How Much You Learn from Shared Reading May Depend on How Sensitive You are to the Sound Structure

Shared reading has been promoted as one of the most effective techniques for developing early literacy skills. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive factors underlying its processes. This study examined the effect of L1 phonological awareness on the individual differences in benefiting from shared reading of English. Sixth-grade Chinese EFL learners were administered a finger-point reading task, which assessed the synchronization of voice and print in shared reading. Children with poorer L1 phonological awareness were less able to map a spoken English word onto its corresponding print than children with better phonological awareness. They also recognized fewer words in the text in a word finding task subsequently administered. These differences could be attributed neither to the differences in the children’s prior knowledge of the text materials, nor to the differences in general English vocabulary knowledge, verbal short-term memory, speed in letter naming, or the one-to-one tagging concept. Finally, the two groups of children did not show differences in a written arithmetic task, indicating that the effect of phonological awareness was specific to the reading task. 1 Shared reading and reading acquisition Shared reading (joint parent-child or teacher-student reading) has been promoted by educators, whole language advocates, and the popular press as providing significant opportunities for children to develop the language abilities needed for skilled reading (Adams, 1990; Bus, van IJzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995; Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas & Daley, 1998; Snow, 1991) and for successful acquisition of receptive vocabulary (Hargrave & Senechal, 2000; Jordan, Snow & Porche, 2000). In a literature-based EFL classroom, the teacher uses oversized books with enlarged print and illustrations. As the teacher reads the book aloud, all of the children who are being read to can see and appreciate the print and illustrations. Sometimes, if the students have a copy of the book in hand, the teacher may encourage them to follow along with their finger as they read or hear a story, a method referred to as finger-point reading. This shared reading experience is believed to be important because children can follow along as the text is being read several times, which scaffolds the acquisition of the relationship between speech and print (Constance, 1994). However, children do not benefit equally from shared reading. Not much is known about the basic cognitive factors that might be related to individual differences in benefiting from such an activity. One reason might be that we are tempted to attribute individual differences in shared reading to the differences in more observable factors such as prior knowledge and familiarity with print, literacy exposure, parents’ active involvement in children’s literature, or even more remotely, the parents’ own literacy experience. While variability in exposure is certainly a significant factor How much you learn from shared reading may depend on how sensitive you are to the sound structure 5 in determining individual differences in literacy-related activities, it only explains a part of the variance in the beneficial effect of shared reading (Frijters, Barron & Brunello, 2000). As shared reading has been celebrated as an essential component of a balanced reading approach, it is necessary to know more about what underlying cognitive factors are associated with individual differences in shared reading. 2 Cognitive prerequisites for shared reading One of the beneficial effects of shared reading is that it provides opportunities for specific word learning through the establishment of the association between spoken and written words (Constance, 1994). Yet, this advantage is afforded only to the extent that children can read with an accurate match between voice and print (Uhry, 2002), given that rapid orthographic learning has been shown to be contingent on successfully recoding printed forms into phonological codes (Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich & Share, 2002; Share, 2004a). Thus, a logical start to understand the cognitive abilities necessary for shared reading is to ask what allows for the formation of an accurate match between voice and print. Several studies have linked the synchronization of voice and print to phonological awareness (Ehri & Sweet, 1991; Uhry, 1999, 2002). Phonological awareness refers to the ability to manipulate the internal sound components of a spoken word, an ability that is not directly related to print exposure (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1993; Whitehurst, Epstein, Angel, Payne, Crone & Fischel, 1994). Its influence in early literacy acquisition might be more essential than the shared reading experience itself. In a study of early literacy, Frijters, Barron and Brunello (2000) found that shared reading experience, combined with other indexes of home literacy (i.e. parental knowledge of children’s literature and reported feelings about literacy activities), accounted for significant variance on a letter-name and letter-sound measure of early literacy. The relationship ceased to be significant after controlling for the variance in phonological awareness. It appears that phonological awareness has mediated the relationship between shared reading and success in early literacy acquisition. In learning a foreign language as well as in learning one’s native language, in order to map sound onto print in shared reading, one needs to be able to encode and temporarily hold the phonetic form of the word in memory, analyze the internal structure of the spoken form, identify the component sounds, and map the identified component sounds onto the printed letters. The quality of the temporary representation of the word encoded in verbal short-term memory is critical to subsequent analyses. If the information registered in memory contains merely the holistic features of the words (such as the overall prosodic pattern, the number of the syllables, or the noise of the initial consonant) without full specifications in the segmental prototypes, then the internal structure of the word would become evasive and the analyses of the structure will become impossible. The specificity or strength of the temporary representation of the word in verbal short-term memory is usually reflected in one’s phonological awareness (Edwards & Lahey, 1998; Gathercole, Willis & Baddeley, 1991; Metsala, 1999; Snowling, Chiat & Hulme, 1991). Evidence has shown that children usually have difficulty constructing full-specified phonological representations for a new foreign word if they fail to develop good awareness of the segmental structure of spoken words from the acquisition process of the native language (Hu, 2003). To complicate the matter further, the segmental units implicitly encoded in memory are not always available to conscious inspection (Hu, 2004a). Thus, even when the child is able to encode the acoustic stimuli into a fully-specified phonological representation in memory at an implicit level, the component sounds of the word have to be consciously accessible so that they can be tracked for an explicit analysis. Thus, either at the implicit or at the explicit level, a number of the multiple processes involved in voice-print matching depend on a sense of phonological awareness. In the absence of the awareness of the sound structure of a spoken word, the child might be handicapped in extracting even partial information from a spoken word, which, in turn, restricts the possibility