Phonemic Awareness, Article Critique Example

Byrne , B., Freebody, P., & Gates, A. (1992). Longitudinal Data on the Relations of Word-Reading Strategies to Comprehension, Reading Time, and Phonemic Awareness. Reading Research Quarterly, 27(2), 140-151.

As legislative and educational trends have made it more imperative than ever for teachers to provide effective, comprehensive instruction in the classroom, a growing body of literature has been written which examines and discusses various strategies to support such a mission. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandates that students meet threshold criteria for skills in reading as assessed by standardized testing, and educators face the challenge of ensuring that students with widely-varying skill sets are able to meet these minimum standards. Research has demonstrated that phonemic awareness is a critical building-block for students to develop literacy skills, and strategies to develop phonemic awareness in the classroom are encouraged as a means of cultivating reading comprehension skills and other aspects of literacy. While the development of phonemic awareness is becoming more widely-recognized as an effective component of developing strong literacy skills in the era of accountability, the benefits of phonemic awareness have been touted by researchers for decades.

In the article entitled “Longitudinal Data on the Relations of Word-Reading Strategies to Comprehension, Reading Time, and Phonemic Awareness”(1991) authors Byrne, Freebody and Gates offer a comprehensive analysis of evidence that demonstrates strong links between and among phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and reading time. Students who develop strong phonemic awareness are more apt to demonstrate strong reading comprehension skills and to read at a faster rate than students who develop literacy skills that are unsupported by phonemic awareness (Byrne, Freebody & Gates, 1991). A growing body of literature and research-based evidence is bearing out the notion that phonemic awareness is a fundamental building block of literacy, and that developing phonemic awareness skills in the context of early-childhood education is critical for the subsequent development of more complex literacy skills.

Among the research studies discussed by the authors in this article was one that assessed several different literacy skills of participating students. The primary skill sets being assessed in this study were the “ability to read two types of letter strings” (Byrne et al., 1991). The first of these was the ability to read “common irregularly spelled words such as laugh” (Byrne et al., 1991); the second was the ability to decode misspelled words and to identify nonsense words and to distinguish them from misspelled versions of real words. The students were assessed for their abilities to successfully navigate their way through these different types of letter strings, and were subsequently divided into groups according to their relative proficiency in these different areas. The members of these groups were then assessed for their proficiency in the eras of phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and reading time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the students who were most adept at reading the irregularly-spelled words and at decoding nonsense words and purposely-misspelled words showed overall higher scores in the areas of phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and reading time. What is interesting about this study, note the authors, are the differences between students who are better at decoding non-words than at reading irregular words and vice versa. While the participants who scored well in both areas also demonstrated strong overall reading comprehension and reading time skills, it was the students with the strongest decoding skills that also demonstrated the highest scores in those two areas of proficiency. Citing these and other results and data from the study, Byrne et al concluded that word-recognition skills that are based primarily on memorization are not as indicative of subsequent reading comprehension and reading time skills as are word-decoding skills.

Extrapolating both from the specific assertions of the authors and from the implications of their work, it appears that phonemic awareness serves as a fundamental building block for developing the decoding skills highlighted in this article. Word recognition skills are, of course, a valuable comment of a complete set of literacy skills. However, assert Byrne et al, such skills are only useful up to a point, and are largely developed through whole-word reading and other related exercises. The development of phonemic awareness, by contrast, allows students to understand how words are constructed using these small phonological building blocks. In essence, phonemic awareness underpins the subsequent development of more complex literacy skills, affording students the ability not just to recognize whole words, but also to understand them and understand how they are constructed. As such, phonemic awareness is perhaps the single most critical of all literacy skills.