Phonological Processing

On January 30, 2018, at 2:00p.m., my newsletter presentation was given to four teachers in the exceptional children’s department at Douglas Byrd High School. It was important for me to review the newsletter with my coworkers because our work team is currently in the process of gathering new information for the start of the new semester which began on January 26, 2018. The age range of the students in our department range from 15-19 years of age; however, because of their varied learning disabilities and function levels, we use a lot of beginning reader teaching methods in an effort to work more effectively with all of our students.

We chose to assess phonological awareness because it is a crucial component in children’s development of writing, spelling, and reading skills (Paul & Norbury, 2012). Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure or words; it can be characterized by words, syllables, onset/rime, phoneme manipulations, and the ability to rearrange these different levels into various patterns.

Phonological Dyslexia is the type of dyslexia that hinders one's ability to identify basic sounds and causes them to lose phonemic awareness, or the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes in words (Desroches et. al, 2005). Research has also revealed a range of impairments and problems in other domains. This includes impairments in visual processing, auditory processing, working memory, oral language and motor functioning (Lum et. al, 2013).

1. ELL students need to be familiar with the sounds of English before they can develop phonological awareness. 2. Instruction needs to be explicit, modifications made, and practice needs to be given when needed. 3. Once phonological awareness has developed in any language, then it can be transferred to other languages that are learned.  4. Teachers should frequently model the production of sounds. 5. Beginning readers should get help to learn to identify sounds in short words.

The literacy rates among fourth grade students in America are sobering. Sixty six percent of all U.S. fourth graders scored "below proficient" on the 2013 NAEP reading test, meaning that they are not reading at grade level. Even more alarming is the fact that among students from low-income backgrounds, 80 percent score below grade level in reading (Students First, 2014).

A phonological process is a typical pattern that all young children use when developing their speech. The child’s brain creates rules to simplify speech sounds and make words easier to say. As children grow older, they outgrow these patterns on their own and eventually, their speech becomes intelligible. A phonological process disorder is when a child continues to exhibit these patterns past the age expected for them to disappear. Phonological processes consist of syllable structure processes, substitution process, and assimilation processes.

Researchers have shown that lack of preparation in the teaching of phonological awareness hinders the way teachers present phonological awareness when teaching their studnets reading. Researchers suggest interference due to the teacher's perspective, lack of training, values, and background may exist an be detrimental in properly teaching phonological awareness. Flesh’s 1955 publication of Why Johnny can’t Read and What You Can Do About it was influential in exposing the ineffective way how teachers teach their students literacy and reevaluation of reading programs in education and their deficiencies (Smith, 2002). Flesh’s book ignited educators and non-educators to look seriously at this literacy deficiency. A renewed interest

This paper is a review of two articles published by Paul Miller in the Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities. The first is entitled, “The role of phonology in the word decoding skills of poor readers: evidence from individuals with prelingual deafness or diagnosed dyslexia,” and was written in 2007. The second, written in 2010, is named, “Phonological, orthographic, and syntactic awareness and their relation to reading comprehension in prelingually deaf individuals: what can we learn from skilled readers?” At their heart, the articles attempt to address what explains good and poor readers in the deaf community, rejecting previous assumptions in the literature in this area. The studies are carefully designed, and attempt to address

Within current research, it is acknowledged that phonological impairment may result in dyslexia. A study by Lobier, Zoubrinetzky, and Valdois (2012) suggests that while phonological impairment may be the root cause in some dyslexic patients, visual processing deficits may play a significant role in dyslexia, especially in patients without phonological difficulties. More specifically, the research aimed to support the hypothesis that the “underlying impairment responsible for the VA span deficit is visual, not verbal” (2012, p. 768). To support the hypothesis, the study was designed to compare the performance of typically-developing children and dyslexic children on visual attention span tasks with verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Non-verbal stimuli were included to demonstrate the absence of

The second category of dyslexia, auditory dyslexia, is not a disability caused by any loss of hearing but the difficulty in processing and interpreting the oral information which is heard. Auditory dyslexia cause problems in the phonological realm of speech such as: distinguishing certain consonant and vowel sounds, the difference in syllables, and the ability to rhyme (Houston 1987).

Oral language is the foundation on which reading and writing are built. Many of the same rules and components, e.g., phonology, lexicon, and grammar govern written and oral language. Both systems also use the same cognitive resources e.g. working memory so developing one helps boost the other. Children develop an early knowledge of the phonological systems from oral language during their preschool years. Later this knowledge develops into a conscious phonological awareness, the knowledge of the sound structures of words. This phonological awareness helps the child when learning to read creating a reciprocal relationship between written and oral skills. Reading requires the child to be familiar with language and have an understanding of the

Bulgarian language consists only of six vowels, which are all short vowels. In comparison, Standard American English has fifteen vowels, including the diphthongs. Often, when a Bulgarian person learns English as a second language, this fact becomes underestimated and the importance of the vowel pronunciation is undervalued. Yet, when living in the United States, often a Bulgarian speaker tries to adapt to the American English phonological system as much as he/she can, and tries to melt this difference between the mispronunciations of the vowels. However, is it possible to blend so much to the American culture and be able to pronounce all the vowels, regardless of the phonological differences? This research emphasizes on the difference between

The phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia is one of the most long standing explanations existing in psychological research. The theory was coined by a man known as the father of dyslexia, Pringle-Morgan in 1896. Morgan viewed reading as a process that critically involved the segmentation of text into graphemes (1). These graphemes served as the earliest precursors to phonemes (the small unit of language), such that grapheme to phoneme conversion is equivalent to the whole sound of a word (1), (5). The process is said to both require that a reader assemble and address a word's phonology. Dyslexics are said to have phonological deficits which caused phonemic representation difficulties; they would often fare worse than others when it came to mapping sounds into letters in the brain, and with phonemic recall (1,5). Deficits in dyslexics' ability to retain short-term word memory and problems with segmentation of words into phonemes (e.g., auditory discrimination), lent support to these ideas (5).

This journal paper presented by Vellution and his associates outlines the most important findings of research that evaluates possible causes of reading abilities in dyslexia over the past four decades. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of research on the fundamental cause(s) of developmental dyslexia. The secondary purpose is to present the evidence that reveals differences between early reading difficulties caused mainly by cognitive/biological deficits and those caused primarily by instructional deficits. The authors first propose a model that captures all the relevant knowledge and cognitive skills required for individuals in learning to read (figure 1). This model certainly indicates that reading is mainly a linguistic ability rather than once popular notion that it is primarily a visual skill. The model that underscores all reading components are thus used to analyze manifest causes of reading difficulties. The evidence suggests that basic deficits in alphabetic coding would lead to inadequate word identification and which then contributes to reading difficulties. Moreover, both phonological awareness and orthographic awareness have an impact on skills of alphabetic coding. Importantly, casual relationships between word identification difficulties and deficient phonological skills seem more prominent in learning to read in opaque orthographies such as English than in learning to read in more transparent orthographies such as German. It

Roger Bacon points out “Grammar is substantially one and the same in all the languages despite its accidental variations.” So there is not much difference in the structure of a language. If a person has good command over the mother tongue, there are more possibilities to adapt, assimilate and accommodate second language without putting up much pressure on the learners. There are some similarities in syntax, phonology, morpheme, word inflection and various other aspects of the language. In this context of learning the second language, introspective learning should be emphasized, language learning should be action oriented and engaging so that learners can practice more and more. They can easily perceive what one wants to convey in a particular sentence. It is obvious that acquisition