British Journal of Educational Psychology · 1996 · 188 citations · 0 references
EducationEducational PsychologyLiteracy EducationPhonological AwarenessReading ComprehensionReading DevelopmentEarly Literacy SkillsMetalinguistic AwarenessMetalinguistic DevelopmentReadingReading AcquisitionSyntactic AwarenessEarly Comprehension SkillsEarly Literacy PredictionEarly Reading ComprehensionMetalinguistic Phonological SkillsReading Awareness
The study examined how phonological awareness and syntactic awareness predict recoding abilities and reading comprehension. A four‑year longitudinal study of 23 children used repeated testing and fixed‑order regression, controlling for intelligence and vocabulary, to assess the predictive power of metalinguistic skills on reading outcomes. Phonological awareness predicts later recoding abilities, whereas syntactic awareness predicts later reading comprehension after controlling for intelligence and vocabulary.
This study was designed to investigate the relations between two metalinguistic abilities (phonological awareness and syntactic awareness) and two components of reading (recoding abilities and comprehension). In order to study these connections, a four‐year follow‐up study comprising 23 children was set up. These children had been tested repetitively during their first years of learning to read. Results were analysed with fixed‐order regression in which the dependent variable was either recoding abilities or comprehension performances; the first steps were extraneous variables (intelligence and vocabulary levels) and the final step was that of metalinguistic measures. Stepwise regressions were performed including all the measures (metalinguistic performances and extraneous variables). Results indicated that children's phonological awareness predicts later recoding abilities, while syntactic awareness predicts later reading comprehension after effects of extraneous variables have been ruled out.