Is Phonemic Awareness Instruction Appropriate for Learning Spanish?

In this American Educational Research Journal article, Claude Goldenberg (Stanford University), Tammy Tolar and David Francis (University of Houston), Leslie Reese (California State University/Long Beach), and Antonio Ray Bazan and Rebeca Mejia-Arauz (Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente) report on a comparative study of the role of phonemic awareness instruction with first and second graders learning Spanish in Mexico and the U.S. “Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate individual phonemes and is measured by having individuals perform various manipulations such as phoneme isolation, blending, segmentation, and deletion,” the authors explain. “Phonemic awareness is consistently and highly predictive of reading and spelling achievement in English.” But the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading proficiency is not a one-way street – rather, progress in one stimulates progress in the other. Instruction in phonemic awareness seems to be important for students who are having difficulty learning to read in English.

The question is whether this is also true with Spanish, a language with much simpler and more transparent orthographies and much more consistent relationships between letters and their corresponding sounds – for example, the letters a and f in Spanish always represent the same sounds (and no others), and the a and f sounds are always represented by those letters. The authors hypothesized that instruction in phonemic awareness might be less important in Spanish than in English. 

What were the findings? The Mexican students started first grade equal to or above the Spanish-speaking U.S. students in Spanish vocabulary and listening comprehension, but far lower in phonemic awareness. They ended second grade matching or surpassing the reading skills of the American students, while remaining lower in phonemic awareness. The authors say this casts doubt on whether instruction in phonemic awareness is helpful for children learning to read Spanish and other languages with similar characteristics (such as Italian and Turkish). 

“How Important Is Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children Learning to Read in Spanish?” by Claude Goldenberg, Tammy Tolar, Leslie Reese, David Francis, Antonio Ray Bazan, and Rebeca Mejia-Arauz in American Educational Research Journal, June 2014 (Vol. 51, #3, p. 604-633), https://openarchive.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/PASpanReadingFINALACCEPTED_1.pdf; Goldenberg can be reached at cgoldenberg@stanford.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #542