Phonemic Awareness and Beginning Reading and Writing

Abstract

Vernon and Ferreiro (1999) took Spanish-speaking kindergartners' levels of writing as an independent variable and their performance on oral-segmentation tasks as the dependent variable. They found a highly significant multiple correlation R and concluded that: 1) children's ability to deal with oral-segmentation tasks seems to depend on their knowledge of the writing system and 2) the ability to segment words into phonemes is not a cause or prerequisite for learning to read and write. To find out if a similar relationship can be found among English-speaking kindergartners, we gave 68 kindergartners a writing task and two oral-segmentation tasks similar to those used by Vernon and Ferreiro. In the writing task, we asked each child to write four pairs of words—“ham” and “hamster,” “butter” and “butterfly,” “key” and “monkey,” and “gum” and “bubblegum.” We, too, found a close relationship between children's levels of writing and their levels of oral segmentation, and concluded that their knowledge of our writing system enables them to write at a higher level and to segment words phonemically.

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