test of phoneme identities: Predicting alphabetic insight in prealphabetic readers, The

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 2000 by Murray, Bruce A, Smith, Kimberly A, Murray, Geralyn G

The present study was designed to compare the Test of Phoneme Identities (TPI) with two popular tests of phoneme awareness, the Yopp-Singer Segmentation Test (Yopp,1995) and the Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA, Torgesen & Bryant, 1994). In the TPI, children play a "repeating game" in which they repeat a sentence introducing two words they will test for a phoneme, for example, "We have tar on our car." Next they repeat an isolated phoneme (/k/), and then they are asked which word has the phoneme ("Do you hear /k/ in tar or car?").

Measures of alphabet knowledge and nursery rhyme knowledge were taken as additional estimates of reading potential and as possible explanatory factors for reading progress. All children were screened for phonetic cue reading, a form of rudimentary decoding that indicates alphabetic insight. Only children who scored below criterion on the test of phonetic cue reading participated in a dynamic assessment of reading. These prealphabetic readers received phoneme awareness instruction in the form of a lesson on using the letters S and M as phonetic cues. They were taught to use the beginning letter of a word (e.g., SEAL) to distinguish it from a rhyming word (e.g., MEAL). The number of trials it took them to use phonetic cues to distinguish rhyming printed words represented their relative ease in gaining alphabetic insight, the first step in learning to decode.

We predicted that the T PI would be reliable and strongly correlated with other measures of phoneme awareness and would correlate with a rudimentary decoding measure (a concurrent measure of early reading) as well as its competitors. But given the purpose of measuring potential for alphabetic understanding in prealphabetic readers, we predicted the TPI would explain more variation in learning to read phonetic cues than its competitors for children who had not yet developed alphabetic insight.

Beyond the validation question, this study allows examination of some broader issues concerning alphabetic insight. Can we explain alphabetic insight as a function of phoneme awareness or other literacy predictors? Could results on particular tests of phoneme awareness, including the TPI, be explained by other variables? Does the analysis of phoneme awareness tests reveal anything about the nature of phoneme awareness and how it can be taught?

Procedures

Participants

Ninety-seven kindergarten students participated in the study. Of this total, 35 (36%) were African American, 6 (6%) were Asian American, and 56 (58%) were European American. There were 54 girls (56%) and 43 boys (44%). All students attended an all-kindergarten public school in a small city in the southeastern United States. The children represented a wide range of socioeconomic status. They ranged in age from 5.5 to 7.3 years, with a mean age of 6.3 years (SD = .4). Students from 12 classrooms participated in the study. We included all children who returned permission forms signed by their parents. Of the 97 participants, 34 children were identified as prealphabetic readers for the purpose of instruction in the dynamic assessment of learning. Half (17) of the prealphabetic readers were African American, and half (17) were European American; 19 were boys (56%), and 15 were girls (44%).