Writing Development: A Neglected Variable in the Consideration of Phonological Awareness

Abstract

In this article, Sofía Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro present the results of an experimental study that looks at the relationship between the development of phonological awareness and the development of writing in Spanish-speaking kindergartners. The results of this study speak to the ongoing controversy about approaches to early literacy instruction — that is, whether children's ability to segment words into phonemes (phonological awareness) is a prerequisite for learning how to read and write. These results show that phonological awareness is not an either/or phenomenon, but that it develops across levels and that this development is related to children's writing development. Vernon and Ferreiro discuss several important educational implications based on their findings: first, that children's ability to benefit from systematic phonics instruction depends on their level of writing development; and second, that encouraging children to write in kindergarten and first grade is an important way to stimulate the analysis of spoken words or other meaningful units.

High-Stakes Testing, Latinos, and English Language Learners: Lessons from Colorado

“…For all fourth graders and for the Latino students taking the CSAP in English, there is a significant gap between reading and writing, with both groups scoring higher in reading than in writing. (Escamilla, 2001;Vernon & Ferreiro, 1999). More research is needed in this area to further analyze relationships between reading and writing across languages.…”

The impact of invented spelling on phonemic awareness

“…The idea that the exploration and progression of children's knowledge about written language is reflected in their capacity to analyse speech is also highlighted in Alvarado (1998), Vernon (1998) and Vernon and Ferreiro's (1999) work. For example, to test children with different levels of spelling Alvarado (1998) used an initial-phoneme deletion task applied to words that were both presented verbally and accompanied by a written support.…”

“…Having said this, he also questioned whether it had been unequivocally proven that such programs produce lasting effects and are ecologically valid. Although it is not this article's purpose to take the debate on this issue any further, aspects such as the variety and differing degrees of difficulty of the tasks that the various studies have used to assess phonological awareness, the fact that in this type of study children are dichotomously classified as readers or non-readers without conducting additional analyses of the extent of their knowledge about written language, and also the fact that the same studies have primarily employed reading measures, but rarely writing measures (Ferreiro, 2002;Vernon & Ferreiro, 1999), are all factors that are not only important, but are very often neglected in the literature on phonological awareness.…”

“…The same study also confirms that children perform better in segmentation tasks when words are presented in the shape of a written support than they do when the words are only presented verbally. Another research project (Vernon & Ferreiro, 1999) involving preschool-age children suggests that their responses in a segmentation task display an evolutionary sequence. Initially the children were not able to identify pieces of a word, they then evolved to syllabic analysis, after which they managed an intra-syllabic analysis of the final part of words and finally were able to perform a complete segmental analysis.…”

“…In the light of the fact that the current state of the art indicates that children's invented spelling is a privileged instrument for developing oral analysis skills, and that some authors (Alvarado, 1998;Ouzoulias, 2001;Vernon, 1998;Vernon & Ferreiro, 1999) even argue that the more complex segmentation and phonemic manipulation skills evolve side-by-side with children's knowledge of writing until they reach the point at which children understand its alphabetic nature, we believe that it is pertinent to take a more in-depth look at this point of view by carrying out experimental intervention studies designed to improve the quality of children's spelling. We feel that this analysis should be undertaken using various means of measuring performance in terms of phonemic awareness, in such a way as to take the heterogeneity and varying degrees of difficulty of the different phonemic tests into account (Adams, 1998;Yopp, 1988).…”