidly become an independent reader through learning the phoneme-letter correspondences of the language. A great deal of evidence supports this approach (McGuinness, 2004, pp.107-152), the most well-known being the report of the National Reading Panel (National Reading Panel (NRP), 2000), entitled Teaching Children to Read. The NRP’s report reflects the most extensive review and analysis of the research on reading instruction to date. The report concluded that children taught with whole-word methods consistently presented lower reading test scores than children taught with approaches emphasizing phoneme-letter correspondences. In addition, the report explained that phonemes are hard to recognize by the learners; therefore, phoneme awareness needs to be developed in the early reader by doing phoneme-analysis tasks in class. So, the NRP report supported the case of the phonological approach to reading (McGuinness, 2004, p.73-106).

Furthermore, the report gave some additional guidelines for reading instruction, such as the fact that the teaching should be from the phoneme to the letter and not the other way around. Indeed, teaching from the phoneme to the letter allow for the reversibility of the alphabetic code to be maintained, including in non-transparent languages –called opaque systems. In other words, the fact that the alphabet is a code should be made clear to the student, so that he or she can start reading faster in an independent fashion. In addition, the NRP report encourages reading instruction to be consistent in the sound units used to

teach reading. In fact, learners often get confused if teachers mix phonemes, syllables and full words in their classes. Teaching Children to Read explains that the instruction should be based on the unit at the basis of the alphabetic system –usually the phoneme (McGuinness, 2004, p.73-106).

The phonological approach to reading is also supported by neurobiological evidence.

Shaywitz and her colleagues’ research (Shaywitz et al., 2002 cited in Coles, 2003, p.169), compared the patterns of activation of areas in the brain between good readers and dyslexic readers. The research found higher activation of the left part of the brain in good readers across all phonological awareness tasks, when compared with readers affected by reading disorders. This research provided neurobiological evidence that dyslexic readers have an imperfectly functioning system in terms of phonological awareness.

In conclusion, a lot of scientific evidence supports that the phonological approach to reading is the fastest and most consistent method to teach students to become independent readers.