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Research by Age Level

Age Four to Five

Background Research: Sound Awareness for Four- and Five-Year-Olds

Learning to read and write is essential for school success. Children who read early and well read a lot more than children who are slow to learn to read, or who are having reading difficulties. As a result, successful readers become smarter, not just about how to read, but also about all those things that can be learned from books. In contrast, children who lag behind in reading receive less practice in reading than other children, miss out on opportunities to develop strategies for understanding what they read, often encounter reading material that is too hard, and may come to dislike reading and school assignments that require reading.

Reading and writing are crucial to living and working in our society. We use these skills at the grocery store when writing a check for food, in the car when reading directions, at the bank when filling out paperwork, and at home when reading the newspaper. Many children, however, fail at the task of learning to read. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 38% of fourth graders nationally cannot read at the basic level. In other words, they cannot read and understand a simple paragraph of the type that would be found in a children's book. In some school districts that serve large numbers of children living in poverty, the number of fourth graders who cannot read at the basic level hovers around 70%. These children seldom catch up. They enter high school with the ability to read only at an elementary school level. For many, the work becomes too difficult and they end up dropping out of high school. For those who go on to graduate, the picture is not much better. These young adults cannot participate fully in a society such as ours, where expectations for reading and writing arise in almost every daily activity. Further, they miss out on the joys of reading and are poorly prepared as parents to help their own children become ready to read.

Within the past two decades, research has identified phonological sensitivity (sometimes called "phonological awareness" or "phonemic awareness") as a central basis for learning to read. Phonological sensitivity involves understanding that words are made up of smaller sounds. These smaller sound units include individual words in compound words ("sea" and "shell" in "seashell"), syllables ("but" and "ter" in "butter"), and phonemes, which are the smallest speech sounds and are the sounds depicted by letters (the "buh" sound in "bat"). Phonological sensitivity might be revealed by a child's ability to identify words that rhyme ("What rhymes with cat?), blend spoken syllables or letter-sounds together to form a word ("What do you get when you put 'tie' and 'ger' together?") delete syllables or a letter-sound from spoken words to form a new word ("What is 'window' without 'doe'?"), or count the number of letter-sounds in a spoken word ("How many letter sounds are there in 'milk'?" Answer = four). Children who have better phonological sensitivity as indicated by their ability to answer questions such as these learn to read quicker and better than children who have trouble with these tasks.

Well-developed phonological sensitivity promotes the development of reading because letters in written language correspond to phonemes, e.g., the letter B makes the buh sound. Understanding that words are made up of smaller sounds helps children "break the code" between written language (letters) and spoken language (sounds). Research with school-age children indicates that most poor readers have poor phonological sensitivity skills.

Children's phonological sensitivity begins to develop during the preschool years. Unless children are given help from teachers, parents, or other adults, those with low levels of phonological sensitivity will continue to be delayed in this skill from the late preschool period forward. The development of phonological sensitivity in young children progresses from sensitivity to large and meaningful units of sound (e.g., individual words within sentences or individual words within compound words), to syllables, to phonemes.

The Sound Awareness for Pre-readers program, described subsequently, consists of activities that are designed to help parents teach their children phonological sensitivity skills. The program includes language games appropriate for four- to five-year-old children.

Most programs designed to facilitate phonological sensitivity in pre-readers involve a large number of activities that span the developmental progression of phonological skills from word sensitivity to phoneme sensitivity. Such programs would be impractical for libraries to implement with parents and would likely be overly cumbersome and too involved for many parents to implement with their children (two such well-designed programs are Ladders to Literacy and Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum). The activities described in the Sound Awareness for Pre-readers Program, however, can be extended by advancing along the continuum of phonological sensitivity development (e.g., the "Say It Slow--Say It Fast Puzzle Game," described in the following materials, can be performed with syllables or phonemes). A description of several extension activities is provided for libraries that have the ability to offer a series of programs to the same group of parents over a several month period.

Children from families of all family backgrounds can have difficulty learning to read. However, children from low-income families are disproportionately at risk for reading difficulties. These children are more likely to be slow in the development of oral language skills, print awareness, and phonological sensitivity prior to school entry than their middle-income counterparts. As a group, children from low-income families tend to have fewer experiences with book sharing, print materials, and other experiences that foster emergent literacy skills. Thus, a library's recruiting efforts for the Sound Awareness for Pre-readers program might pay special attention to organizations and information sources that serve low-income families, while also making the program available for all families.

Although the origins of phonological sensitivity have not yet been identified completely, we know that it depends on a well-developed vocabulary. Thus the Dialogic Reading Program for Parents of Two and Three Year Olds, described elsewhere in this package of materials, may be a more appropriate starting point for a child who has been slow to develop oral language, even if the child is four years of age or older. Even though vocabulary and other oral language abilities are prerequisites to phonological sensitivity, research has indicated that the types of activities that promote vocabulary development (such as shared book reading) are different from the activities that promote phonological sensitivity. Consequently, both the vocabulary building experiences provided in the Talking and Books program and the phonological sensitivity building experiences provided in the Sound Awareness for Pre-readers program are necessary for children to be fully ready to learn to read.

List of Relevant Research

Adams, M. J. (1990). Learning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Adams, M. J., Foorman, B. R., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A classroom curriculum. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks Publishing Company.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Juel, C., Griffith, P., & Gough, P. (1986). Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 243-255.

Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., & Anthony, J. L. (2000). Development of emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool children: Evidence from a latent variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 36, 596-613.

Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., Anthony, J. L., & Barker, T. A. (1998). Development of phonological sensitivity in two- to five-year-old children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 294-311.

Notari-Syverson, A., O'Conner, R. E., & Vadasy, P. F. (1998). Ladders to literacy: A preschool activity book. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks Publishing Company.

Raz, I.S., and Bryant, P. (1990). Social background, phonological awareness, and children's reading. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 209-225.

Sénéchal, M., LeFevre, J., Thomas, E. M., & Daley, K. E. (1998). Differential effects of home literacy experiences on the development of oral and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 13, 96-116.

Stanovich, K. E. (1992). Speculations on the causes and consequences of individual differences in early reading acquisition. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, and R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 307-342). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Stanovich, K. E., & Siegel, L. S. (1994). Phenotypic performance profile of children with reading disabilities: A regression-based test of the phonological-core variable-difference model. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 24-53.

Wagner, R. K. & Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The natural of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 192-212.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1994). Development of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New evidence of bidirectional causality from a latent variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 30, 73-87.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., Rashotte, C. A., Hecht, S. A., Barker, T. A., Burgess, S. R., Donahue, J., & Garon, T., (1997). Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 33, 468-479.