Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children

Where American kindergartners are taught letters and letter sounds, German kindergartners are not; where American first and second graders receive an eclectic blend of whole language, whole word and phonics-based approaches, their German counterparts are taught by an intensive synthetic phonics approach. As a probe to the consequences of these pedagogical differences on the emergence of phoneme awareness, this study administered two tests of phoneme awareness to kindergarten-, firstand second-grade children in Germany and America, along with reading tests, the digit span test and a test of RAN color naming ability. The American kindergarten children excelled on a phoneme identity judgement and a phoneme deletion task that the German kindergartners found difficult. Their advantage held equally whether the manipulated sound was a syllable onset or the initial part of a consonant cluster. The first and second graders surpassed the kindergartners in both countries; however, the German first and second graders equaled their American peers on both tasks and both types of units. In addition, the German children were more accurate decoders of pseudowords by the end of second grade, and the association between phoneme awareness and German decoding ability was weaker. An increased emphasis on phonics and the greater transparency of the German alphabet are discussed as possible factors in the decoding excellence of the German second graders and its decreased association with phoneme awareness. The contrast between the American and German kindergartners and the equivalence of the first and second graders in the two countries are consistent with a view that phoneme awareness develops primarily as a product of literacy exposure.