Essay: “Phonological awareness and decoding skills are necessary but not sufficient in becoming a skilled reader”

Critically evaluate and discuss the claim that phonological awareness and decoding skills are necessary but not sufficient in becoming a skilled reader.
Introduction:
Reading is the ability to decode and understand the printed information. Though for most typically developed people reading is an effortless ability, it involves a range of sophisticated cognitive skills and processes, for example: the ability to decipher the printed words, ability to grasp the words meaning and then combine these two for retrieving the contextual meaning and complete understanding of the whole text (Cain, 2010). Reading involves two major levels, one is phonological and decoding level and another is comprehension level. However, Most of the early research of reading development emphasise on the phonological and decoding level for developing reading ability (Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Snowling, 2000, cited in (Nation & Snowling, 2004))
Why are phonological awareness and decoding skills necessary but not sufficient for becoming a skilled reader? To answer this question, first the key concepts and relationship among phonological awareness, decoding and reading skills will be discussed in conjunction with relevant literature and research. Next, a critical evaluation will be made for explaining why these two skills are not adequate for efficient readers.
Finally, by summarizing the importance of phonological awareness and decoding skills as well as to what extent other skills are also essential for becoming skilled reader the conclusion will be drawn.
Overview of reading
Reading emprises a range of knowledge, skills and strategy. Cain (2010) argued that to read and understand a text readers engage with couple of activities. At first their eyes focus on printed lines of the text for accessing the meaning of individual words, While reading some words may seems unfamiliar with can interrupt the understanding of meaning. In addition, some words may not follow the conventional rules of pronunciation for example: ‘meat’, ‘feat’ and ‘cheat’ contain the similar sequence of letters and pronounce in the same way, the word ‘threat’ has same letter string ‘eat’ but is not pronounced same as the meat, feat or cheat spelled. In a text some words may be ambiguous for example: the word bank, If we say- John goes to the bank. Here ‘bank’ is an ambiguous word that means the word contains more than one meaning. In such cases, for skilled reading context should be considered. It is also important to consider that some words contain multi-expressions for example: ‘cats and dogs’. The sentence ‘ It is raining cats and dogs’ does not make any sense by its lateral meaning (cain, 2010). For skilled reading, it is necessary to figure out all idiomatic expressions of a text.
To explain the reading acquisition and development several language based theory developed. Although such models are criticized often (Pearson, 1976) but for the richer understanding of acquisition of reading and related skills, the importance of such models are undeniable. As the aim of this essay is not review Models of reading, in this section few language based model are discussed in order to explain development of reading skills with particular attention given to phonological awareness and decoding:
Frith’s Model of Reading Acquisition: One of the influential models of reading acquisition is Firth’s three-phase model of reading proposed by Uta Frith (1985). According to this model a typically developed person has to be master in the logographic, alphabetic and orthographic phases (Frith, 1986). In logographic phase children are dependent on visual recognition. They are unable to decode the unfamiliar words because they cannot understand the phoneme grapheme correspondence. They can recognize familiar words or special symbolic words (for example: logos of popular chocolate). In alphabetic stage, children able to decode new words by sequencing letter sound (Frith, 1986). Finally, in orthographic phase children instantly recognize morphological conventions (for example: ‘S’ for plural) (Frith, 1986).
This model modified by Ehri (2005). She divided the alphabetic phase into pre-alphabetic and partial alphabetic phases (Ehri, 2005). The pre-alphabetic phase associated with visual recognition, which is similar with Frith’s logographic phase (Ehri, 2005). The partial alphabetic phase start with learning of phoneme and grapheme correspondence and decoding the words (Ehri, 2005). She mentioned that, when children can learn to form sight words by connecting letters and phonemes they can become complete alphabetic phase readers. This model emphasise on written word decoding to describe word-reading skills. On the other hand ‘psycholinguistic Model of Reading (Goodman, 1969 & Pearson, 1976) and ‘Simple View of Reading’ ((Gough & Tunmer, 1986) highlighted that spoken language skills such as vocabulary, semantics, grammar are also important for ultimate reading comprehension.
Psycholinguistic Model of Reading: The psycholinguistic view of reading is rooted an attempt to understand how language works for carrying meaning (Pearson, 1976). Three types of information need to be processed when readers read some printed information (Goodman, 1969). The first type information is called graphophonic or grapho-phonemic which involves with explicit or implicit phonemic manipulation, phonics generation and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The second type of information that readers processed is syntactic information, which includes systematic relationships among words and grammatically acceptable sentences (Pearson, 1976). The third kind of information is the semantic information (Goodman, 1969) which refers the knowledge of the relationship between the meaning of word, phrase and sentences and how this meaning is related to each other.
Pearson (1976) argued that for actual reading, these three kinds of information are simultaneously processed. Psycholinguistics approach is also suggested that, skilled or efficient readers gradually maximize their reliance on semantic and syntactic information and minimize the dependency of grapho-phonemic analysis. In addition novice readers are ‘so bound up’ for searching phonemic information because in this stage meaning is not highlighted that much but gradually when they are become skilled their dependency of grapho-phonemic information reduced. This model explains that to become a skilled reader initially phonological awareness and decoding skills (grapho-phonemic information) are necessary, but for mature reader these skills are not minimized.
Simple View of Reading: One of the widely used conceptual frameworks of reading is ‘The Simple View of Reading’. According to this framework, the concept of reading comprises two components (Cain, 2010). One component is the ability to word reading or the ability to decode the printed word and retrieve the meaning. The other component is language (listening) comprehension skill; retrieve the sense of individual words, clauses and sentences from the sequence of texts (Gough and Tummer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990). This is identified by one simple rule: R=DXC. The term ‘R’ refers to reading comprehension, ‘D’ refers to decoding which should be efficient and logical word recognition. ‘C’ refers to language comprehension. Simple view of reading defines reading comprehension as the aptness to understand word meaning, constructing sentence and interpreting discourse (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) which actually measured by listening comprehension task. Thus word decoding and listening skills are central for reading comprehension (cain, 2010). Reading comprehension considered as the ‘product’ of these two principal components.
This view claims that for efficient reading ability both skills are important. If one skill is not sufficient, other skill may not lead to become efficient reader. Despite of the argument that simple view of reading is not appropriate to explain reading ability, this claim is always considered as a plausible description of reading skill development (cain, 2010).
Overall to learn reading, phoneme manipulation, identify to grapheme sound correspondence (defined as phonological awareness, Anthony and Francis (2005) and word recognition, phonic generation or decoding is essential. As successful decoding skills is dependent on phonological abilities ((Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Stanovich & Stanovich, 1995; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994, cited in Nation & Snowling 1998a), several studies have clearly demonstrated that, phonological awareness and decoding skills are integrated for the best outcome for reading, however, it is also clearly demonstrated that for skilled reading only phonological and decoding skills are not adequate (Anthony, Francis, Anthony, & Francis, 2017; Gillon, 2018; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975).
It should be noted that, different languages have different writing system for example, logographic for Chinese language and alphabetic for English, Finish and German languages (Cain, 2010). It is worth mentioned that majority of research of phonological awareness, word decoding and overall reading development focuses on alphabetic writing system especially on English language. This essay only focuses on alphabetic system because the consistency between speech-sound relationships is not equal in every languages and the relationship between phonological awareness, decoding and skilled reading may vary as well (Cain, 2010). In the following sections evaluate that how are phonological awareness and decoding skills essential for skilled reading:
Phonological Awareness and skilled reading:
The ability of identifying and manipulating the structure of an utterance which involves a wide range of skills for example, letter knowledge, syllabic structure of words, and segmentation of phonemes regardless of the meaning of words is defined as phonological awareness (PA) skills (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). Gillion (2015) described it as a ‘multilevel skills’ of separating words into small unit. He argued that, a word can be described according to the following levels of PA skills:
Syllabic awareness: Syllabic level awareness refers to a realization of divided words into syllables. Each syllable structure requires some principles for example, each syllable need to contain a vowel, for several consonants who cannot be clustered in alphabetic language like English cannot start of end a syllable, Syllable structure follows the stress pattern of word (Gillion, 2015).
Onset-Rime awareness: Within a syllable two parts are involved- onset and rime. This is known as onset-rime awareness (Gillion, 2015). For example, in the word ‘mum’ ‘m’ is the onset and ‘um’ is rime of the syllable. This awareness level can be seen on rhyming test.
Phoneme or phonemic level awareness: Phoneme is described as the smallest unit of sound that change the meaning of a word (Gillion, 2015). For example, the word ‘bad’ contains three phonemes- /b/, /a/, /d/. If one of these is changed, a different word will be created for example /dad/.
For developing efficient reading skills, children need to understand different levels of phonological awareness including phoneme matching, isolation, completion, blending and deletion. In one study Stahl and Murray (1994), reviewed a number of sources for providing evidence that children ability to syllable segmentation, onset and rime awareness is necessary for early word reading. Correlation studies of early reading development and phonological awareness suggested that different phonological awareness skills (blending, segmenting words, manipulating consonants) are highly correlated with later development of skilled reading (e.g., Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Mann, 1984, cited in Stahl & Murray, 1994).
Based on multidisciplinary and cross-cultural studies Anthony and Francis (2005) summarized the development of PA skills of typically developed children. According to their study, in alphabetic languages, PA is pivotal for reading development. They have argued that, individuals those have difficulties to manipulate the sound structure of spoken language for example, blending, rhyming, segmentations and syllabification of sounds in words will face difficulty with reading. One of the significant outcomes of reading research is that PA training has a great impact on reading intervention. A meta-analysis of 52 controlled studies in PA training showed that, for developing word recognition, spelling and reading comprehension instruction of PA skills has statistically significant (Ehri et al., 2001). This investigation of reading and literacy outcomes for children with developmental language disorders has established that PA is a crucial factor in early reading competency.
Decoding and skilled reading
Decoding is recognizing single words accurately, quickly, and silently (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). They argued that, decoding is not necessarily related to word reading. For example: someone can decode other language but not necessarily they can read a word. However, according to simple view of reading decoding involves the ability to decipher the printed symbols in order to retrieve the meaning of the words they represent (Cain, 2010). Cain (2010) suggested that, though the goal of reading is to understand what is read, but for the beginner readers, the most crucial challenge is decoding. She also argued that for being skilled reader two skills are needed. One is the ability to decode individual words of a text, which includes the ability to pronounce and access the meaning of words without any difficulty, and the other is the ability to comprehend the overall text. A skilled reader also can able to pronounce non-word without any hesitation.
In fact for reading comprehension the importance of decoding is undeniable. Children can be classified as skilled reader or less skilled reader by depending on the amount of time needed for a word recognition ((Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975). An experiment research conducted by Perfetti and Hogaboam among 64 children in elementary school, US about the relation between vocalization latencies of single word decoding and reading comprehension. The result suggested that skilled comprehenders take shorter time for single word decoding than are less skilled reading comprehenders. They argue that skilled readers are performed significantly greater for decoding low frequency words, pseudo words and overall understanding of text. In addition, good readers recognize words and break the code automatically. This account is consistent with the finding of Ehri (2005). She argued that while reading people practically focus on every word rather than phoneme because phonemes may have more than one pronunciation. In addition, single grapheme cannot relate the word with meaning, while written word directly related. So the key of skilled reading is accurately and automatically decodes the written word (Ehri, 2005).
Why phonological awareness and decoding skills are not sufficient in becoming skilled reader
Skilled reading is not only depends on a single skill. In fact a wide range of skills involve with developing efficient reading. In early psychology studies, reading always considers as a complex higher mental activity, which includes thinking, judging, evaluating, imagining, problem solving, and reasoning (Gates, 1949, cited in Hoover & Gough, 1990). In counterpoint, it is also evident in early research that reading certainly involves above listed higher mental processes but if someone cannot able to read, it will be impossible for him to process those (Fries, 1963, cited in Hoover & Gough, 1990). Thus, early language based models, which discussed in earlier section focus on two distinguished levels. One is phonological and decoding level, another is comprehension level (Gough and Tummer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990). In the simple view of reading, comprehension defined as an ability to interpret semantic information based on graphic representation arriving through eyes (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Cain (2010) argued that to become skilled reader the ability to decode individual words of a text and the ability to comprehend the passage both are equally needed. Becoming skilled reader, the importance of non-phonological language abilities (defined as broader language skills, Nation & Snowling, 2004) is also undeniable. Gilion & Dodd, (2005) described broader language skills as metalinguistic abilities. They argued that not only PA, but also other metalinguistic skills for example: morphological, syntactical, semantic and pragmatic awareness are influence to become skilled reader (Gillion, 2015). A number of studies support this point. In one study Nation and Snowling (2004) investigated the relationship between language skills and reading development of 72 typically developing children. They conducted this study in two points of time, at the first point participants were around 8.5 years old and at the second point they were around 13 years old. The study reported that a significant concurrent and longitudinal predictive relationship between broader language skills (vocabulary, semantics and listening comprehension) and accurate reading. They reported that the strengths and weaknesses in broader language skills are also necessary to determine the way in which children learn to read and reach in the final structure of reading system in their adulthood (Nation & Snowling, 2004).
In addition, A number of early studies have argued that, dyslexic (reading difficulties) children have only phonological deficiency, they do not have any problem with semantic processing (Shankweiler et al., 1995; Share & Stanovich, 1995, cited in Nation & Snowling, 1998b). However, not every poor reader only has difficulties with word recognition level. In another investigation Nation and Snowling (1998b) demonstrated that children with reading comprehension difficulties showed poor semantic processing abilities rather than typically developed children despite the both groups have closely matched phonological and non-verbal skills. In addition to though the poor comprehenders had good decoding skills, they showed greater difficulty with low frequency and exception words reading. A similar point was made by Bishop and Snowling (2004) in one study, they also showed that without any phonological impairment, many children struggle with comprehension and overall reading performance.
Such research outcomes on reading abilities establish the idea that only PA and decoding skills are not sufficient for becoming skilled reader. Moreover, broader language abilities are also important for successful reading performance.
Conclusion
Despite the ultimate goal of reading is successfully recognized the word and complete understanding the text, many early studies only focus on phonological skills. In few language based models of reading overlook the importance of semantic skill and other language skills in order to become skilled reading. However psycholinguistics model of reading and simple view of reading have emphasised that skilled reading also involved reading comprehension which largely rely on broader language skills or metalinguistic skills. In fact one similar point showed in both views is that for developing skilled reading phonological skills and comprehension equally important, but neither alone is sufficient for efficient reading.
Furthermore, research on reading comprehension and intervention of developmental language disorders (for example: dyslexia) support that good phonological skills (the ability of fast and skilled decoding strategies) are not sufficient to secure an advance level of reading ability (Nation & Snowling, 1998b).
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