Chang, Joel Alvar (Ginj) - Final PHD Thesis

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BENEFITS OF LITERACY INTERVENTIONS
TO EARLY READERS
WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE WEAKNESSES
Joel Ginj Chang
A thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
College of Education
University of Canterbury
New Zealand
November 2019
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Declaration of Originality
I certify that this thesis does not incorporate without acknowledgment any
material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university; and that to the
best of my knowledge and belief, it does not contain any material previously published
or written by another person except where due reference is made in the text.
I also certify that the research in this thesis has been approved by the University
of Canterbury Human Ethics Committee.
Joel Ginj Chang 28 November 2019

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To God
provider, comforter, healer, friend

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Acknowledgment
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
- Rumi
Countless stories lie underneath every page of this PhD thesis: A terrible
vehicular accident, crowdfunding, falling out with friends, massive earthquake,
depression, mass shooting, sense of loss, homesickness, theft, poverty and
desperation. Each individual experience is thick in texture, bound by color and layered
with every conceivable pain. However, despite of it all, I managed to triumph. I prevailed
not because I was special, but because at every turning point of my struggle, there was
someone who was able to selflessly share his/her wisdom and compassion without
asking anything in return.
Hence, I would like to thank all my friends back home in the Philippines and
those around the world who ceaselessly prayed for me. The same form of recognition is
dedicated to my New Zealand friends and to my partner who inspire me daily. My
heartfelt appreciation is also extended to my secondary supervisor Bridgid McNeill and
associate supervisor Dina Ocampo, who were steadfast in their guidance. My most
profound gratitude though goes to my primary supervisor, Prof. John Everatt, who
tirelessly motivated me to keep writing, despite of my numerous personal setbacks.
My PhD journey concludes with a deeper sense of understanding to Gibran’s
words that “our pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding”. If we
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can allow our pain to present itself and lead us to how we ought to grow, then we come
closer to realizing our truth and purpose.

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Abstract
It has been estimated that children who learn and are exposed to two languages
prior to puberty will become the majority worldwide (Tucker, 1998). Communities
evolving into highly linguistically-diverse environments have the potential to pose a
considerable challenge not only among individuals, but also to educational institutions,
as immersion in languages learned does not guarantee linguistic proficiency. Hence,
more ethnically-disparate countries, such as the Philippines and New Zealand, will need
to develop responsive educational programs that accommodate successful bilingualism
and support a range of learners. For example, children presenting with language
learning deficits can be placed at a greater disadvantage in educational contexts,
especially when this hinders proficiency in the language of education and leads to
difficulties in literacy acquisition. Studies reported in this thesis focused on methods that
might be valuable to reduce difficulties experienced by such populations of early
learners.
The thesis studies assessed two treatment approaches: one focused on
phonological awareness and a second targeted morphological skills. Both approaches
were assessed to determine their efficacy in facilitating the growth of language and
reading skills among children with specific language weaknesses in their first formal
year of primary school. Improvements in language processing (phonological,
morphological and vocabulary), word identification, and sentence comprehension in two
country contexts (New Zealand and the Philippines) were the focus of the research.
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In the first study, the focus was on children from monolingual versus bilingual
backgrounds in New Zealand who showed evidence of weaknesses in the English
language. Twenty year 1 pupils (mean age = 5.8) were selected from a group of
students identified by their classroom teachers as language weak. In the second study,
the sample comprised 16 typically-developing bilingual and 15 English language weak
bilingual children from the Philippines (mean age = 6.3) who were all Filipino speakers
but were using English as the language of education in school. In both studies,
participants were screened using standardized language assessments and measures of
non-verbal intelligence, basic reading skills (comprehending words and sentences),
language skills (including vocabulary), phonological and morphological awareness
levels. All children showed no evidence of sensory, behavioural or neurological
problems and their non-verbal intelligence score was within 85 to 115 points on the
Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence. Students with language weaknesses were
those who showed poor scores in several areas of verbal language processing. The
design evaluated the performance of the children at three different time points: once
prior to the introduction of the interventions, once after the first intervention was given
and once after the second intervention was completed. In both country contexts, roughly
half of each group completed the phonological intervention first whereas the rest
completed the morphological intervention first.
Results indicated that specific gains in phonological processing were observed
for the phonological-based intervention across groups in both countries (New Zealand
and the Philippines). However, for the New Zealand context, gains for both monolingual
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and bilingual language weak children were generally more evident with the phonological
intervention, whereas in the Philippines, the morphological intervention showed specific
gains in morphology and word meaning tasks. When students had completed both
interventions, there was evidence for all groups to show gains across the range of
measures used in the study. The findings suggest that providing an integrated
phonological and morphological awareness intervention among school-aged children
may be an effective approach to support the language and reading development of
students experiencing difficulties with the acquisition of English language skills. Such
positive effects may be evident whether children are from a predominantly monolingual
or bilingual/second language background.

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Presentations with published abstracts
Chang, J., Everatt, J., McNeill, B., & Ocampo, D. (2019). Early classroom-based
literacy interventions for young readers with specific language
weaknesses. Oral Presentation at the 2019 Association for Reading and
Writing Conference, 28th February – 1st March, BITS Pilani, Goa, India.
Chang, J., Everatt, J., McNeill, B., & Ocampo, D. (2018). Literacy interventions
for young readers with specific language difficulties. Oral Presentation at
the 2018 Resource Teachers of Literacy Conference (RTLit), 26th
September, Rydges Latimer Hotel, Christchurch, New Zealand.
for young readers with specific language impairment. Oral Presentation at
the 2018 Asian Conference on Education, 13th – 15th October, Toshi
Center Hotel, Tokyo, Japan.
to early readers with specific language weaknesses. Oral Presentation
at the 10th International Conference on Teacher Education: Educational
Equity through Inclusion, 23rd – 25th August, Diliman, Quezon City,
Philippines.
Everatt, J., Chang, J., McNeill, B., & Ocampo, D. (2017). Benefits of an early
intervention for monolingual versus bilingual learners with specific
language and/or literacy impairments. Oral Presentation at the 25th
Annual Society for the Scientific Study of Reading Meeting, 18th – 21st
July, Hilton Brighton Metropole, Brighton, United Kingdom.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Literature Review ............................................................................................ 1
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1
Specific Language Weaknesses .................................................................................. 7
Bridging Reading Achievement Gaps: A Tale of Two Countries ................................ 11
New Zealand........................................................................................................... 11
The Philippines ....................................................................................................... 13
The Development of Reading .................................................................................... 19
The Component Model of Reading ............................................................................ 19
Relevant Theories of Word Recognition .................................................................... 21
The Simple View of Reading .................................................................................. 21
The Dual Route Model ............................................................................................ 22
Modified Dual Route Model .................................................................................... 24
The Analogy Model ................................................................................................. 24
Connectionist Models ............................................................................................. 25
Developmental Models of Word Recognition ............................................................. 27
The Self-Teaching Hypothesis ................................................................................ 28
The Connected Text Reading Model ...................................................................... 29
Section Summary....................................................................................................... 31
Model for Categorizing Reading Deficits .................................................................... 32
Methods of Reading Instruction ................................................................................. 33
Whole Language Approach .................................................................................... 34
Phonics Instruction ................................................................................................. 36
Balanced Literacy Approaches ............................................................................... 39
Phonological Awareness Development ...................................................................... 46
Levels of Phonological Awareness ......................................................................... 46
Overlapping Continuum .......................................................................................... 49
The Development of Literacy and Phonological Awareness ...................................... 50
Phonological Awareness and Reading Development ............................................. 51
Measuring Phonological Awareness ....................................................................... 53
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Phonological Awareness, Phoneme Awareness and Phonics ................................ 54

Classroom-based Phonological Awareness Intervention ........................................... 55
Metalinguistic Awareness .......................................................................................... 60
Morphological Awareness .......................................................................................... 61
General Aspects of Morphemes ............................................................................. 64
Three Specific Distinctions of Morphology .............................................................. 65
Morphological Awareness as a Predictor of Early Literacy Development ............... 67
Factors Affecting Word Identification ...................................................................... 68
Morphology Awareness Levels ............................................................................... 71
Similarities between Morphological Awareness and Phonological Awareness .......... 76
Measuring Morphological Awareness ........................................................................ 77
Analogy Tasks ........................................................................................................ 80
Judgment Tasks ..................................................................................................... 81
Identification Tasks ................................................................................................. 82
Production Tasks .................................................................................................... 82
Morphological Awareness Intervention ................................................................... 83
Morphological Awareness and Reading Difficulties ................................................ 86
Morphological Awareness and Other Cultures........................................................ 88
The Response to Intervention Model ......................................................................... 91
Quantifying Intervention Effects ................................................................................. 94
Bilingualism and English Language Learners ............................................................ 96
Combined Morphological and Phonological Awareness Interventions ..................... 101
Significance of the Study ......................................................................................... 103
Thesis Synopsis ....................................................................................................... 105
Chapter 2 Effectiveness of Phonological and Morphological Awareness Training on the
Literacy Outcomes of Children with Specific Language Weaknesses in the First Year of
Primary School – A New Zealand Study ..................................................................... 110
Introduction and Background ................................................................................... 110
Benefits of intensified classroom phonological and morphological awareness
instruction................................................................................................................. 114
Adapting a Phonological Awareness Approach .................................................... 118
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Implementation of a Morphological Awareness Intervention ................................. 121

Reduction of student performance inequalities through PA and MA treatment
approaches in classrooms ....................................................................................... 124
The Present Study ................................................................................................... 125
Research Questions ................................................................................................ 126
Methods ................................................................................................................... 127
Participants ........................................................................................................... 127
Standardized Assessment Measures ................................................................... 131
Procedure ................................................................................................................ 137
Controls for Treatment Bias ..................................................................................... 137
Reliability.................................................................................................................. 138
Treatment Fidelity .................................................................................................... 138
Baseline measures .................................................................................................. 139
Results ..................................................................................................................... 141
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time2-Mid assessment data ............................. 143
Syllable awareness task ....................................................................................... 146
Rhyme awareness task ........................................................................................ 147
Alliteration awareness task ................................................................................... 148
Phoneme isolation task ......................................................................................... 149
Phoneme segmentation task ................................................................................ 150
Letter-sound task .................................................................................................. 151
Morphological awareness inflection task .............................................................. 152
Morphological awareness derivation task ............................................................. 153
Antonym production task ...................................................................................... 154
Synonym production task ..................................................................................... 155
Word analogy task ................................................................................................ 156
Text comprehension task ...................................................................................... 157
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time3-Post assessment data ........................... 158
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Comparison Control Group ...................................................................................... 173
Discussion................................................................................................................ 177
Limitations and future directions .............................................................................. 186
Clinical and Educational Implications ....................................................................... 187
Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 189
Chapter 3 Impact of Classroom-based Phonological and Morphological Awareness
Intervention Approaches on Literacy Skills of Emerging Readers in the Philippines – A
Bilingual Context ......................................................................................................... 190
Phonological Awareness across languages ............................................................. 191
Morphological Awareness and bilingualism ............................................................. 194
Methods ................................................................................................................... 202
Participants ........................................................................................................... 202
Assessment Measures ......................................................................................... 206
Procedure ................................................................................................................ 212
Treatment Approaches ............................................................................................ 214
Phonological Awareness Training......................................................................... 214
Morphological Awareness Training ....................................................................... 215
Treatment Fidelity .................................................................................................... 217
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Data Analyses of the Philippine Cohort .................................................................... 217

Baseline Measures ............................................................................................... 217
Results ..................................................................................................................... 219
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time2-Mid assessment data ............................. 221
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time3-Post assessment data ........................... 236
Phoneme Isolation task ........................................................................................ 242
Discussion................................................................................................................ 251
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Limitations and Future Directions ............................................................................. 256

Clinical and Educational Implications ....................................................................... 258
Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 259
Chapter 4 A Follow-up Study Evaluating the Impact of Phonological and Morphological
Awareness Intervention Programs on School-aged Children with Specific Language
Weaknesses................................................................................................................ 262
Methods ................................................................................................................... 264
Participants ........................................................................................................... 264
Procedures ........................................................................................................... 264
Assessment Measures ......................................................................................... 265
Reliability and Treatment Fidelity .......................................................................... 265
Results ..................................................................................................................... 266
Comparison of Time 1-Pre versus Time 4-Follow up assessment data ................... 267
Syllable Awareness Task ...................................................................................... 269
Rhyme Awareness Task ....................................................................................... 270
Alliteration Awareness Task ................................................................................. 271
Phoneme Isolation Task ....................................................................................... 272
Phoneme Segmentation Task............................................................................... 273
Letter-sound Task ................................................................................................. 274
Morphological Awareness Inflection Task ............................................................. 275
Morphological Awareness Derivation Task ........................................................... 276
Antonym Production Task ..................................................................................... 277
Synonym Production Task .................................................................................... 278
Word Analogy Task .............................................................................................. 279
Text Comprehension Task .................................................................................... 280
Discussion................................................................................................................ 281
Chapter 5 Assessing Literacy Intervention Impact – A Cross-country Comparison of
New Zealand and the Philippines ................................................................................ 289
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Methods ................................................................................................................... 291
Data Source .......................................................................................................... 291
Procedures ........................................................................................................... 291
Results ..................................................................................................................... 292
Discussion................................................................................................................ 312
Chapter 6 General Discussion .................................................................................... 318
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 318
Impact of Classroom-Based Literacy Interventions .................................................. 320
Usefulness of Phonological and Morphological Interventions .................................. 322
Implications .............................................................................................................. 329
Advancing classroom teaching and reading practices .......................................... 329
Expanding knowledge about theories of reading through current findings ............... 333
The Simple View of Reading ................................................................................ 334
The Dual Foundation Theory of Reading .............................................................. 334
Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 343
Appendix I. Information Sheet for School Administrators 386 .................................. 404
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List of Figures .......................................................................................................... 406

List of Tables............................................................................................................ 408
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Chapter 1 Literature Review

Introduction
At the heart of every society’s guaranteed existence is its capability to preserve
knowledge and transfer essential information from one generation to the next. Written
language has made it possible that abstract and concrete concepts are made tangible
and conveyed conveniently to individuals across time and place. However, such rich
and vital information will become insignificant, if the ability to comprehend the symbols
that carry meaning is inaccessible to people. Hence, educational institutions were
created to ensure that proficiency in understanding and even creating written text are
maintained and well-established.
Since the acquisition of such competency is a developmental process, impacted
by differing contexts (e.g. home beliefs, community ideologies, educational institutions
etc.) that shape distinct situations learners are in (Durgunoğlu & Verhoeven, 2013),
simply providing exemplars of the written medium does not secure successful
acquisition of particular sets of skills and knowledge; instead, reading and writing
specific skills, as well as knowledge, must be integrated, nurtured and advanced in
every child. Researchers even highlight the importance of developing reading skills in
the early years of school and deem it as a crucial milestone in literacy (Kamhi & Catts,
2012; Kern & Friedman, 2008). Having an improved reading skill set is fundamental in
attaining academic success in every aspect of the school curriculum, as it remains an
imperative skill for almost all jobs and the basic key element to continuous learning
(Tunmer & Chapman, 2015). Such emergent literacy skills comprise meaning-related
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skills (e.g. grammar and vocabulary), narrative skills (Pullen & Justice, 2003, NICHD,
2005), and code-related related skills (e.g. grapheme knowledge, print concept and
phonological knowledge) critical in unlocking the meaning of words and comprehending
the relationship between the oral and printed forms of texts (Gillon, 2004; Ehri et al.,
2001; Hulme et al., 2012). The aforementioned emergent literacy skills related to code
and meaning may be supported by a literacy-rich environment and engaging activities
that link relationships between print and meaning (Westerveld, Gillon, & van Bysterveldt
2015).
Apart from obtaining outstanding literacy instructional practices, reduction of
inequality in literacy achievement between vulnerable readers coming from
disadvantaged backgrounds and proficient readers from socially affluent families is
needed to be resolved by existing educational systems. Prochnow, Tunmer and Arrow
(2015) reported that research data taken from New Zealand and several other countries
indicate that children enter school possessing huge disparities of individual differences,
particularly in the aspects of literacy-relevant knowledge, experiences and capabilities
crucial for gaining literacy. The real test contemporary education systems face would be
the promotion of evidence-based approaches that bridge the gap between high and low-
performing readers; addressing the inequities of existing literacy achievement.
Ensuring that children who enter schools become competent readers is a crucial
issue in the field of education. Resolving such is a complex process requires a unified
approach and initiative from parents, teachers, students, policy makers and researchers
in various tiers of the system. A particular aspect of such processes that can be
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addressed is to ascertain that key contributors of literacy achievement are effectively
assessed and taught in classrooms. Research has shown that the development of early
literacy in preschool and primary grades is associated to gains in reading outcomes in
later grades (Snow et al., 1999). As a linguistic skill, reading relies on the assimilation of
phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (Kamhi &
Catts, 2012; Lonigan, Schatschneider & Westberg, 2008).
The importance of phonology as a linguistic domain has garnered considerable
interest among educators with its strong connection to early literacy development
(Anthony, Williams, McDonald & Francis, 2007; Gillon, 2018) and later reading success
(Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Muter, Hulme, Snowling& Stevenson, 2004). Findings based
on studies made by Muter et al. (2004) and Wagner et al. (1997) illustrated that learners
displaying strong phonological awareness skills in the early grades are likely to be more
proficient readers by the third grade of primary school. Not only is it a potent gauge of
early literacy success (Catts, Wilcox, Wood-Jackson, Larrivee & Scott, 1997; Treutlein,
Zoller, Roos & Scholer, 2008; Ehri et al., 2001; Gallagher, Laxon, Armstrong, Frith,
1996; Gillon, 2004), but it has also been observed to boost reading and/or spelling
outcomes when given as an intervention to children diagnosed with weak phonological
processing skills (Castle, Riach, & Nicholson, 1994; Torgensen et al., 1999), dyslexia
(Duff, Hayiou-Thomas, & Hulme, 2012; Fukuda & Capellini, 2012); spoken language
impairment (Gillon, 2000, 2002; Korkman & Peltomma, 1993; Warrick et al., 1993; Zens
et al., 2009), childhood apraxia of speech (McNeill, Gillon, & Dodd, 2009a), and even
developmental disabilities such as Down Syndrome (Burgoyne, Duff, Snowling,

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Buckley, & Hulme, 2013; Lemons et a., 2015; van Bysterveldt, Gillon & Foster-Cohen,
2010). The critical role of phonological awareness in the initial stages of reading led to
its prominence in serving as a diagnostic marker for distinguishing potentially at-risk
learners in first years of school (Blachman et al., 2000; Ehri et al., 2001; Goswami,
2001; Pressley, 2006). Researchers Catts et al. (1999) have identified that a number of
struggling readers often possess deficits in phonological awareness knowledge.
In more than three decades, several research studies focused on gauging and
imparting phonological awareness among children in highly-controlled clinical settings
(Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne, Fielding-Barnsley & Ashley, 2000; Ehri et al., 2001,
Gillon, 2000, 2005; Gillon & McNeill, 2009). Hattie (2005) even discovered that
phonological awareness skills contribute highly toward student achievement; above and
beyond factors such as class size, socio-economic income and whole language type of
program.
Aside from phonological awareness, another linguistic skill that likewise provides
considerable support in analyzing and understanding written text is morphological
awareness. Fostering morphological awareness aids children to identify relationships
between the root/base word and its derived forms (Everatt, 2018). For instance,
learners comprehend the word pictorial from the root word picture. Morphological
awareness refers to the ability of reflecting upon and recognizing the fundamental
components of words at the level of meaning (Gabig & Zaretsky, 2013). This also
includes the manipulation of the smallest constituents of a word – the base/root and the
affixes (i.e. prefixes and suffixes). With morphological awareness, an individual is able
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to realize that words are created in a language via processes and patterns of lexical
construction inherent to the language, basically by inflection, derivation or compositions
(Gabig & Zaretsky, 2013). Morphological information in the written text is transmitted
through the base form or lexical root as unbound / free morphemes (i.e. units of
meaning that can stand alone) and further conveyed in grammatical inflections and
derivational relations as bound morphemes (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2003). In contrast,
phonological awareness allows a person to become familiar that a word is comprised of
a sound or combinations of sounds that signal meaning and that phonological
information within the written text is expressed through the association between the
grapheme and phoneme (i.e. sound unit).
The contribution of morphological knowledge in literacy has been gaining
considerable interest among researchers, for not only sound is evident within the
English orthography, but also meaning. Several researchers argue that knowledge in
the smallest meaningful structures of words leads to unique variance in areas of literacy
such as word recognition, comprehension, spelling and vocabulary enrichment (Carlisle,
2003; Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; McCutchen, Logan & Biangardi-Orpe, 2009).
Verhoeven & Perfetti (2003) suggested that competent identification of morphologically-
complex words may promote skillful decomposition of words into underlying morphemic
units that activate the employment of direct lexical route to obtain complete lexical
representations.
In addition, morphemic knowledge can also be utilized as a compensatory
strategy for individuals faced with learning difficulties. Elbro and Arnbak (1996)
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discovered that dyslexic adolescents’ awareness of small meaningful units in spoken
language contributed to their skill in using such strategy to support comprehension of
written text. Increasing number of research studies focusing on morphological
awareness corroborate its significance in improving literacy outcomes and serving as an
invaluable teaching tool for primary students possessing language and literacy deficits
(Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Carlisle, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010; Goodwin,
Lipsky & Ahn, 2012; Reed, 2008). There are even data to support morphological
awareness performance as an effective means to identify late emerging weak
comprehenders in primary school (Tong et al., 2011).
The promising effects brought about by both phonological and morphological
awareness remain an interesting area to investigate, particularly when these
metalinguistic skills are used as treatment approaches to improve reading
comprehension abilities of children with language weaknesses. Such knowledge can be
capitalized on to design programs that optimize the quality of classroom experience for
diverse learners, curtail underachievement and bridge gaps in literacy outcomes. The
current research explores the benefits and effectiveness of two language-based
intervention programs, phonological awareness training and morphological awareness
training in increasing reading comprehension among children with specific language
deficits across two country contexts.

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Specific Language Weaknesses
The foundation of acquiring proficiency to read and write rests on early spoken
language development (Hayiou-Thomas, Harlaar, Dale, & Plomin, 2010). Competency
in spoken language, together with phonological associations of spoken words, fosters
the development of phonological awareness that in turn paves the way for
understanding the sound-symbol correspondence. Simultaneous to such competency is
the activation of morphological, syntactic and semantic skills that allow immediate word
recognition, further leading to efficient reading comprehension. Successful development
of reading assists later spoken language ability all throughout the adolescent years
(Nippold, 1998); yet, not all children possess robust oral language skills to make way for
smooth written language acquisition. A large portion of children characterized with
spoken language difficulties encounter learning deficits primarily related to reading,
writing and spelling (Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001;
Johnson et al. 1999; Larrivee & Catts, 1999; Lewis, Freebairn, & Taylor, 2002; Stoeckel
et al., 2013). Such weaknesses are likely to be persistent and not instantly addressed
(Gillon & McNeill, 2017).
However, determining those with likely reading, writing and spelling difficulties
due to weaknesses in spoken language will depend on reliable identification procedures
for the latter. Such identification depends on the definition of spoken language
weaknesses and the type of weakness that we want to identify. For example, Law et al.
(2000) found that, among children aged 7 years or younger in the United Kingdom, the
median prevalence of receptive language delay/disorder ranged from 2.63% to 3.59%,
whereas different types of expressive language delay/disorder ranged from 2.81% to

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16%. Those exhibiting a combination of expressive and receptive delay/disorder were
discovered to have a prevalence of 2.02% to 3.01% (Law et al., 2000). In contrast, an
earlier study in Canada, which investigated prevalence of language impairment among
kindergarteners, recorded an overall rate of 8.04%, with 8.37% prevalence for girls and
8.17% for boys (Beitchman et al., 1986). Similarly, in the Midwestern region of the
United States of America, the prevalence of spoken language disorders, particularly
those with specific language impairment, among kindergarten children was documented
to be 7.4% overall, with an 8% rate for boys and a 6% rate for girls (Tomblin et al.,
1997).
With regard to the two countries in which the current research was performed, a
report by Gillon and Schwarz (2001) approximated that five percent of New Zealand
children aged five to seven years old demonstrate idiopathic speech problems. This
estimate, however, did not comprise children with diagnosed language impairment,
unidentified language deficits or other wider communication difficulties. Meanwhile, in
the Philippines, no comprehensive national data exist pertaining to the prevalence of
language deficiencies among school-aged children. Differences in identification
processes across countries makes it difficult to rely simply on local clinical/practitioner
diagnoses to determine a sample for research purposes.
Given such potential differences, it is important to operationalize the definition of
specific language weakness in order to provide a comprehensive description of the
characteristics present in the language-based deficit. Adopting a primarily exclusionary
definition (for example, as used in the research reported by Critchley in 1970) avoids
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other variables that may be deemed responsible for a weakness, but can lead to
complications in identifying individuals presenting with a language difficulty. Utilizing
exclusionary criteria alone in defining specific language weaknesses may not be
sufficient, as it includes little description of the particular behaviours or deficits generally
associated to the condition. It tells much more about what a specific language
weakness is not than what it actually is. In the research performed as part of this thesis,
an exclusionary perspective was supplemented with an identification of the inclusion
criteria that would be likely to be present when a child is experiencing a specific
language weakness.
Hence, in this doctoral research, children with specific language weaknesses
referred to school-aged children exhibiting a receptive language index score below the
norm average of 85 (i.e. a general inclusion criteria). These learners also showed
evidence of weak letter-sound knowledge (another inclusion criteria associated with
language weaknesses and the main reason for supporting children with their reading
development). These weaknesses occurred despite having no record of learning,
sensory, or behavior problems, and showing a nonverbal intelligence score within the
norm of 85 to 115 range (i.e. exclusionary criteria). The latter IQ cut off approach was
used as a means to ensure that the child does not qualify as having general cognitive
impairments that is their nonverbal IQ was within the average range despite their verbal
abilities falling below this average range.
Although these criteria would broadly fit those used to identify a developmental
language disorder, none of the children in the study had been diagnosed as such by a
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trained professional – such a diagnostic procedure would have likely included further
observations of the child’s language processing and interviews to determine the history
of language development. As such, the term specific language weakness was adopted
in the research. Children characterized with specific language weakness were
hypothesized to have decoding-related phonological skill difficulties (though potentially
milder than those assessed as having dyslexia), and poor reading comprehension
levels related to non-phonological language skills, such as morphology, vocabulary and
syntax. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, phonological and morphological awareness
tests, single word decoding, word and text comprehension measures were administered
to confirm problems with both decoding and language comprehension.
This study investigated primary 1 learners, presenting with specific language
weaknesses and learning the English language as one of the two languages that they
were using to communicate with others (i.e., bilingual learners).
In order to convey the rationale that lays the foundation of the investigations
presented in this thesis, the subsequent literature review is partitioned into four main
sections that encompass:
1.) Evidence of reading achievement gaps focusing on educational practices in
two different countries – New Zealand and Philippines
2.) Theoretical underpinnings of phonological and morphological awareness in
relation to the advancement of reading skills
3.) Significance of integrating interventions in the actual classroom environment

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4.) Promotion of multi-component classroom-based intervention programs in
addressing specific language weaknesses among English language learners
The review of related literature concludes with a synthesis of the discussions and
outlines four broad hypotheses that will each be addressed in the ensuing chapters; in
order to realize the principal aim of this research – to provide research-informed
solutions that lead to equitable reading outcomes.
Bridging Reading Achievement Gaps: A Tale of Two Countries
New Zealand
For more than a decade, concerted efforts were initiated by the New Zealand
government to address the increasing inequities of underachievement in the area of
literacy education; one of which is the adoption of a national literacy strategy that highly
regarded a constructivist approach, evident in its adoption of the Reading Recovery
Program designed by Marie Clay during the 1970s (Tunmer & Chapman, 2015). Under
the Reading Recovery Program, students are provided daily one on one instruction in
the span of 30 minutes for 12-20 weeks by a Reading Recovery teacher. Scaffolding on
the child’s learning is made to continually alter the zone of the learner’s performance
(Clay & Cazden, 1990). Focus is on the development of compensatory strategies in
reading using an assortment of semantic, syntactic, pictorial and graphophonic cues to
monitor and repair errors in the derivation of meaning from text (Clay, 1991).
However, international data analysed for over twenty years based on surveys of
reading achievement revealed that New Zealand has consistently demonstrated

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considerable levels of test score variability (Tunmer, Chapman & Prochnow, 2007,
2009). This was again validated by the 2016 Progress in International Reading and
Literacy Study (PIRLS). The report indicated a trend of boys continuing to score worse
than girls; with children of Maori and European descent (Pākehā) experiencing a
decrease in mean scores since the last PIRLS assessment in 2011.
Overall, New Zealand ranked 33rd out of 49 other countries that participated. The
nation also earned a mean scale score of 523 which was eight points lower than the
previously attained 531 mean score back in 2011. The results of such international
assessment not only exposed the extent of disparity between vulnerable and proficient
readers, but also clearly indicate that New Zealand’s national strategy involving well-
meaning policies and substantial resources failed to attain its intended outcome.
In their article Pedagogical Constructivism in New Zealand Literacy Education: A
Flawed Approach to Teaching, authors Tunmer, Greaney and Prochnow (2015) mainly
attributed the country’s underperformance in literacy achievement to the Ministry of
Education’s rigid adherence to the ‘multiple cues’ theory of reading (Greaney, 2011;
Tracey & Morrow, 2006) also known as the ‘searchlights’ model of reading (Rose,
2006). Under this theory, skilful reading is viewed as a process requiring minimum
word-level information to validate prediction of imminent words in printed form and relies
on various sources of information such as picture cues, schema, sentence context clues
and preceding passage information. Since early readers are urged to rely heavily on
context cues under the searchlights model of reading, the process of learning to read is
similar to recognizing 25, 000 telephone numbers instantly and accurately (Adams,
13
1991). Because of such an ineffective, capacity-draining word identification method
being taught under the whole language approach, students encounter continuous
decline in reading comprehension development as they mature (Tunmer & Nicholson,
2011). More evidence of educational inequalities come from key findings of the recent
2018 UNICEF Innocenti Report Card which concluded that New Zealand is falling
behind other high and middle income countries that comprise the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Out of 38 countries within OECD,
New Zealand was placed at 33rd in rank for the UNICEF study. The country was
assessed based on three indicators of education equality: (1) Preschool indicator (relies
on percentage of students who have equality of access to preschool education; (2)
Primary school indicator (measured by looking at the gap in reading scores between the
lowest and highest performing students at Grade 4; and (3) Secondary school indicator
(evaluated by the gap in reading scores of the highest and lowest performers at age
15). Analysing each of the indicators, results showed that New Zealand, along with
Australia and Slovakia, are at the bottom third for each stage of the indicators of
equality in education. The persistent dismal results from international surveys simply
underscore that New Zealand’s educational system has not improved over the years,
and has somewhat regressed in providing equal opportunities for all students.
The Philippines
Much like New Zealand, the Philippine government has attempted to close the
widening gap in literacy by focusing on initiatives that pave the way for equitable
educational opportunities (e.g. Every child a reader program, Library Hub, Mother
14
tongue-based multilingual education, K-3 Curriculum on language development)
(Cristobal, 2015). Still, inequities in education persist particularly in levels of functional
literacy (i.e. the level of literacy that includes reading, writing and numeracy skills)
according to the 2008 Functional Literacy Education and Mass Media Survey
(FLEMMS). The survey revealed a relevant gap between the rich and poor populations,
with functional literacy higher among the non-poor (i.e. 9 out of 10) than individuals
categorized as poor (i.e. 7 out of 10). In addition, the same survey indicated that
functional literacy among individuals between the ages of 10 to 64 were greatly
disparate with girls and women scoring higher (88.7%) than boys and men (84.2%).
More recent data compiled by the United Nations Human Development report in 2016
(see Jahan, 2016) showed that although the country’s literacy rates improved, inequality
was observed with women aged 15-24 (i.e.98.9% literacy rate) compared to men of the
same age range (i.e. 97% literacy rate). Meanwhile, the 2017 Philippine Statistics
Authority Report cited apparent literacy gaps at the community level, where the number
of out-of-school youth aged 16-24 were documented at 3.6 million. Two main reasons
identified by the said Philippine government agency were lack of personal interest in
school and learning disability.
Both New Zealand and the Philippines have similar literacy educational
experience disparities, yet varied levels of educational equality. These differences are
shaped by each country’s education system that evolved within a distinct national
context. Certain policies or even literacy practices may be applicable in one country,
and not the other. Still, general principles exist that are deemed pertinent to any country
15
aiming to reduce the inequitable gap in literacy education. The 2018 UNICEF Innocenti
Report Card (see Chzhen et al., 2018) enumerated six main principles of reducing
educational inequality. These are providing high quality childhood education and care,
reducing socio-economic inequalities, closing the gender gap in achievement, ensuring
achievement of meritorious minimum levels of core skills, producing high-quality, cross-
country comparable evidence, and focusing on equality and not just averages. Of these
principles, countries need a solid foundation for an equitable education system; which
can be attained by utilizing the decisive ingredient required of any education system –
the provision of basic/ core literacy skills to children that allows for them to participate
fully in society (UNICEF, 2018). The research discussed in this thesis addresses the
concern by exploring the ways of developing core reading skills and raising
achievement through enhancement of metalinguistic awareness training (i.e.
phonological and morphological awareness) among atypically developing children with
language weaknesses. It has been documented that without sufficient instruction, the
gap widens between fast starters and slow starters in a phenomenon described by
Stanovich (1986) as the ‘Matthew Effect’. This was apparently seen in the results
reported in the preceding international studies survey that measured a country’s
education performance and literacy achievement equality.
Bridging Gaps in Literacy: Phonological and Morphological Awareness Instruction
In the past 30 years, several research studies were conducted highlighting the
benefits of phonological awareness (PA) evaluation and instruction (Anthony & Francis,
2005, Ehri et al., 2001). Phonological awareness refers to the ability to identify,
16
discriminate and manipulate the smallest unit of sounds that are likely to be beneficial in
word recognition (Anthony & Francis, 2005). Al Otaiba et al. (2012) discovered that the
more sensitive learners become to the sound structure of words, the greater chances
they have of becoming proficient readers. It is because according to the researchers,
the awareness provides children with the understanding to associate sounds with the
letters in deciphering printed text and accessing meaning. Phonological awareness not
only supports reading comprehension indirectly via decoding and decoding fluency
(Adams, 1990; Carnio, Vosgrau & Soares, 2017, Ehri et al., 2001; Engen & Hoien,
2002; Gillon, 2000), but is able to bridge the gap between weak and proficient readers,
as it supports written language development of children with or without linguistic deficits
(Catts, Fey, Zhang & Tomblin, 2001).
Like Phonological awareness, morphological awareness (MA) contributes to
reading comprehension in children (Carlisle& Goodwin, 2013; H. Zhang, 2016; Kirby et
al., 2012; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Levesque, Kieffer & Deacon, 2017; McCutchen &
Logan, 2011) and adults (D. Zhang & Koda, 2012). To, Tighe & Binder (2016) defines
morphological awareness as the ability to consciously manipulate morphemes which
are smallest units that carry semantic information (e.g. base words, prefixes and
suffixes). Morphological awareness also assists in word decoding as it provides learners
the knowledge to parse words into their smallest meaningful units that paves the way in
recognition of potentially ambiguous phoneme-grapheme associations (Carlisle, 2000,
2003). An example would be the correct differentiation of the combination of the letters
‘s’ and ‘h’ when decoding the word dishonest; where the phonemes /s/ and /h/ are
17
pronounced separately, as opposed to the to the word dish where /sh/ is a digraph
representing one sound.
A significant aspect in morphological awareness that deserves further research is
in the context of early literacy. Although previous researchers demonstrated the
development of morphological awareness among kindergarteners and first graders
(Berko, 1958; Carlisle, 1995, Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Kirby et al., 2012; Reed,
2008), scant research pertaining to the impact of explicit morphological awareness
instruction in fostering reading comprehension among emergent readers exists. Hence,
investigating the development of morphological awareness in the early years of primary
school is crucial to better understanding early childhood reading development.
Since the ultimate goal of reading is to assist children in the acquisition of skills
necessary to understand meaning (Al Otaiba, Kosanovich & Torgesen, 2012), it is only
timely that studies relating to instructional approaches that center on the development of
both morphological and phonological awareness in advancing children’s reading
comprehension are explored. The inclusion of phonological awareness and
morphological awareness training as part of the classroom core reading program, may
promote and even bridge the existing inequalities in reading performance by making
sure that children at risk of developing reading deficits are recognized early.
This doctoral thesis explores the benefits of classroom-based early reading
interventions by looking at the following perspectives:

18
1.) The study attempts to identify whether morphological and/or phonological
awareness approach leads to immediate reading comprehension among five
and six-year-old grade one students with specific language weaknesses at
the end of the first five weeks of a ten-week intervention program
2.) The research investigates whether a significant difference in reading
comprehension scores exists between monolingual and bilingual participants
in the intervention program in New Zealand
3.) The experiment assesses whether relevant differences exist between typically
developing and atypically developing bilingual English language learners in
the Philippines
4.) The investigation compares and contrasts reading performance outcomes
across two country contexts to identify common and contrasting patterns
relevant to the development of reading skills and effective reading instruction
for at-risk children
5.) The project monitors whether explicit literacy treatment approaches result in
the maintenance of learned reading skills post-intervention
The research experiment discussed in this thesis provides additional information
to educational research by offering new insights in integrating explicit instructional
training related to the enhancement of phonological and morphological awareness skills
with regular classroom teaching that supports early language and reading achievement.
19
It emphasizes that inequalities in reading performance outcomes can be
addressed by ensuring requisite knowledge, relating to the theoretical importance of
combining phonological and morphological awareness instruction as crucial elements of
effective classroom reading practice, is made clear to students and educators alike.
Hence, the ensuing section enumerates and discusses significant theories of children’s
reading development, frameworks surrounding the classification of reading deficits and
comprehensive models relevant to reading instruction.
The Development of Reading
An awareness of how small sound structures and meaningful word units directly
relate to an individual’s capacity to comprehend and interpret printed forms of text
accurately requires understanding of theoretical frameworks. Such knowledge further
determines appropriate evaluation of instruction and identifies successful transference
of reading comprehension strategies.
The Component Model of Reading
Reading is a process impacted by a myriad of influences. A particular individual’s
reading performance may be enhanced or hindered mainly by intrinsic or extrinsic
factors relative to his/her circumstances (Gillon, 2018). Gillon (2018) further outlines
external and internal aspects that effect literacy development. Extrinsic factors include
family, culture, socio-economic status, community and teaching methods; while intrinsic
elements involve oral language skills, intelligence and knowledge of print concepts.
Such factors that influence reading outcomes are grounded in the Component Model of
Reading (CMR) espoused by Aaron, Joshi, Gooden & Bentum in 2008. The model was
20
conceptualized to serve as a useful framework of reading and to identify different
domains (i.e. cognitive, psychological and ecological) that impact successful reading
acquisition. The CMR model depicts the cognitive component as the domain focusing
on the mental skills crucial in advancing precise word recognition and text
comprehension. Metalinguistic skills (e.g. phonological awareness and morphological
awareness), orthographic knowledge, and vocabulary size and depth are all subsumed
under the cognitive domain. Another domain is the psychological domain. This covers
areas such as children’s interest, motivation, confidence, expectations and self-
perception of their ability as competent readers that determine their success in reading.
The third is the ecological domain that focuses on environmental aspects surrounding
the learners. These include home and family background, culture, and parental support
toward reading skill development.
Although all three domains exert essential effects necessary for positive reading
outcomes, more attention in research was placed on the cognitive domain (Aaron et al.,
2008, Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). Researchers Kahmi and Catts (2012) mentioned that
cognitive factors provide a more direct influence and play a fundamental role in learning
to read as basic cognitive processes of encryption, storage and retrieval of linguistic
information are performed and achieved by learners during the actual reading
experience.
Since the development of phonological and morphological awareness are
essentially cognitive achievements, the discussion of word recognition theories is
considered in the next section.

21
Relevant Theories of Word Recognition
In the last few decades, much of the interest in reading research shifted toward
the cognitive processes involved in word recognition. Not only was it helpful in
expanding knowledge pertaining to reading development, but it also became relevant in
understanding struggling readers and their limited capacity to identify and pronounce
printed information accurately. Cultivating efficient word recognition in relation to
reading comprehension had been highlighted in several research studies on theories of
skilled reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, Nathan & Zolman,
1988). Stanovich (1991) mentioned that not being able to efficiently recognize words
lead to the comprehension challenges experienced by weak readers.
One basic model of reading comprehension that emphasizes the significance of
word recognition is the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover &
Gough, 1990).
The Simple View of Reading
The central idea conveyed by this model is that reading consists of two important
concepts. One is word recognition and the other is linguistic comprehension. The word
recognition component involves the decoding process of transforming print into words;
while linguistic comprehension (i.e. listening comprehension) refers to the process of
interpreting words, sentences and discourses (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). The simple
view of reading also serves as a framework for classifying reading deficits (Carson et
al., 2013). This view of reading assists in distinguishing difficulties in reading based on
word recognition (e.g. dyslexia, spoken language impairment), language

22
comprehension (e.g. specific comprehension deficits) or a combination of weaknesses
in both components (e.g. mixed reading disability).
There were other competing reading models developed to explain a person’s
ability to identify or recognize words. The dual route model (Coltheart, 1978; La Berge &
Samuels, 1974; Marshall & Newcombe, 1973), together with the connectionist model of
reading (Patterson, Seidenberg. & McClelland, 1989, Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986;
Seidenberg, 1989; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), were among those widely
discussed; hence, the models dominated much of the early literature pertaining to
understanding the nature of reading (Gillon, 2018).
The Dual Route Model
The dual route model of word recognition was one of the earlier models that
explained how learners derive meaning from printed texts. It posits that individuals
access meaning of an isolated printed word by utilizing either of the two existing routes:
a phonological route or a visual route (Coltheart, 1978; Forster, 1976; Morton &
Patterson, 1980).
In order to use the phonological route, the reader must be able to analyse and
decode a string of letters found in a word, apply letter-sound association and assemble
phonemes to construct precise phonological representations. Once accurate
deciphering is completed, meaning is then accessed.
Coltheart (1978) added that in cases of words considered phonetically ‘irregular’
(i.e. words that do not conform to normal grapheme-phoneme conversion rules such as
23
cough), a visual route that is independent of the phonological route as an alternative
must be employed. Accessing meaning via the visual route requires learner’s high
dependence on memory, as it taps heavily on previous experience of the word form and
word meaning. This entails obtaining orthographic representation of the entire word
based on letter shapes, cues and legal patterns prior to subsequent understanding of
the word’s meaning. According to Coltheart (1978), readers further use the two routes
interchangeably depending on the type of reading material and the goal of reading. For
instance, the phonological route is deemed helpful for reading unknown or unfamiliar
words encountered in the text. Knowledge on how to decompose words in smaller parts
would aid in mapping letters onto sounds that later lead to the decoding of the word.
The dual route model further suggests that a person with no knowledge of the word’s
internal sound structure, may still retrieve meaning via visual cues. An example would
be reading words from flashcards and learning each word by visual rote learning.
Successive repetitions of hearing the word and training visually on letter patterns are
techniques to enhance the visual route. Other teaching strategies in line with reliance on
the visual route include looking / visualizing the word and actually spelling the word
repeatedly.
The standard dual route proposed by Coltheart in 1978 was heavily criticized by
several researchers (Barron, 1986; Ehri, 1992; Humphreys & Evett, 1985). Ehri (1992)
specifically targeted the lack of a phonological processing component attributed to the
visual route in order to recognize words. Ehri argued that many of the irregular words in
the English language are partially irregular. One example of such partial irregularity is
24
found in the word debt. In this particular word only the “b” does not follow regular letter-
sound mapping. Imparting knowledge of the sound-letter relationship for “d” and “t” may
assist in the identification of the word. Ehri (2005) even conveyed that learners can take
advantage of sound-letter correspondences in spelling and pronunciation; in order to
help activate memory and reduce memory capacity, as opposed to learning the entire
form by rote.
Modified Dual Route Model
In 1992, Ehri presented a revised model explaining word recognition by
redefining the visual route in the standard dual route model as a visual-phonological
route. It was hypothesized that associations between the word’s pronunciation and
spelling are immediate. The learner somewhat ‘sees’ the specific pronunciation of a
word which paves the way of linking spelling with meaning (Ehri, 1992).
Simply stated, Ehri’s (1992) modified dual route theory of word recognition
advances the idea that learning to read requires children to use the phonological route
first and then deciphers the word through grapheme-phoneme correspondence
strategies. After being able to decode a word, readers will adapt and recognize
immediately the word; making it unnecessary to decipher each grapheme. Still, such
recognition by sight is made possible with combined use of phonological cues within the
word.
The Analogy Model
The theories of reading analogy posited by researchers Glushko (1979),
Goswami (1994), and Marcel (1980) argue that learners tap into their stored memory of
25
how words are pronounced and link it with similar and familiar spelling patterns rather
than associate individual letters to corresponding phonemes. Identifying words based
on spelling and phonological similarities has been characterized as “reading by analogy”
(Goswami, 1991; Goswami & Bryant, 1992; Marsh, Desberg & Cooper, 1977; Treiman,
1992).
Early research using this word recognition model indicated that analogy proved
useful in the later stages of reading progress, when connections between spelling-
pronunciation patterns have been reinforced by the continuous practice of the sound-
letter conversion (Marsh et al., 1977; Marsh, Friedman, Welch, & Desberg, 1980).
Goswami & Bryant (1990) argued that even young children can use analogy to
decode novel words, if they are instructed to separate linguistic units, particularly at the
onset-rime level. Goswami and Bryant (1992) then suggested that awareness at the
onset-rime level provides relevant support in children’s development of orthographic
categories; classifying words with common structural spelling patterns together.
Eventually, children can read and spell newly encountered words by just utilizing
knowledge of analogy based on common or known word patterns. Identifying words that
rhyme, producing rhyming words or blending words at the onset-rime level are only
some of the activities promoting the analogy theory of word recognition.
Connectionist Models
A connectionist model of word recognition, also known as parallel distributed
processing model, stresses the importance of the integration of various linguistic
systems (i.e. orthographic, semantic and phonological) in accessing meaning of

26
regularly and irregularly spelled words (Invernizzi & Hayes, 2010; Plaut, 2007;
Seidenberg, 1995; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). In this specific model, knowledge
in phonology is essential to: (1) process unfamiliar words (realized upon testing pseudo
word reading) (2) acquire words capable of being decoded letter by letter (e.g. shop);
and (3) become familiar with words that possess irregular elements (e.g. doubt). The
connectionist model acknowledges the interplay of multiple skills needed to read print,
rather than differences in processing routes (Seidenberg, 1995). The proponents of the
connectionist word reading theory used a computer program to model the contribution
of phonological, orthographic and semantic knowledge related to reading development
by generalizing facilitative or inhibitive effects on each language area and assessing its
impact on word recognition ability (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999). Demonstrating the role
and effect of phonological knowledge, by impairing the phonological unit in the
computer model, revealed marked difficulty in decoding non-words and irregular words.
Another pair of researchers Brown and Lossemore (1994) showed that by reducing
connections in the activities representing both phonological and orthographic word form
resulted to an identical performance of a dyslexic child.
To simplify, the connectionist model suggests that phonological knowledge
assists novice readers to decode unfamiliar words. It likewise demonstrates that strong
connections involving phonological, orthographic and semantic systems allow children
the opportunity to derive meaning from printed text proficiently. The model implies that
educators should develop among learners competence in different layers of
phonological, orthographic and semantic knowledge; in order to recognize areas of

27
deficit that needed to be strengthened. Such can impact pedagogical decisions and
bring about informative teaching practices, if given utmost priority.
Developmental Models of Word Recognition
The previous models discussed provided theoretical foundations that relate to
how proficient readers recognize printed texts. However, it is also necessary to gain
knowledge on the developmental phases that lead to proficiency in word recognition.
The advancement of word recognition according to the proponents of the developmental
model of reading involves gradual and defined stages of development (Ehri, 1991; Frith,
1985; Gough & Hillinger, 1980; Marsh et al., 1980).
The initial stage acknowledged by many stage theorists is the logographic stage.
At this period, children typically do not utilize names of letter and do not map out sound-
letter associations in order to recognize words. Ehri (1991) observed that children
employ letters simply as visual cues due to their salient graphic features, not because
they represent sounds in words. This leads to inability to read new words and
vulnerability to misinterpret visual cues. Masonheimer, Drum and Ehri (1984) explored
this concept by conducting an experiment among pre-schoolers. The researchers
placed a Coca-Cola logo on a Kellog’s Rice Krispies box and asked children what it
said. More than half of the pre-schoolers who participated answered ‘Rice Krispies.’
Another was when the researchers replaced the ‘P’ in the Pepsi logo with ‘X’ to read
‘Xepsi.’ The result revealed that 74% of the pre-schoolers still read the logo as ‘Pepsi.’
Although stage theorists have differing ideas pertaining to the number of stages
required to promote efficient word recognition skills (Chall, 1983; Ehri, 2005; Frith,
28
1985), there is general consensus though the alphabetic stage begins when learners
start to decode words by mapping out sound-letter relationships. The underlying
principle is that readers enter the alphabetic stage the moment they utilize their
knowledge based on connections between written and oral forms, and use these to
decode printed words. The reader understands that the connections are not arbitrary as
experienced in the logographic stage, but are actually systematic links between
phonemes and graphemes. Such competency leads to the acquisition of the ability to
assess spelling that allows correct translation of symbols to sounds at the sub-lexical
level (Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985). In the final stage – orthographic phase, children use
knowledge of letter order and spelling patterns to immediately recognize words by sight,
without resorting to phonological decoding. At the orthographic stage, readers are also
able to perceive morphemic parts of words that are usually occurring letter patterns -ing,
-ment, and –ed (Gillon, 2018). Instead of producing all the available phonemes in the
new word, mature readers match the observed letter sequence of the new word to pre-
existing letter patterns based on recognizable words stored in the semantic memory
(Kahmi & Catts, 2012).
The Self-Teaching Hypothesis
The self-teaching hypothesis proposed by Share (1995) and Share and
Stanovich (1995) provides an alternative explanation for decoding printed words. In this
item-based model, Share explained that readers utilize phonological decoding as a self-
teaching mechanism; enabling them to acquire efficiency in determining orthographic
representations vital for instant and accurate recognition of words, as well as

29
competency in spelling. The learner starts the process of self-teaching after learning to
map sound-letter correspondences, then attains improved proficiency in word
recognition after increased encounters and exposures to printed texts. The reader
eventually gains enhanced understanding of complex phoneme-grapheme associations,
as they are discovered in various morphemic and orthographic restrictions (Share,
1995). De Jong and Share (2007) emphasized that such learning may transpire not only
in actual oral reading, but also in independent silent reading.
Although Share and Stanovich presented convincing arguments in support of the
significance of enhancing the phonological decoding skill, the researchers still pointed
out that the presence of the said skill alone does not automatically guarantee self-
teaching. They remarked that it only paves the way for opportunities to actualize the
self-teaching process. Other factors may advance or impede the establishment of word-
specific orthographic representations. One such factor that gained prominence to date
would be morphological knowledge (Carlisle, 2003; Jarmulowicz, Hay, Taran, &
Ethington, 2008) which will be discussed in the succeeding sections.
The Connected Text Reading Model
The earlier models mentioned in this chapter illustrate how learners read printed
words in isolation. Nevertheless, context provided by connected text also contributes
substantial information that fosters word recognition among readers. This information
involves semantic relationships within sentences, knowledge of sentence, paragraph
and narrative structure, and context to access accurate meaning for words that convey
numerous possible interpretations (Kim & Goetz, 1994; Roth & Spekman, 1989,
30
Stanovich, 1984). The merging of information derived from word-level and higher-order
processing has given birth to an interactive model of reading.
The model of interactive reading or the connected text reading model was a
result of the merging of two opposite views that were prominent in earlier reading
research – the bottom-up (Gough, 1972) and top-down processing views (Goodman,
1970; Smith, 1971). The bottom-up model or the word-level approach in reading
emphasized the idea of reading being a sequential process involving series of
increasing operations which begin with the conversion of printed letters into sounds,
then the string of letters to the oral form which allow access of meaning stored in
memory. The top-down approach, on the other hand, highlighted the importance of
semantic and syntactic skills needed to derive meaning. The synchronous use of
information supported by these higher order cognitive processes lead not only into
fluency, but also efficient comprehension in reading (Smith, 1971). Goodman (1970)
referred to this activity as a ‘psycholinguistic guessing game.’ Reading researchers
supporting the top-down approach postulate that both semantic and syntactic
knowledge in word structures trim down probabilities related to the meaning of
upcoming texts; drawing out plausible guesses which aid the reader during word
recognition (Athey, 1977; Goodman, 1985).
The bottom-up and the top-down models received heavy criticisms from reading
researchers. For example, Rumelhart (1976) and Danks (1978) presented related
research findings focusing on the influence of semantic and syntactic context in
recognizing words unexplained by the bottom-up processing model. This is mainly

31
because the bottom-up approach lacks a mechanism that explains how higher-level
processes can impact lower-level processes (Stanovich, 1980). In the same way, the
top-down approach with its emphasis on using contextual information in immediate word
recognition was also disproved; as it was observed in experiments that weak readers
were as capable of utilizing contextual cues to enable word recognition just like their
typically developing peers (Stanovich, 1984). Recently, increasing support from
researchers on how the interactive model provides explanation on the way learners use
their knowledge to read connected text has gained ground (Gillon, 2018). The
interactive model conveys readers’ simultaneous synthesizing of lower-level and higher-
level processes during reading engagement that improves accuracy in reading. As
Share (1995) indicate, errors made by children in selecting the accurate word could be
twice as much, if they simply rely on textual information. However, the reader is able to
capitalize more and achieve proficient reading comprehension the moment he/she is
able to merge several sources of information (i.e. syntactic, semantic, orthographic,
pragmatic, phonological and morphological) simultaneously.
Section Summary
The models discussed in this chapter provide a theoretical framework essential in
gaining better insight on the development of reading skills. The inability to recognize
printed text is a distinguishing feature of a reading deficit (Invernizzi & Hayes, 2010)
which hinders fluency and comprehension. As researchers Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, and
Barnes (2007) discovered , reading fluency is dependent on solid word recognition skills
that are further enhanced through continuous usage of cognitive abilities such as
32
automaticity and rapid naming; while, reading comprehension relies on efficient
recognition of words that leads to the assimilation and discernment of information at the
text level (Stanovich, 1994). Any deficiencies in word recognition and comprehension
can negatively impact learning to read, and mark solidly and significantly in a model
applied to categorize reading inadequacies.
Model for Categorizing Reading Deficits
Reading models that provide a means of distinguishing reading difficulties give
educators a system for classifying deficits that may impede the growth of a child’s
reading ability. It not only determines eligibility for services, but guides informed
curriculum design and implementation. One of such models that has dominated reading
literature, since its inception in 1986 is the Simple View of Reading.
As mentioned in the earlier section, the simple view of reading states that reading
comprehension is a by-product of two things – word recognition and listening
comprehension. The model argues that in order to know how well an individual
comprehends printed text means measuring how well they decode words and how
efficiently they understand the words and sentences that are read to them (Gough &
Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). In order to determine the contribution of word
recognition and listening comprehension variables on reading comprehension,
researchers Hoover and Gough (1990) administered a longitudinal study among
English-Spanish bilingual learners starting from their first year in school until their fourth
grade. The outcome demonstrated that word recognition and listening comprehension
accounted for the resulting variance in reading comprehension. The combination of the
33
two variables contributed between 72 and 85 percent of the variance in reading
comprehension across the four grades.
Adolf, Catts and Little (2006) in another longitudinal study involving 600
monolingual children, tested the simple view of reading model and observed that the
areas of listening comprehension and word recognition collectively accounted for nearly
100 percent of the variance in reading comprehension performance in second, fourth,
and eighth grades. Several researchers also provided convincing evidenced in support
of the Simple View of Reading (Aaron, Joshi & Williams, 1999; Carver, 1993; Catts,
Hogan & Adolf, 2005; Catts, Hogan & Fey, 2003; de Jong & Van der Liej, 2002). Hence,
knowledge in thoroughly understanding the Simple View of Reading can inform
teachers regarding the most appropriate and most effective instructional practice
framework for struggling readers that leads toward the attainment of enhanced reading
competency, possible in classroom reading instruction.
Methods of Reading Instruction
The stark difference between learning a language and learning to read
fundamentally lies in one aspect – instruction. Language development for those
characterized as within the norm of typical development is universal. Regardless of
state, nation, society or culture, children without any cognitive, affective, sensory or
physical deficits raised in a healthy social environment naturally learn a language,
whereas literacy is far from universal. The development of an individual’s ability to read
typically requires explicit instruction and continuous practice in order to achieve
proficiency.
34
Since it had been observed that children greatly differ in how fast and precisely
they learn to learn (Snow et al., 1998), long-standing debates have persisted as to
where exactly the emphasis of literacy teaching should be; especially among the
emergent readers (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; Tunmer et al., 2014). Supporters of the
idea that language learning and reading have non-shared aspects contend that the
implementation of phonics instruction is vital for improving reading competency.
Advocates of the said reading instruction method assert that the introduction of
alphabetic reading must involve explicit discussion and training on mapping out sound-
spelling associations including letter patterns. On the other hand, proponents that
highlight the commonalities of language and literacy development focus on the
significance of learning to read for meaning rather than simply decoding strings of
letters and/or words. The emphasis of learning to read through connected text is the
guiding principle behind the method known as “whole language instruction”.
Whole Language Approach
The proponents of whole language instruction promote reading words as whole
units which often are dependent on visual recognition (Seymour & Elder, 1986).
Instructors of the whole language approach occasionally make connections on letter
names, sounds, and words (e.g. castle begins with a /k/ sound); however, as Snow et
al. (1998) observed in their research, teaching systematic phonics is often not included
in the curriculum. The main goal is for children to extract meaning by utilizing context,
which includes becoming sensitive to syntactic and semantic cues. The children’s
35
acquisition of phonics knowledge is deemed implicitly honed as their experience with
printed text increases (Goodman & Goodman, 1979).
Whole language instruction again highlights the assumption that children will
naturally develop their ability to read with minimal directives, much in the same way they
develop their oral language ability (Pressley, 2006; Tunmer, Chapman & Prochnow,
2004). Learners using whole language instruction approach the development of literacy
using text-level processing or the top-down perspective in reading. In so doing, children
are presented with strategies such as schema activation and inference-making to
comprehend sentences (Moats, 2000; Pressley, 2006). In addition, they are given
stories to read, not just isolated words or simple sentences. They are also taught to get
acquainted with story structure, which proponents of the model emphasized as a means
to veer away from the mechanical approach of sounding out letters during reading
instruction (McBride-Chang, 2016).
The whole language approach to reading may accommodate children with
special reading problems. Stanovich (2000) pointed out that there exists an estimated
10 to 20 percent of children who find it difficult to master the alphabetic principle (e.g.
reading disabled, dyslexic and poor comprehenders). For such learners, grapheme-
phoneme correspondences or sounding out words can cause perplexity, and that the
strategy of recognizing words by sight may initially prove beneficial. Another advantage
brought about by the whole language approach is that readers trained to develop early
literacy skills using such instructional methods may find reading more enjoyable, as
opposed to those trained under the traditional phonics instruction (Stahl & Murray,
36
1994). McBride-Chang (2016) mentioned that this may be because children read for
meaning which motivates them to come up with predictions regarding succeeding
events in the story. Still, critics of the whole language approach to reading instruction
have cited that high dependence on visual strategy to identify printed text is limiting an
individual’s capability to acquire words (Gough, Juel & Griffith, 1992; McBride-Chang,
2016). The researchers explained that cognitive storage delegated for unrelated
information, specifically variety of word patterns is limited. Hence, it is utterly impossible
to rely solely on a purely visual strategy without causing negative consequences on
reading outcomes (Gough, Juel & Griffith, 1992). What is needed is a means to
recognize printed forms of text that assist in retrieval and recall of more words from
memory. As a result, a shift toward including phonics instruction as part of the
classroom reading program has become more prominent in recent years.
Phonics Instruction
Educating children to seamlessly unlock the codes of alphabetic conversions to
infer meaning of words, specifically in an opaque orthography such as English, is vital in
gaining competency in reading. This method of instruction is known as the phonics-
based approach. Phonics instruction is basically viewed as a bottom-up process of
recognizing words, upon which a person utilizes the orthographic and phonological
features of printed forms of text to deduce meaning. Four different kinds of phonics-
based methods have been reported in literature. These are analytic phonics, synthetic
phonics, analogy phonics, and embedded phonics. In analytic phonics, instruction of
letter-sound associations are imparted with phonemes related to specific graphemes not
37
pronounced as separate units or produced in isolation. Learners are asked to identify
the phoneme being studied by using a set of words containing a common phoneme. For
instance, children may be presented with words such as bat, boy, bush and bin. Then
the teacher, together with the students, discuss how the given words are alike. Through
inferential learning, children deduce that the beginning phoneme in /ball/ is the same as
the initial phonemes evident in the series of words provided. It is expected that children
arrive at a conclusion to write the grapheme ‘b’ as a representation of the existing
common phoneme. In contrast, synthetic phonics is an approach to reading instruction
where phonemes associated to graphemes are taught in isolation; then combined or
blended together to form a whole word. This entails imparting to a learner that sounds
are represented by symbols (i.e. written letters) and that creating and pronouncing
words mean knowing how to blend the sounds together. Meanwhile, analogy phonics
involves teaching students to read unfamiliar words by capitalizing on their existing
knowledge of known words. Familiarization of words requires remembering by rote
stacks of riming units (i.e. phonograms) such as ‘am,’ ‘an,’ ‘et,’ and utilizing these to
approximate the reading and spelling of unknown words. Lastly, embedded phonics is
an approach to reading where children are taught sound-letter correspondence during
the reading of connected text using authentic materials. For instance, a learner might be
trained to decode the word ‘train’ within the context of a story about trains and various
modes of transportation. Because children are exposed to a multitude of phoneme-
grapheme relationships, they read and engage in stories. The means of instruction is
non-explicit and learning thereby is incidental.

38
Phonics instruction has gained prominence as it was observed to be efficient not
only in decoding words, but also in fostering reading comprehension (Stanovich, 2000).
In addition, phonics-trained learners were found to be more proficient spellers of English
(Bruck, Treiman, Caravolas, Genesee, & Cassar, 1998). In another study by Foorman
et al. (1998) which compared American first and second graders, in connection with the
use of whole-language and phonics-based instruction, proved that children trained in
the systematic approach of mapping phoneme-grapheme correspondences (i.e.
phonics) performed significantly better in reading words. Researchers Foorman et al.
(1998) and Juel & Minden-Cupp (2000) concluded that phonics-based instruction is
beneficial, as it improves reading-related skills of children characterized as having
lower-level reading abilities. Those children who underwent explicit phonics-based
instructional approach displayed higher word recognition scores at the end of primary 1
(Connor, Morrison & Underwood, 2007). Immense support of a phonics-based approach
is echoed by reports showing consensus from the United States of America’s The
National Reading Panel (Ehri et al., 2001) and The National Research Council’s
Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow et al.,
1998). Additional documents from government agencies of other countries such as
Australia’s National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Australian Government, 2005),
Scotland’s The Effects of Synthetic Phonics teaching on Reading and Spelling
Attainment (Johnson & Watson, 2005) and the United Kingdom’s Independent Review
of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) discuss the importance of phonics and
advocate for the instruction of it in the classroom to be afforded the highest level of
importance.
39
Despite strong evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of phonics instruction in
advancing reading-related skills in alphabetic orthographies, critics of the approach
pointed out limitations in the very foundation of the program – consistent application of
the sound patterns (Strauss & Altwerger, 2007). The problem highlighted by the
aforementioned authors is that in non-transparent alphabetic languages such as
English, simplifying letter-sound correspondences is unrealistic; as spelling patterns of
words do not predict how they are pronounced. The sorting and pronunciation are often
arbitrary; take for instance words such as post, most, host and ghost which are
pronounced using a long vowel ‘o’ sound. The preceding words are marked differently
than words frost, lost and cost; which have the same rime patterns, but uttered with
short vowel sounds.
Further example where letters alone are insufficient to specify actual
pronunciation is evident in the words wind (i.e. natural movement of air) and wind (i.e.
twist and turn). Thus, instruction that provides efficient support to improve reading
outcomes of weak-performing students have long been sought for.
Balanced Literacy Approaches
A contemporary approach to reading instruction is the adoption of a balanced
form of literacy approach, since literacy acquisition is multi-faceted (Tunmer, 2014). This
method aggregates significant features of both phonics and whole language instruction
into its core program (Moats, 2000; Pressley, 2006). Gaskin (2011) discusses that
mapping links between letter-sound associations are better taught in isolation, but is not
the sole focus of instruction. The knowledge children derive is then employed to figure
40
out unknown words that appear in connected text. Learning phoneme-grapheme
correspondences serve as the primary technique for deciphering unfamiliar words found
in connected text. In a balanced literacy framework, learners are provided with different
types of written language which they are encouraged to explore. Children are also given
freedom to select books and texts they are interested to read. Likewise, the students
have ample time to read independently or placed in small groups; in order to discover
language. The role of the teacher is to scaffold literacy learning, which may be in the
form of read alouds, word study and guided instructions (Au, Carroll & Scheu, 2001).
Knowledge in various types of reading instructional approaches is significant in
order for educators to tailor their teaching strategies to the distinct learning needs of
students in the classroom. Given that learners entering school differ immensely from
one another, with regard to their reading-related skills; this requires variegated levels of
instruction in metalinguistic awareness and letter-sound knowledge to pave the way for
independent reading (Nelson, 2010). As Snow and Juel (2005) observed, there is a
proportion of students who require detailed instruction and exposure to letter-sound
correspondence; prior to attaining the means to unlock the alphabetic code. Still, other
children need explicit and highly-structured educational support in becoming competent
readers (Kahmi & Catts, 2012). Hence, one may think that ensuring a balanced
approach to reading instruction that involves code-focused and print-focused reading
strategies is critical when taking into account ways of reducing the growing inequality or
gap in reading literacy achievement for emerging readers. Still, irregularities in reading
outcomes can only be suitably addressed when there is a consideration of theoretical

41
frameworks and reading contexts based on existing information regarding models of
word recognition, approaches to reading instruction and classification of reading
difficulties. Because the development of reading proficiency is a complex process, there
is a need to establish a systematized implementation of phonological and morphological
skills intervention with the aim of supporting word recognition, enhancing reading
fluency and strengthen comprehension in a classroom-based reading program.
Authors Bowen and Snow (2017) in their book Making Sense of Interventions for
Children with Developmental Disorders: A Guide for Parents and Professionals,
cautioned against the Balance Literacy Approach because researchers believe that
simply merging phonics and whole language instruction was just “well-intentioned and
cleverly titled marketing” that attempted to strike a compromise by adopting approaches
used in both. One teacher’s “balanced” approach may be implemented differently by
another teacher, who most likely will also have a different perception and interpretation
of what revolves around the concept “balanced”. The result would simply be educators,
in the pursuit of what they deemed as balanced literacy, blending myriads of
approaches that weaken instruction.
Evidence-based intervention programmes based on clear and systematic
guidelines are essential in supporting language and reading-related skills of children
with language deficits. The following sections then outline the role of metalinguistic skills
in relation to the acquisition of reading; beginning with phonological awareness and
concluding with morphological awareness skills. Discussion on the critical role of the
42
said metalinguistic skills in the early identification and prevention of reading deficiencies
in the classroom shall further ensue.
Precursors of Literacy Development
As researchers highlighted, different models that elucidate the acquisition of word
recognition skills underscore the fact that proficiency in reading requires the
consolidation of an array of knowledge and print experience (Invernizzi & Hayes, 2011;
Konza, 2006). The establishment of robust skills that pave the way for emerging word-
recognition abilities (e.g. phonological, morphological and alphabetic knowledge)
guarantees that learners develop essential means to derive meaning from printed forms
of information they encounter (Justice, 2006; Kahmi & Catts, 2012). Poor reading
foundation skills limit children’s chances of becoming proficient readers and compound
the risks for continuing literacy failure and life-long educational underachievement
(Bishop & Adams, 1990; Catts, Bridges, Little, & Tomblin, 2008; Conti-Ramsden &
Purkin, 2007). Ergo, the integration of classroom-based literacy interventions that
promote word-recognition development within the school curriculum is crucial in
reducing the impact of existing literacy inequality.
Sound and Print Information
Pivotal to an individual’s ability to learn how to read and write are abilities to
discriminate, attune to, recall and manipulate speech sounds; coded in print from whole
then to parts (McBride-Chang, 2016). Children require such use of phonological
information that enables them to read words. However, this may not be an easy process
43
for all children. For example, children may initially develop implicit phonological
knowledge enabling them to evaluate whether a word is related to their native language
or not. They may be able to perform auto-correction of errors evident in speech, and
distinguish variations across spoken words that make the relationships between
phonemes, graphemes and morphemes less clear (i.e. the phoneme-grapheme
correspondence do not reflect actual speech sounds in words such as the English letter
c which can represent two different phonemes /k/ and /s/). However, the variability in
speech (i.e. utterance of a word becomes intricate as it differs among individuals based
on voice quality, gender, age, nationality or even pronunciation) may make it more
challenging for some children to derive phonemes from spoken words (McBride-Chang,
2016). McBride-Chang (2016) expressed that most children and a number of adults
without undergoing detailed reading-related training cannot manipulate particular
phonemes present within a word, especially those that do not constitute the onset of a
given word. English-speaking children who are able to manipulate phonemes skilfully
are placed at a greater advantage in learning to read English than those who are not
(Adams, 1990; Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Pressley, 1998).
For children, across cultures and ages, the ability to focus on and discriminate
the speech sound system and gain understanding that spoken language can be broken
down into minute components comprising syllables, onsets, rimes and phonemes offer
greater significance in learning to read. In fact, consensus among various researchers
exists that phonological awareness is strongly related to reading (Gillon, 2000;
Shankweiler, 1999; Stanovich, 2000). Phonological awareness, in relation to an

44
individual’s reading ability, was reported in several cross language studies that focused
on European Latin-based orthographies (Cossu, 1999; Wimmer, 1996; Wimmer,
Mayringer & Landerl, 2000; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), non-Latin based scripts
particularly Hebrew (Bentin & Leshem, 1993), Arabic (Elbeheri & everatt, 2007; Taibah
& Haynes, 2011), and Persian (Sadeghi, Everatt & McNeill, 2016). Phonological
awareness was even found to influence reading of a non-alphabetic language such as
Chinese (Ho & Bryant, 1997). Wagner & Torgesen (1987) noted that one of the potential
triggers that set-off word recognition difficulties is a deficit in processing the
phonological aspects of language and utilizing this in acquiring written language. The
concept of phonological processing involves the employment of phonological
information when engaged in oral and written language activities (Catts, Kahmi & Adolf,
2012). Wagner and Torgesen (1987) identified various types of phonological processing
skills which include speeded naming (i.e. rapid automatized naming), phonological
memory and phonological awareness.
The first type of phonological processing skill is speeded naming or rapid
automatized naming which involves immediate identification, retrieval and visual
sequencing of symbols or representation from long-term memory. Another type referred
to as phonological memory can be measured by the accurate retrieval in particular order
of a certain list of non-words or random real words from basic memory or context
presented in sentential memory (Waters & Caplan, 1996). Lastly, the third type is
phonological awareness which is defined as the awareness of access to and
manipulation of the sound structure of a language (Gillon, 2004; Kahmi & Catts, 2012;
45
McBride-Chang; 2016). Out of all the identified phonological processing skills,
phonological awareness has been observed to show significant impact not only on
literacy development, but also on literacy success (Branum-Martin et al., 2012; Melby-
Lervag et al., 2012; Wagner et al., 1997).
The concept of learning to read using phonics has been around since the early
20th century; however, emphasis on its use was not given as much significance. For
many English language students in 1930 America, phonics was only introduced after
the child is able to recognize new words using picture and meaning clues (Chall, 1967).
Phonics was taught about the same time as structural analysis, and was only one of the
several mechanisms used in the identification of new words (known then as word
perception). It was even only encouraged when other ways of instruction fail. In 1967,
the credibility of the then perceived progressive whole word approach began to slowly
deteriorate with the publication of Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate. The
book presented research-based evidence in favour of phonics instruction. The ability of
reducing whole words into their equivalent discrete speech sounds slowly began to
gather steam, with basal readers in the 1970s being published that encouraged more
phonics instruction in the early grades (Rehage, 1984). Soon, studies in the early
1970s focused on investigations relating to linguistic awareness existing at the
phonological level (Calfie et al., 1973; Liberman, 1973; Liberman et al., 1974; Mattingly,
1972). These researchers associated children’s understanding of words as made up of
discernible components. It was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the term
“phonological awareness” started to emerge in the research literature. This term

46
specifically referred to a person’s awareness of the sound structure of an uttered word.
Marcel (1980) also linked phonological awareness to spelling by showing that children
struggling with spelling performed weakly on tasks measuring phonological awareness.
By the 1990s, the number of research studies conducted to explore the significance of
phonological awareness in relation to reading and spelling increased; which resulted in
the term being widely cited in scientific journals and other forms of literature in the fields
of psychology, speech-language therapy, linguistics and education.
Phonological Awareness Development
An encompassing view pertaining to the development of phonological awareness
among children explains that skills signifying sensitivity to the sound structure in a
language exist along a continuum (Anthony et al., 2009; Lonigan et al., 2009). It depicts
a framework highlighting a hierarchical nature of sensitivity to linguistic units at distinct
levels/tiers (Hempstall, 1997). In general, learners become aware of larger sound units
(i.e. syllables and rhymes) prior to perception of smaller sound components (i.e.
phonemes) (Schuele & Boudreau, 2008).
Levels of Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is comprised of different levels: syllable, onset-rime and
phoneme awareness. Initially, children exhibit knowledge that multi-syllabic words can
be divided at the level of syllables, and that a specific word such as mommy can be
segmented into mom-my or that the word pancake can be broken into two parts pan
and cake. Eventually, the children display high sensitivity to discriminate within
intrasyllabic units also known as onset-rime awareness (Goswami & Bryant, 1990;
47
Moats, 2010). Onsets are the initial sounds of the word, which could be a consonant
cluster (where two or three consecutive consonants are evident like ‘tr’ in trip or ‘str’ in
strip). On the other hand, in words like ball, trip and strip, the rime would be comprised
of sounds that follow the onset such as ‘all’ in ball and ‘ip’ in words trip and strip.
There are observable patterns governing the development of children’s sensitivity
to intrasyllabic units in the syllables (Justice et al., 2013). In the beginning phase of their
awareness to syllables, when phonemes are not yet viewed as a fundamental linguistic
component, children demonstrate more competence in separating syllables into onsets
and rimes; when onsets occur as solitary consonants as compared to consonant cluster
(Treiman, 1983). For example, children are better likely to separate the word rip into an
onset and rime, as opposed to trip.
Another means of breaking down words into minute units is by segmenting them
into distinct sounds. This is the phoneme level of awareness. A phoneme is defined as
the smallest component that influences a word’s meaning. For instance, the word ball is
comprised of three distinct phonemes: /b/, /ɔ/, /l/. Altering one of the phonemes within
the word such as /b/ to /m/ or /l/ to /t/ would change the meaning conveyed by the word.
Phonemes represent an abstract idea. In the utterance of a word, the listener hears the
phonemes blended into syllables within speech rather than segmented phonemes.
Hence, an individual needed to learn the perception of phonemes in speech (Liberman,
Cooper, Shankweiler & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967), as they are critical requisites in
becoming a proficient reader (Justice et al., 2013).

48
Supporting evidence related to the developmental continuum of phonological
awareness were based on previous research demonstrating that sensitivity to syllable
structure appears earlier than sensitivity to phonemes (Anthony et al., 2005; Lonigan et
al., 1998, 2009). Developmental studies indicate that explicit awareness of syllabic
distinctions in words emerges between three and four years of age (Schreiber, 2008),
while the awareness to detect and create rhyme patterns has been documented in
children as young as two years of age (Hempenstall, 1997). In contrast, early phoneme
sensitivity, particularly accurate identification of shared phoneme across words (e.g. toy
and tin) begins to show between four and five years of age; with succeeding
development at the phoneme level in conjunction with the beginning literacy instruction
(Dodd & Gillon, 2001; Lonigan et al., 2008). A significant period for screening and
monitoring majority of children in relation to phonological awareness is advised to be
conducted at around four years of age, as consistency in phonological awareness ability
becomes evident during this period.
Phonological awareness at the smallest component of sound in a language (i.e.
phoneme awareness also known as phonemic awareness) is considered to be more
complex; which makes it difficult to master easily or become proficient in. As opposed to
rhymes or syllables, phonemes are hard to perceive acoustically (Liberman, 1980).
Phonemes are not obvious even to native speakers, unless explicit instruction is
provided to them (Bowey & Francis, 1991). Despite this, children who become skilful in
identifying sound units tend to be more proficient in learning to read (McBride-Chang,
2016). Researchers even concurred that sensitivity to phonemes in spoken words is

49
highly associated to early reading success, above and beyond rhyme and syllable
awareness (Schreiber, 2008; Gillon, 2004).
A longitudinal study conducted by Muter and Snowling (1998) that tracked rhyme
and phoneme awareness skills of 34 children in Britain revealed that rhyme detection at
ages four, five and six failed to predict reading accuracy at age nine. However,
phoneme deletion tasks at five and six years of age highly predicted reading proficiency
at age nine. The results strengthen and confirm previous claims of existing research
which suggest that measures in rhyming decrease in prognostic value as learners move
up the education system (Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1997). Additional studies on
phoneme level awareness indicate its capability to assist in the improvement of rhyme
and syllable awareness; whereas the opposite is less probable to occur (Brown, 1998;
Yeh, 2003). Such findings provide further reasons for classroom instructions to place
greater emphasis in teaching phonological awareness at the phoneme level.
Overlapping Continuum
Even though phonological awareness development seems to follow a continuum,
the development of sensitivity to words, syllables, onset-rimes and phonemes overlaps
rather than emerges in discrete stages (Anthony et al., 2003). Researchers refer to it as
a “quasi-parallel progression,” where mastery at a simpler level is not a pre-requisite for
displaying development at a succeeding complex level. This means that children may
increase sensitivity in onset-rime, while simultaneously developing awareness of
phonemes; although the former may be closer to mastery than the latter (Anthony et al.,
2013). Knowing the “quasi-parallel” nature of the development of phonological

50
awareness convey that learners should not be restricted in becoming proficient in one
ability (e.g. onset-rimes) before embarking in the mastery of another (e.g. phoneme
awareness). Those two areas of phonological awareness can be developed at the same
time. It further suggests that classroom-based programs need not focus on complete
mastery of shallow levels of phonological awareness (i.e. syllable or onset-rime
awareness) before focusing on deeper levels of sensitivity such as phonemic
awareness. Carson et al. (2013) even mentioned that a particular emphasis on the
instruction of phoneme-level skills may be critical and time-efficient rather than focusing
on broad skills at all levels of awareness.
The Development of Literacy and Phonological Awareness
The critical role performed by phonological awareness in relation to the
development of reading skills sparked interest among many researchers to conduct
studies about it, within the framework of the development of literacy. In the context of
this doctoral thesis, literacy is characterized as the acquisition of both emergent literacy
skills (i.e. knowledge and skills necessary for writing and reading) and conventional
literacy skills (i.e. fluent and proficient reading and writing). The development of
children’s phonological awareness and print knowledge are fundamental to literacy
development (Whitehurst & Logan, 1998) and offer underlying principles for the
consequent achievement of conventional literacy (Justice et al., 2013).
Badian (2000), Christensen (2000), and Storch and Whitehurst (2000)
discovered that children with higher or more refined levels of phonological awareness
and print knowledge tend to advance into competent conventional readers and writers,
51
compared to those with meagre levels of awareness. In the last ten years, a number of
researchers described children’s literacy and determined mediating factors that impact
its development (i.e. linguistic, cognitive and environmental influences) (Justice, Pence,
Bowles & Wiggins, 2006; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). In the multitude of studies relating
to literacy development among children, a particular set of variables representing
phonological awareness has emerged with regard to its robustness in predicting reading
success (Hogan, Catts & Little, 2005; Torgesen, Wagner & Rashotte, 1994). Sensitivity
to the sound structure of the oral language allows children to decipher printed text,
identify words in print, and spell words accurately (Gillon, 2004).
Phonological Awareness and Reading Development
Three different views can be gleaned from related literature that examines the
relationship between learning to read and phonological awareness (Castles & Coltheart,
2004; Elbro & Pallesen, 2002; Hatcher et al., 2006; Lukatela, Carello, Shankweiler &
Liberman, 1995; Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Stevenson, 2004; Troia, 1999; Wagner,
Torgesen & Rashotte, 1994). The first is that the degree of a child’s phonological
awareness ability impacts reading development. Available information that support this
claim were from longitudinal studies that demonstrate high correlations between
phonological awareness and later reading development, as well as research on
phonological awareness training leading to significant impact on the growth of reading
ability (Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Hatcher et al., 2006; Wagner et al., 1994).
Another perspective suggests that phonological awareness ability improves due
to learning to read. Evidence reinforcing this outlook came from investigations

52
displaying that illiterate adults or even individuals reading non-alphabetic scripts have
minimal or no existing awareness involving the sound structure of spoken words
(Morais, 1991). The last perspective proposes that a bidirectional relationship exists
between phonological awareness and learning to read. The view asserts that initial
phonological awareness skills promote the development of early word identification,
which then fosters the learning of more intricate phonological awareness knowledge
(Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Castles, & Coltheart, 2004; Cataldo & Ellis, 1988; Perfetti,
Beck, Bell & Hughes, 1987; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988). Apparently, each view features
the significance of phonological awareness in learning to read, and the relevance of
integrating phonological awareness in the early reading program.
Again, phonological awareness skill at the phoneme level (i.e. phoneme
awareness or phonemic awareness) is pivotal for the enhancement of proficient word
recognition ability. Al Otaiba et al. (2012) discussed that phoneme awareness is
indispensable in offering children a means to comprehend that sounds in spoken words
can be symbolized in text using alphabetic letters. In addition, phonemic awareness is
crucial in strengthening children’s ability to identify sound-letter correspondence, which
integrates the growth of phonological representations that assist word-recognition
fluency. Ultimately, phonemic awareness assists children in deciphering partially
irregular words by simply sounding out the regular sound-symbol units within the word
and inferring conceivable word meanings.
The research on phonological awareness mentioned above offers a rationale for
educators, researchers, school administrators and policy makers to warrant its

53
incorporation within the school curriculum, as it is a vital component of classroom
evaluation and teaching practice at the initial stages of reading development.
Measuring Phonological Awareness
There is a significant number of available standardized assessments aimed at
evaluating phonological awareness ability of children in the classroom. Some have
already been used to screen and monitor phonological awareness development, while
others are utilized to supply diagnostic information regarding participant’s phonological
deficiency and/or reading disability.
In the article published by Sodoro, Allinder and Rankin-Erickson in 2002, the
researchers enumerated the commonly utilized measures in assessing phonological
awareness. These were: (1) the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test, Revised
Edition (LAC; Lindamood & Lindamood, 1979); (2) the Test of Phonological Awareness
(TOPA; Torgesen & Bryant, 1994); (3) the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
(Yopp, 1995); (4) the Phonological Awareness Profile (Robertson & Salter, 1995); and
(5) the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP, Wagner, Torgesen &
Rashotte, 1999).
Other forms of phonological awareness assessments that were cited in the
literature include: (1) the Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness
(PIPA; Dodd, Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel, & Ozanne, 2000); (2) the Phonological
Awareness Literacy Screening-Kindergarten (PALS-K; Invernizzi, Juel, Meier, & Swank,
2005); and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good &
Kaminski, 2005).
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With proper training, teachers can independently administer measures that
adequately support screening decisions, distinguish at-risk learners, identify target
areas of improvement, and guide the provision of available levels of support for
stakeholders.
Phonological Awareness, Phoneme Awareness and Phonics
From a point of view of regular teaching, the concepts phonemic awareness or
phonological awareness are often misconstrued to be simply another namesake of
phonics; though these three are different and distinct terms that are not one and the
same. However, all three have some association to sounds existing within words.
Phonics simply refers to the instruction of sound-letter equivalents which is helpful for
reading and spelling. In teaching phonics, an educator would highlight “D is for dog; E is
for elephant” or mention letter ‘M” and says “/m/ in his/her phonic activities. Meanwhile,
phonological awareness tasks requires learners to consciously recognize the smaller
sound units that constitute a word (Justice et al., 2013). Phonological awareness
activities help students understand that the word dog has one syllable; the word dog
has ‘d’ as an onset and ‘-og’ s the rime; the word dog has three phonemes; or that the
words dog and log are rhyming words. These activities vary greatly for a simple sound-
symbol correspondence for the phoneme [d].
In actual teaching practice, phonics is often taught as a skill and drill exercise using
worksheets and workbook activities. Phonics has always been instructed separately
from phoneme-level awareness with minimal emphasis given to expanding children’s
awareness of the sound structure within words. Like phonics, phoneme awareness may
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be taught in isolation. In raising children’s phoneme-level awareness, children can be
taught to separate words into individual phonemes. For instance, a child is asked to
segment the word sand into its component phonemes which result to four phonemes [s],
[æ], [n], and [d]. Another task that aid the development of phonemic awareness is to
blend a sequence of individual sounds and build it to form a larger linguistic unit. Still,
studies have shown that the integration of phonics and phoneme awareness lead to
excellent reading outcomes (Hatcher, Hulme & Ellis, 1994). This resulted to
phonological awareness treatment approaches incorporating various phonic learning
tasks in their intervention programs (Gillon, 2018).
Classroom-based Phonological Awareness Intervention
At the beginning of formal schooling, much of the time in the classroom is
allocated in fostering literacy-based skills (Johnston & Watson, 2005; Rose, 2006).
Initial instruction in developing reading proficiency targets vital competencies that are
fundamental to subsequent learning.
Researchers recognized that enhancing phonological awareness is a crucial area
that holds greater promise in developing positive reading outcomes to learners (Carroll
& Snowling, 2004; Catts et al., 2001; Ehri et al., 2001; Lonigan et al., 2008). Research
studies on phonological skills were greatly influenced by the first ever large-scale
research investigation conducted in Sweden by researchers Lundberg, Olofsson and
Wall in 1980. This study provided strong evidence that children’s deficiency in linguistic
tasks, particularly phonemic analysis, were predictive of reading failure (Goswami &
Bryant, 2016).
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In order to enhance the success of implementing a phonological awareness
intervention inside the classroom, several considerations are needed to be taken into
account. Detailed reports, based on earlier studies, highlight time efficiency as critical to
ensure programs easily consolidate with class schedules and children possess
adequate skills to benefit from reading instruction (Carson et al., 2013, McIntosh et al.,
2007, Tyler et al., 2014). Elbaum et al., (1999) and Gillon (2004) confirmed that frequent
and intensive sessions are vital aspects of effective phonological awareness training.
High intensity sessions (i.e. intensive sessions) are those sessions that are conducted
twice a week, with explicit instruction lasting for a minimum of 60 minutes per session.
Such intervention focusing on phoneme-level skills accumulating 20 hours of teaching
time in a span of ten weeks has been established to advance reading achievement of
struggling learners in one-on-one and small group therapy contexts (Gillon, 2000, 2005;
Gillon & McNeill, 2009). Exploring the impact of length, frequency and intensity of
phonological awareness training in classrooms to reduce the inequality in reading
outcomes also imparts invaluable information regarding the amount of time required by
educators to allocate for phonological awareness training.
Carson et al. (2013) cited content of phonological awareness instruction as
another criterion to be considered in the implementation of classroom-based
phonological training program. She added that a narrow approach to content instruction
(i.e. teaching children to develop awareness of phonological units at the phoneme level)
would result in better outcomes in reading achievement; in contrast to a broad approach

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aiming to develop a wide range of phonological awareness skills such as syllable,
onset-rimes, rhyme and phonemes.
Results from previous research demonstrated that effective implementation of
phonological awareness instruction within classrooms can likewise lead to a significant
effect on the reduction of reading difficulty incidence via highly-intensive and long-term
classroom training that highlight phonological awareness at the level of phonemes
(Shapiro & Solity, 2008). The authors Shapiro and Solity (2008) conducted a
longitudinal study that examined the 251 Year 1 British students’ reading outcomes after
receiving intensive phonological awareness instruction in phoneme blending, phoneme
segmentation and high-frequency phonics training. The strategy influenced reading
performance of both typically-developing students and those with weak phonological
awareness skills contributing to reducing the prevalence of reading deficits which was
20 percent among typically-developing children enrolled in the regular teaching program
and five percent among weak learners receiving training in phonemic awareness after
being evaluated at Year 3.
Another classroom-based research, this time made by Fuchs et al. (2001),
contrasted the effectiveness of a teacher-delivered phonological awareness training
with explicit training and without actual instruction in deciphering printed text. The
investigation conducted was shorter in duration (i.e. less than one academic year), low
in intensity (i.e. children received 15-minute sessions per week; less than the suggested
two hours per week), and provided a broad phonological awareness focus. Three
testing conditions were designed: (1) phonological instruction that targeted syllable,
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rhyme and decoding; (2) phonological awareness only; and (3) regular classroom
instruction without phonological training at all. A total of 404 five-year old children
participated in the study. Results indicated that children who underwent phonological
awareness and word decoding training performed better than those learners who were
taught phonological awareness skills only and those without actual intervention; on
tasks involving reading and spelling immediately after instruction. However, five months
post intervention, children who had phonological awareness and word decoding training
no longer displayed a statistically relevant advantage in reading and spelling proficiency
over the other groups. The study showed that instruction of a broad range of
phonological awareness skills with very low intensity (i.e. 45 minutes every week)
implemented over a short duration of time is less impactful in attaining continuous
reading outcomes in the long run.
Justice et al. (2010) tested whether short duration, low intensity approaches that
target a broad range of phonological awareness skills would help improve reading skills
of children susceptible to developing reading deficiencies. The researchers included
particular emphasis on teaching phonological awareness at the phoneme level among
66 children whose age range from three years and three months and five years and six
months. The reading program termed as ‘Read It Again’ (RIA) was administered twice a
week for thirty weeks, with each classroom lesson covering phonological awareness,
print, vocabulary and narrative ability lasting for 20 to 30 minutes. Based on the results,
the children under the RIA program demonstrated significantly higher reading
performance than the comparison group on measures of literacy; directly evaluated

59
following instruction. Additional findings revealed that learners with weak language
abilities did not improve on phonemic awareness and alphabet knowledge in as much
extent as children possessing average to high language skills.
Benefits resulting from a short duration, highly-intensive and broad phonological
awareness program were explored by researchers McIntosh, Crosbie, Holm, Dodd and
Thomas in 2007. The study observed the reading performance of 97 pre-schoolers
coming from low socio-economic backgrounds. The said learners were given daily
phonological awareness training that focused on syllable segmentation, initial sound
recognition, rhyme identification and rhyme generation. Despite the relevant gains
identified in phonological awareness knowledge after instruction, a succeeding inquiry
made by researchers O’ Connor, Arnott, McIntosh and Dodd (2009) revealed that the
observed improvement in phonological awareness in preschool failed to support gains
in the development of literacy in the early years of primary school. However, a post-hoc
evaluation of individual students showed that a sub-group of participants, who were
administered with phonological awareness and language intervention, managed to
maintain their enhanced performance and that the same group of individuals attained
similar scores on the phonological awareness tests to their aged-matched peers in the
study.
A similar ten-week, highly intensive phonological awareness program was
designed by Carson, Gillon and Boustead in 2013. However, the study specifically
targeted the improvement of phonological awareness skills of students at the phoneme
level. The experiment later demonstrated that the students who were given phonological
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awareness training showed higher literacy outcomes in comparison to children who
received the ‘usual’ regular literacy curriculum.
The findings gleaned from the aforementioned studies suggest that classroom
interventions conducted over a short ten-week period result to a significant effect in
improving the reading performance of children experiencing language difficulties.
Accordingly, exploring whether positive influence in reading could be achieved by
integrating phonological awareness instruction with another aspect of metalinguistic
awareness may support time-efficient identification of reading deficits, impact
development of literacy and bridge existing inequalities between good and poor readers.
Metalinguistic Awareness
The ability to reflect upon and manipulate language beyond its functional sense
is essential in reading. Indeed, it was found that an association between a child’s
awareness of language and progress in reading exists (Mattingly, 1972; National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). This knowledge to
consciously regulate and monitor language is referred to as metalinguistic awareness.
Aspects of metalinguistic awareness that impact reading and writing outcomes include
syntactic awareness, semantic awareness, pragmatic awareness, phonological
awareness and morphological awareness. Of all the aspects comprising metalinguistic
knowledge, phonological awareness has garnered increased attention with regard to
written language acquisition (Gillon, 2018). However, other areas of metalinguistic
awareness are also crucial in advancing word recognition processes. One of the
relevant metalinguistic skills that helps children recognize the base form of a word, such
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as differentiating the word jump from jumped; which can likewise be an indispensable
tool in reading and spelling complex words is morphological awareness (Apel &
Thomas-Tate, 2009; Carlisle, 1995; Masterson & Apel, 2000).
Previous investigations had indicated that morphological awareness can account
for unique variance in performance outcomes related to reading and spelling; and that
treatment approaches that incorporate morphological awareness display promising
results in fostering word reading and spelling (Apel, Diehm, & Apel, 2013; Carlisle,
McBride-Chang, Nagy & Nunes, 2010; Good, Lance, & Rainey, 2015; Goodwin & Ahn,
2013; Kirk& Gillon, 2009; McCutchen & Stull, 2015; Wolter & Green, 2013). Thus, the
following discussion outlines the importance of developing morphological awareness in
relation to word recognition processes that foster reading comprehension.
Morphological Awareness
Previous researchers described that learning to read is metalinguistic in nature
(Mattingly, 1984; Nagy & Anderson, 1999). This means that in order to advance in one’s
reading skills, it is critical to be able to extract language from meaningful contexts and to
contemplate on its structural features.
With regard to determining whether significant connections exist between facets
of metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition, much interest has been given to
phonological awareness (Goswami, 2000), as it is influential in establishing phoneme-
grapheme correspondences in learning alphabetic script (Bradley & Bryant, 1983;
Wang, Yang & Cheng, 2009) and in providing information to parse syllables into onsets
and rimes when learning logographic character recognition in a language such as

62
Chinese (Ho & Bryant, 1997; Ho, Law & Ng, 2000; Li, Anderson, Nagy & Zhang, 2002;
McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; Pan et al., 2011; Shu, Peng & McBride-Chang, 2008;
Zhang et al., 2013). Still, reading entails more than just the conversion of orthographic
scripts into its equivalent phonological forms. Comprehension of underlying meaning
within words can only be attained once the converted phonological forms become
mapped onto semantic information. The smallest phonological component that
possesses semantic information is referred to as a morpheme. For instance, the word
reformed can be segmented into three morphemes – ‘re-,’ ‘form,’ and ‘-ed.’
If phonological awareness requires being conscious of how individual sounds
make up words and is measured by one’s ability to merge sounds together or divide
words into its component sounds (Anthony & Francis, 2005), morphological awareness
is the recognition, understanding and analysis that word parts carry small meaningful
units that develop good literacy (Carlisle, 2010).
Focus was given by researchers toward morphological knowledge and its effect on
literacy, as it promotes a lighter cognitive load for learners by reducing the number of
so-called “units” in language that they need to process (Cunningham & Carroll, 2012).
One example is the –ful in the word careful, which can be read as either one morpheme
or three distinct phonemes. In addition, morphological awareness assists in helping
students grasp correct pronunciation, most particularly with words that veer away from
the alphabetic principle in order to retain spelling of morphemes (e.g. devotion is read
as devo-shun and not devot-ion).

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Several investigations reveal that morphological awareness contributes variance to
word reading beyond phonological awareness (Berninger, Abbott, Nagy & Carlisle,
2010; Nagy et al., 2006; Wotler, Wood & D’ Zatko, 2009). In addition, morphological
awareness assists in helping children comprehend better syntactic structure
surrounding sentences (e.g. that “John cooked his food” refers to a past event, with the
action highlighted as “to cook”).
A role played by morphological awareness in connection to reading
comprehension rests on the utilization of morphological information when processing
complex words (Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, & Blevins, 2003; Harley, 2001; Nagy et al.,
1989; Napp, 1989; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). An example would be the frequency of root
and affixes affecting the processing of words in alphabetic languages categorized as
morphologically complex (i.e. words that consist of two or more morphemes such as the
word out-land-ish-ness). Research studies that gleaned similar results were from
investigations supporting a morpheme-based cognitive lexicon such as that surrounding
the acquisition of Chinese logographic language (Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1994, 1995).
The studies pointed out that the greater number of roots and affixes learners become
familiar with, the more advantage they have on reading, writing and vocabulary
knowledge (Reed, 2008; Templeton et al., 2015). Banking on the concept that the
mental lexicon is arranged morphologically suggests that knowledge in morphology may
act as a system to methodically store words (Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Sandra,
1994). Hence, learners, especially children, with advanced morphological knowledge
may benefit largely in gaining, expanding and accommodating morphologically complex

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vocabulary. Accelerated development of intricate morphological vocabulary is vital
because such type of vocabulary comprises 60% to 80% of novel words learned by
school-aged children (Anglin, 1993; Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Given that immediate
recognition of words is a critical indicator of reading outcomes (Anderson & Freebody,
1981), morphological awareness then performs a valuable role in the development of
reading proficiency.
Morphological awareness likewise proves indispensable in reading, as it paves
the way for children to understand that different phonological forms can be utilized to
represent the same morpheme; like in the case of words hopped [t], robbed [d], and
batted [-ed]. Such knowledge would permit readers to read morphologically complex
words precisely and efficiently.
Since word recognition is a significant aspect of reading (Adams, 1990), the more
rapidly an individual recognizes the words, the more fluent he / she becomes as a
reader (Yucel-Koc, 2015). Morphological awareness studies that focus on investigating
the development of reading among young readers often concentrate on word
recognition. As mentioned earlier, deriving meaning in words that facilitate successful
comprehension of printed text relies on a learner’s ability to discern the most basic
meaningful components within a language (i.e. morphemes).
General Aspects of Morphemes
Morphemes are regarded as ‘building blocks of language’ because each distinct
morpheme carries syntactic and semantic information embedded in words (Carlisle,
2000). The ability to merge and segment units of meaning allows children to
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comprehend words in varieties of form. In discussing units of meaning, it is important to
understand that a given morpheme can either be free or bound.
Free morphemes are words that do not rely on other forms of morphemes and
can basically stand alone. Free morphemes are also known as base word or root that
can be utilized on its own. Simply stated, it bears the main unit of meaning. Particular
examples of free morphemes are words such as run, kind, and place. Bound
morphemes, on the other hand, are usually morphemes that are merged with other
existing morphemes (Templeton et al., 2015). Affixes (i.e. prefixes and suffixes) are
classified as bound morphemes. Such word units convey meaning and are utilized to
alter existing words such as adding ‘re-’ to the word play or ‘-ness’ in the root word kind.
Affixes can also be in the form of a Greek root such as ‘geo’ meaning earth, which is
seen in words such as geology or geothermal. It can appear as a Latin root such as
‘dict’ meaning “to speak;” observed in combination with words such as verdict, dictate,
and contradict.
Three Specific Distinctions of Morphology
Studies that revolve around children’s acquisition and awareness of morphology
have centered on three further distinctions of morphology: inflections, derivations and
compound words. Inflections and derivations are basically classified as bound
morphemes. Inflectional morphemes mark either syntactic or semantic relations among
words found in a sentence without changing the meaning or part of speech of the stem.
In English, verbs may be marked by inflections for tense (i.e. past or present) For
instance, the words jump transforming into jumped. Inflectional morphemes may also
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mark nouns to indicate gender (i.e. masculine or feminine). An example would be the
word lion turning into lioness. Nouns may be further marked for agreement in terms of
number (e.g. one boy to two boys). In comparison, derivations require the inclusion of a
morpheme, usually prefixes or suffixes, that eventually alters the part of speech or the
meaning of the base; as in the verb separate changing into a noun by attaching a suffix
‘-tion’ which results to the word separation. Multi-morphemic words can be formed as a
result in combining several derivational morphemes (e.g. The word miscalculation
created by merging the prefix ‘mis-’ and the suffix ‘-tion’ to the root word calculate).
Students may likewise benefit from learning Latin and Greek roots, as early as first
grade, to comprehend the meaning of many English words such as microcomputer or
biology through problem-solving skills during reading-related activities (Freeman,
Townsend & Templeton, 2018). As opposed to inflectional morphemes, derivational
morphemes are regarded as less constructive and more limiting with regard to what
types of roots they can be merged with. In the English language, the morpheme ‘-able’
can only be combined with verbs but not with nouns to create adjectives. Lastly,
compounds are two or more roots combined to form new words (e.g. notebook,
seahorse, butterfly). The parts of a compound can include derived words (radio
technician) or inflected words (housekeeping).
The concepts of inflections, derivations and compounding are significant in
grasping the role of morphological awareness in the acquisition of language and
literacy; which relies fundamentally on explicit depiction and control of obtained
morphological rules.
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Morphological Awareness as a Predictor of Early Literacy Development
Children who are explicitly aware that printed text is directly associated to
meaning at an early age would be expected to map morphemic units directly on to
symbols, thereby making connections between oral and printed morphemes easier
(McBride-Chang, 2016). Such had been demonstrated by Byrne (1996) in a series of
research studies that attempted to differentiate phonological and morphological
awareness of children. He concentrated on distinguishing a single morpheme with a
single phoneme, symbolized by one letter ‘s.’ In order to evaluate the way children
perceive ‘s’ as a letter indicating grammatical number in many English words, he started
teaching children to read pairs of words (e.g. bag/bags and book/books) up to a certain
level upon which children were able to reach the criterion of six trials; where both words
in pair were accurately answered. He, likewise, evaluated different singular - plural pairs
such as those that need phonemic but not morphemic sensitivity (e.g. bug/bus). He then
discovered that children perceived ‘s’ as marking plurals because children achieved
scores beyond chance levels in distinguished singular and plural versions of words;
while children performed at chance levels only for word pairs based on phonemic
contrasts. He argued that children seem to be more sensitive to the idea that script is
associated to meaning rather than sound in the early literacy development of native
English speakers.
Casalis and Louis-Alexandre’s (2000) research shared the relevance of
morphological awareness in learning how to read, by stating that word knowledge
among individuals is often arranged according to morphemes in the mental lexicon.
Hence, they concluded that children even at a young age display awareness of both
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inflections and derivations. In addition, morphological awareness helps readers to focus
on explicit cues evident in words that suggest morphological relations (Gombert, 1992).
Explicit attention to cues is vital in reading, as several cues present in daily
conversations are unavailable in text. Take for instance the sentence “Please
understand that I am unhappy.” Such a sentence may be easier for children to interpret
as part of a conversation due to facial cues, tone of voice, body language and emotional
cues which are more salient than the words. In contrast, seeing the same words in print
compels the reader to concentrate intensely on the words in the sentence. In particular,
the reader would need to discriminate the ‘un-’ component which appears
phonologically identical in the two words understand and unhappy within the sentence,
but morphologically distinct and meaningful in the case of the word unhappy. The fact
that readers tend to organize language on the basis of morphology, and that reading
forces us to attend more cautiously to morphological knowledge to foster
comprehension, validates the significance of morphological awareness in the
development of reading skills.
Factors Affecting Word Identification
Word recognition, in relation to the advancement of morphological awareness, is
influenced by three aspects: frequency of the base word (Nagy, Andrews, Schommer,
Scott, & Stallman, 1989), transparency of the morphemic structure (Goodwin et al.,
2011), and the maturation stage of the learners (Carlisle, 2000).
Words with immensely productive bases have greater chances to be recognized
because they appear often in printed form (Carlisle & Stone, 2005; Reichle & Perfetti,
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2003). Carlisle and Katz (2006) cited examples of words derived from a high frequency
base word such as intense. The authors enumerated the following: intensity, intensifies,
intensified, intensifier, intensifiers, intensifying, intensive, intensively, and intensely.
Such extensive word transformation can be contrasted to a low morpheme productivity.
The word serene, for instance, has a very limited word formation serenely and serenity.
Thus, it can then be said that the word intense is highly productive and more likely
chanced upon regularly in print by readers compared to serene and its relevant word
family.
Transparency of word structure further portrays an essential role in learning to
read words (Carlisle, 2000). A particular word is classified as phonologically transparent
if its pronunciation is not necessarily altered after morpheme inclusion. The word crazy
is a phonologically transparent word evident in the word craziness. On the other hand, a
word is phonologically opaque if the pronunciation of the derived word varies
remarkably from the root, such as in steal and stealth (Carlisle & Stone, 2005).
Meanwhile, words are characterized as orthographically transparent when the spelling
of the root is retained within the derived word, as evident in the words peace and
peaceful. By distinction, a derived word is regarded as orthographically /
morphologically opaque, if the spelling of its root is mostly not retained during its
transformation; as observed in the word old to elder. The terms orthographic
transparency and morphological transparency are two different terms referring to the
same concept; hence, a morphologically opaque derivative is fundamentally a word that
has undergone a notable spelling alteration during derivation. A word can be further
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described as phonologically opaque (e.g. word transformation of sign to signature),
morphologically opaque or it can be both phonologically and morphologically opaque
(e.g. word transformation of five to fifth).
Children’s developmental stage also impacts word identification. A study by
Berko (1958) which focused on the acquisition of inflectional morphemes, among
English-speaking children, as young as four years old, demonstrated that children in
preschool have already acquired some awareness of inflectional markers and may
regulate its application with newly encountered words. Termed as the classic “Wug”
study, Berko showed that children aged four to seven years old possess implicit
knowledge of systematic patterns in the English language for marking plural forms of
nouns, changing verb tenses, and performing morphological changes to word stems
because they could place suitable endings to pseudowords they could never have
previously encountered. In one aspect of the experiment, a child was shown a picture of
a bird-like creature. The participant was told “This is a wug.” Afterwards, another wug
was presented and the child was then prompted, “Now there are two of them. There are
two ____.” The child was expected to answer “wugs.” Findings from Berko’s experiment
revealed that inflectional morpheme knowledge develops prior to formal literacy
instruction and that it increases considerably from pre-school to first grade in primary
school. This outcome was corroborated in succeeding studies that analyzed young
children’s employment of inflections in natural speech (Berman, 1981; Cazden, 1968,
Kuczaj, 1977, 1978; Marcus, Pinker, Ullman & Hollander, 1992).

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Morphology Awareness Levels
Verifying the results attained by Berko (1958) ten years later, Cazden (1968)
conducted a five-year longitudinal investigation that traced the acquisition of inflection
among children. She observed participants aged 18 to 28 months and discovered
parallel findings to those in Berko’s research. Cazden found that plural markings of
words are acquired primarily by children. She likewise observed that possessives are
then attained afterwards and that knowledge regarding use of present progressive
tenses are achieved prior to that of the simple past and present tenses.
Such investigations consistently reveal that the attainment of inflectional
morphology follows a certain time course. Initially, children establish a straightforward
schema for inflection (Berko, 1958; Cazden, 1968; Anisfeld & Tucker, 1968; Carlisle,
1995; Derwing & Baker, 1977). Then they undergo a period of overgeneralization of
rules surrounding irregular words (e.g. eated for ate or mouses for mice) (King, 2006;
Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Ultimately, the schema becomes more refined and children
grasp knowledge of discriminating regular from irregular items (Kuo & Anderson, 2006).
Although learners exposed to alphabetic languages are able to comprehend the
functional features of inflectional morphemes in the early grades, they may still
encounter difficulties in the production and comprehension of inflectional allomorphs
evident in various phonological realizations of the past tense morpheme ‘-ed’ in raced [t]
and rated [d] (Kuo and Anderson, 2006).
Derivational morphology follows a different development trajectory compared to
inflectional morphology among English-speaking children. While knowledge in

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inflections usually becomes evident at age four, with the majority of inflectional
principles gained in the early years of primary school, the acquisition of derivations
starts later and takes a longer developmental course. Grade 1 students usually have
basic knowledge of derived forms which is much less than their understanding of base
and inflected forms (Anglin, 1993). A more explicit knowledge of structural rules and the
meaning of derivations among children usually does not start to develop until the third or
fourth year in primary school (Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). This
awareness of derivational forms progresses through high school (Mahony, 1994; Nagy,
Diakidoy, & Anderson, 1993). What makes derivations more challenging is that they
involve underlying aspects of complicated relational, syntactic and distributional
knowledge (Tyler & Nagy, 1989).
Relational knowledge pertains to the skill of identifying the stem of
morphologically-complex words and perceiving the connection between the stem and
the suffix (e.g. the learner understands that the word teacher comes from teach).
Researchers Jones (1991) and Carlisle (2000) explored the impact of phonological
neutrality (i.e. the phonological form of the stem is not altered) in obtaining relational
knowledge of derivatives. Tyler and Nagy (1989) discovered that if the target word does
not appear regularly in text (i.e. low frequency occurring word or its meaning is hard to
derive from context), a child needs to employ relational knowledge to identify the stem.
The authors added that primary four students have already developed some relational
knowledge which increases until Year 8.

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In another study, Mahony et al. (2000) segregated non-neutral items into four
classifications: stress shift and vowel change (e.g. government to governmental); vowel
change (e.g. wide to width); consonant change (e.g. enunciate to enunciation); silent
letter (e.g. bomb to bombardment). In line with the findings of Tyler and Nagy (1989),
phonological neutrality does not guarantee higher stem recognition rate. This suggests
that phonological neutrality performs a minor role in acquiring understanding of
relational features of derivatives.
Another aspect of derivational morphology is understanding syntactic knowledge.
This refers to the skill of being able to think and to control the order of words in a
sentence (Nagy & Scott, 2000). For instance, in the test item “The trip sounded
______.” the learner is expected to fill in the missing word adventurous by using
syntactic morphological knowledge to guess the most appropriate word needed; though
it is not guaranteed that the child produces the word adventurous for he/she may not
have the understanding that ‘-ous’ transforms a noun into an adjective. In gauging this
type of derivational knowledge, children are asked to always evaluate the
grammaticality of sentences that have derivatives with suffixes indicating a suitable or
unsuitable syntactic category (Nagy et al., 1993; Singson et al., 2000). A sentence
completion task is given to test syntactic knowledge. A pattern observed in research is
that non-neutral items are more challenging than neutral items (Carlisle, 2000; Fowler &
Liberman, 1995; Leong; 1983; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). Although in its infancy stage,
awareness of syntactic information in relation to derivatives appears by age 6 (Brown,
1973; Crain & Thorton, 2000; McKee & Snedeker, 1998), improves gradually by mid-
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primary (i.e. fourth grade) and continues to expand in the middle school (i.e. eight
grade) (Carlisle, 2000; Nagy et al., 1993; Singson et al., 2000; Tyler & Nagy, 1989).
The third aspect of derivational morphology, which trails behind the development
of relational and syntactic morpheme knowledge, is known as distributional knowledge.
It is the most challenging aspect because it requires the ability to distinguish linguistic
restrictions pertaining to plausible combinations of various stems and suffixes affected
by the grammatical category of the base word (Amirjalili & Jabbari, 2018). Kuo and
Anderson (2006) provided an example using the morpheme ‘-ly’ which is only attached
to adjectives and not to nouns; hence, the word beautifully is acceptable, but beautyly is
not. Awareness of ill-formed derivatives become evident beginning in fourth grade to
sixth grade in primary, but declines by the time the child reaches eighth grade (Tyler &
Nagy, 1989).
With regard to the development of compounds, one of the earliest research on
lexical compounding (i.e. creation of compounds) was conducted by Berko in 1958. In
an experiment, she asked students to give explanations of words such as blackboard
and thanksgiving. She observed limited awareness of compounds among preschool and
first grade participants. Still, researchers contested Berko’s study stating that it involved
word items that were highly lexicalized (i.e. words stored as single entry) that even
adults would have difficulty noticing the words’ internal structure (Kuo & Anderson,
2006; Clark & Berman, 1987). Berko’s inclusion of problematic items may not have truly
reflected children’s awareness of compound morphology and underestimated their
existing knowledge (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Almost three decades later, a series of
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studies on children’s acquisition of compound morphology were made by Clark and
Berman (1987) among Hebrew speaking learners that provided evidence of children’s
awareness of compounds. The researchers utilized new compounds made up of words
recognizable to children. The researchers then discovered that at age four onwards,
Hebrew-speaking participants could often recognize the head unit of a compound noun.
Even during a challenging compound production task, five-year old children were
observed to provide correct responses 755 of the time. Given that children displayed
sensitivity and consistency in identification of certain salient features within compounds,
evidenced by head compound noun discrimination, one might infer and generalize that
English-speaking children would have perceived rules surrounding noun compounding.
Meanwhile, Nagy et al. (2003) reported that at-risk grade two readers demonstrated
slightly above chance levels in recognizing novel compound nouns and that at-risk
fourth graders attained only 72% correct answers. This implies that weak readers
grapple with noun compounding rules, particularly in the early and mid-primary school
years.
The general trend that comes to light concerning the three types of morphology is
that awareness of compound and inflectional morphology advances earlier (i.e. prior to
beginning formal literacy instruction) than the acquisition of derivations; which transpires
around mid-elementary grades, with attainment of significant inflectional rules generally
completed by early elementary grades, compound and derivational morphological
understanding continues to expand throughout primary school or even later.

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Equally worth noting is that acquiring morphological knowledge is impacted by
the influence of linguistic factors; particularly productivity of word-formation guidelines,
semantic transparency of affiliations between the parts of the complex forms, and the
extent of phonological change necessary for word generation processes (Kuo &
Anderson, 2006).
Similarities between Morphological Awareness and Phonological Awareness
Morphological awareness parallels phonological awareness, as the former can
also be measured implicitly or explicitly to evaluate different types of response.
Morphological awareness can be further assessed at varying levels of representations,
basically drawing on inflectional, derivational or compound knowledge (Carlisle, 1995;
Gombert, 1992; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000).
A specific example of implicit morphological awareness assessment would be to
request students to choose among four provided options the most suitable
morphological transformation. In a longitudinal study of French children, Casalis and
Louis-Alexandre (2000) demonstrated evidence of implicit awareness of morphological
knowledge by showing participants an image of the French word enrouler (to roll up)
from among choices of word such as: derouler (to roll up), rouler (to roll along), rouleau
(roller), and the answer to the target item enrouler. Since the participating children were
not required to produce the correct answer themselves in the activity, much like in
speech perception tasks where there is a forced choice (e.g. sing / ring), the
assessment was considered implicit.

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On the other hand, a morphological awareness task regarded as explicit involves
children displaying awareness of roots in words. Casalis and Louis-Alexandre assessed
this among children by having them pronounce two parts of a word by its morpheme
(e.g. sinkable, sink and able). The task would entail differentiating between phonological
and morphological awareness knowledge for the segmentation by syllable, as it could
yield a conflicting answer than segregation by morphemes (e.g. awful in awfulness).
The English word awful can be segmented syllabically, but it would compromise the
significance of the morpheme awful in this specific example.
Measuring Morphological Awareness
Distinguishing the varying skills typically-developing and at-risk readers are
capable of employing is the fundamental way to determine the best course of action
needed to remediate a reading problem. However, the limited investigations
surrounding multi-component linguistic awareness interventions rarely measure the
growth of morphological awareness. In a review conducted by Carlisle (2010) that
evaluated several morphological awareness intervention studies administered to various
learners from kindergarten to grade 12, she discovered only 16 studies that
implemented a measure of morphological awareness. Fortunately, since Carlisle’s
(2010) meta-analysis of morphological awareness interventions, attention has been
given to measuring morphological awareness (Apel & Diehm, 2013; Bowers, Kirby &
deacon, 2010; Brimo, 2016; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013; Ramirez, Walton, & Roberts,
2013; Reed, 2008; Tighe, 2015; Wolter & Dilworth, 2013; Zoski & Erickson, 2017). The
above investigations measured a range of literacy outcomes such as word recognition,

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word fluency, spelling and reading comprehension. The researchers involved were very
critical in directly assessing the changes in specific morphemic analysis abilities
acquired by learners. They even checked accompanying literacy outcomes to ascertain
whether morphological awareness is a contributor to other reading-related skills.
Despite the growing attention afforded to morphological awareness, there is no
standardized assessment available that provides exact measurements of morphological
awareness threshold levels by chronological age; except one standardized measure
that was introduced in 2008 which was called the Test of Language Development
Primary fourth edition (TOLD-P4; Newcomer & Hammill, 2008). The assessment
contains a normed sample as young as four years old. However, in a feasibility study by
Pike (2013), it was reported that the standardized nature of the task prevents an
examiner form providing clear instructions that often result to misinterpretation. The
author gave a specific example taken from the stimulus item where the examiner says
to the child “Yesterday, I found one penny. Today, I found two more _________.” In this
task, the child is expected to reply using the word pennies to indicate understanding of
the plural ‘–s’ morpheme; yet, participants often get confused as they do not have any
clear understanding that they were supposed to use the same word in the first sentence
to complete the idea in the succeeding sentence. Pike (2013) documented that children
provided answers that were not only grammatically correct, but also completely logical
such as “puppies,” “aliens,” and “dollars.” Still, whether the child used a plural of the
word ending in ‘-s’ their response was not considered based on the guidelines outlined
in the test user’s manual. Hence, a range of morphological awareness measures seem
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to be limited for children and tasks appropriate for such population are necessary to be
developed.
Over the years, attempts to create research designs and a variety of tasks were
made to evaluate morphological awareness in various student participants; from four-
year old children (Tyler, Lewis, Haskill & Tolber, 2002; Apel & Diehm, 2013) to adults
(Leiken & Hagit, 2006; Tighe, 2015) that helped outline the types of morphological
awareness in developmental stages as utilized by typically-developing readers.
Investigations concerning the various morphological forms utilized by students
with differing reading deficits were likewise incorporated in existing measurement
studies (Gilbert et al., 2013; Kearns, 2015; Leong, 1989). These were explored together
with intervention approaches that comprise morphemic analysis (Arnbak & Elbro, 2000;
Baumann et al., 2002; Berninger et al., 2003).
An analysis of varying morphological awareness assessments may bring us
closer to adequately comprehend how morphological awareness develops; in order to
make logical comparisons of student performance leading to informed educational
instruction.
Previous researchers such as Apel et al. (2013) and Carlisle (2010) examined
and evaluated the nature and the variegated types of morphological awareness tasks.
Carlisle’s (2010) research classified morphemic analysis interventions based on
intended target outcome, apart from raising morphological awareness. She discovered
that morphemic analysis interventions may be designed to assist phonological and

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orthographic awareness, even develop word learning. The efficacy of a morphological
awareness intervention can be determined on how adequately it measures the
morphemic analysis skills taught (Carlisle, 2010).
There are different morphological awareness tasks utilized by researchers in
assessing learners: analogy tasks, identification tasks, production tasks and judgment
tasks.
Analogy Tasks
The analogy tasks require students to create a word, either in derived or inflected
form, based on the regularities in form of the existing ones. The items included in the
measurement may vary in phonological and/or morphological opacity depending on the
level of difficulty required. In addition, these tasks can take the form of either word tasks
(see Kirby et al., 2012) or sentence tasks (see Deacon & Kirby, 2004).
An example of a word analogy task would be asking a child to guess the correct
word that fills in the blank space. For instance “mortal:mortality::mature: __________”
On the other hand, a sentence analogy task would appear like “Today I play at school.
Yesterday, I _____ at school.” Another example would be “Today I work at home.
Yesterday I _____ at home.”
The most prominent analogy task was performed by Berko (1958) in her Wug’s
test discussed in the preceding section. Apel et al. (2013) commented that sentence
analogy tasks gauge only inflectional morphological awareness; otherwise, they begin
to emerge as a production task. A longitudinal study conducted by Kirby et al. (2011)

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which assessed the morphological awareness of typically-developing grades 1, 2 and 3
students showed that word analogy task uniquely predicted reading comprehension
beyond word recognition.
Judgment Tasks
The judgment task demands that a student determine whether two given words
in the sentence are correctly utilized or whether the said words are related semantically.
There are judgment tasks that simply require a child to provide yes or no responses,
based on questions testing their morphological awareness (e.g. “Does moth come from
mother?”) (Berninger et al., 2010; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Nagy et al., 2006). Another
variation of the judgment task is in the form of a multiple choice type of assessment. An
example would be the test item “light, lighter, lightly, lit. Will you turn on the ________?”
(Apel et al., 2013).
Singson, Mahony and Mann (2000) suggested converting the multiple choice
task into a grammatical judgment task. The researchers argued that doing so would
lower the demand on short-term memory, when performing metalinguistic tasks orally.
They recommended that instead of saying to children during the test “She is not very
_____. A. activation B. activity C. active D. activate Which one is correct?”, it was best
to simplify it by stating “She is not very activity. Does this sound right?”
These tasks mentioned above may be presented orally, in written form or a
combination of both. The word items may be inflectional and/or derivational. Not only
can it be presented as inflectional and/or derivational, but it can also be phonologically

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and/or morphologically opaque (Apel et al., 2013). Out of the other types of
morphological awareness tasks, judgment tasks have the most number of variations.
Identification Tasks
Identification tasks were developed based on the research of Singson, Mahony
and Mann (2000). This type of morphological awareness task demands test takers to
choose a pseudoword with the most suitable derivational suffix needed to complete a
sentence. It is expected that learners would depend on their understanding of correct
derivational suffix use that results in correct pseudoword selection that is appropriate to
complete the sentence in a grammatically accurate sense (e.g. “I could feel the
froodness.”). Singson et al.’s (2000) study revealed that the identification task and word
attack were moderately correlated (r = .57, p < .001), although the identification task
was not contrasted with a measure assessing reading comprehension.
Production Tasks
Morphological tasks relating to production often employ a cloze procedure to
gauge student’s ability to derive a word such as in the example, “sleep. Yesterday, I
_____.” (Wolter et al., 2009; Casalis, Cole & Soppo, 2004). Students are likewise
expected to break down a multi-morphemic word for instance, “teacher. Miss Smith likes
to ______.)” (Berninger et al., 2010).
In a separate study, Wolter et al. (2009) required students to spell different words
to confirm their awareness of spelling suffixes. Meanwhile, Kirk & Gillon (2009)
employed an activity called ‘prompted spelling’ to encourage learners to spell words that
are morphologically complex such as mopping and monomorphemic words like trick.
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There were also researchers who evaluated student’s morphological production ability
by asking them to read words aloud (Carlisle, 2000; Jeon, 2011); and some required
students to provide definitions of real words and even multi-morphemic pseudowords
(Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006).
Another production task called Extract the Base, introduced by Goodwin et al.
(2012), examined students ability to analyse and segment multi-morphemic words of
differing phonological and morphological opacity. In the said assessment, each item is
presented orally and visually to L1 and L2 participants (e.g. height. That box is too
____.). Goodwin et al.’s (2012) Extract the Base assessment was actually a
modification of an earlier production task developed by Carlisle in 1988, referred to as
Base Forms Test.
In this regard, it is evident that current researchers modify and refine previously
designed tasks; in order to create a more valid and reliable form of assessment tool,
capable of explaining the nature of a particular phenomenon.
Morphological Awareness Intervention
Without any form of intervention, language weak learners with low language and
literacy skills who enter the early grades tend to lag behind their typically-developing
peers all throughout their academic life (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). However, highly
intensive interventions that concentrate on linguistic features may promote growth and
bridge the gap (Justice, 2006). Even kindergarteners who get a highly-concentrated
form of intervention, on top of excellent classroom instruction, respond positively in less

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than a year and were documented to maintain grade-level literacy competency across
the elementary grades (Coyne, Kame’enui, Simmons & Harn, 2004).
Thus, increased importance has been allocated to studies focusing on the
significance of morphological awareness intervention that are given to young school-
aged learners at-risk for subsequent reading difficulties (Apel & Diehm, 2013; Ramirez,
Walton & Roberts, 2013; Wolter & Dilworth, 2014). Morphological awareness
intervention was reported to also improve gains in phonological awareness, word
reading, spelling and reading comprehension for at-risk and weak readers including
English language learners (ELLs), across different grade levels (Bowers, Kirby, &
deacon, 2010; Carlisle, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013; Reed, 2008). In fact,
Goodwin and Ahn’s (2013) meta-analysis of morphological awareness intervention
research detected a small overall effect size (d = .32), with some moderate effect sizes
for variables such as phonological awareness, morphological awareness and decoding.
The interventions attaining large gains were those that on average provided a total of
twenty hours.
The findings of previous studies suggest that administering a morphological
intervention approach, by itself or as a component of a comprehensive treatment
program, can improve literacy skills of children at risk of developing reading difficulties.
Additional evidence that demonstrated the positive reading outcomes gained by
children from a morphological awareness intervention was provided by Apel et al.
(2013) in a feasibility study involving kindergarteners, first graders and second graders
from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds. In the research, the participating students
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were given small group discussions four times a week with 25 minutes of teaching per
day. For the kindergarteners, the intervention focused on deriving meaning only; while
for first and second graders, the instruction centered on both meaning and print. The
results of the investigations indicated that morphological awareness intervention starting
in kindergarten can lead to large increase in gain scores concerning morphological
awareness and moderate gain scores in other reading-related outcomes.
Continuing their research on morphological awareness intervention, Apel &
Diehm (2013) in a separate study, focused on assessing spoken and printed words with
inflectional and derivational affixes. The research again observed low SES students in
Kindergarten, grade 1 and grade 2 primary school. The researchers randomly assigned
the participants to a control and an intervention group. The students in the intervention
group were administered with morphological awareness instruction, four times a week
with 25 minutes per session for eight consecutive weeks. On the other hand, the control
group received regular classroom instruction. The results indicated that significant gains
for all students in the intervention group were attained; with the kindergarten group
displaying the largest effect gains. Specifically, kindergarteners characterized with low-
level ability showed significantly larger gains in sight word reading than learners with
average skills. Such findings offer evidence that learners at-risk of developing reading
deficiencies may gain most from a morphological intervention beginning in kindergarten.
Further evidence on the effectiveness of adopting a morphological awareness in
the classroom was provided by Ramirez et al. (2013). In their research, teachers were
given training to improve vocabulary and morphological awareness of kindergarten

86
students coming from low SES families. The classroom teachers were given resource
kits that contain ten picture books with high-utility vocabulary words to be targeted in the
discussions (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002). Explicit teaching of vocabulary and
morphological awareness were given 30 minutes daily totalling 24 sessions. Overall,
learners achieved significant improvements in morphological awareness (partial η2= .61)
and vocabulary (partial η2= .53). Closer inspection of student performance indicated that
kindergarteners who garnered the lowest scores in morphological awareness and
expressive vocabulary skills assessment at pre-test showed the greatest gains.
The consolidated findings from the above studies offer promising evidence on the
effectiveness of morphological awareness intervention for at-risk children in the lower
primary grades, specifically learners with low morphological awareness and vocabulary
abilities.
Morphological Awareness and Reading Difficulties
Although it has been discovered that morphological awareness leads to an
important variance on word-level reading beyond phonological awareness in students
from grade 2 in primary school to grade 8 in middle school (Apel, Wilson-Fowler, Brimo
& Perrin, 2012; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Roman, Kirby, Parrila, Wade-Wolley & Deacon,
2009), relatively few research studies have explored the impact of a morphological
awareness intervention to children presented with reading difficulties. Elbro (1990) was
among the growing number of researchers who provided evidence that children with
reading deficits possess lower morphological awareness skills than reading level and
aged-matched peers. Even with explicit instruction proven to be effective for learners
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struggling with reading deficiencies (Good, Lance & Rainey, 2014; Koutsoftas, Harmon,
& Gray, 2009), regular classroom teaching has yet to incorporate a detailed form of
instruction that centers on the manipulation of the word’s morphemic structures (Henry,
1993; Nunes & Bryant, 2006).
Lyon, Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2003) characterized students with reading
deficiencies as those whose reading performance scores on standardized tests are one
standard deviation below the average range on measures relating to reading
comprehension and/or word-level reading evaluation. In addition, they show lower
performance than typically-developing readers on tests measuring oral inflection and
derivational morphological awareness tasks.
Carlisle (1987) observed that students with reading problems display more
noticeable shortcomings in written morphological awareness tasks; while Shankweiler et
al. (1995) reported evidence of poorer production of directives in comparison with
chronologically age-matched peers. The findings revealed by the preceding evidence-
based studies that children are experiencing difficulty in reading, may benefit immensely
from a combination of spoken and written language input; aimed at fostering
morphological awareness skills. It can be further said that students experiencing
reading deficits, may develop atypical morphological awareness abilities that are
detrimental to their academic success compared to normally-developing reading-
matched peers, if they are left to their own devices.
It is worth noting that even students with dyslexia can capitalize on morphological
awareness support, as it was found that they read faster and more accurately when
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texts are presented to them morpheme-by-morpheme, as opposed to syllable-by-
syllable (Elbro & Arnbak, 1996). Research by Law, Wouters & Ghesquiere (2015)
supported such findings by reporting that strong morphological awareness skills result in
compensation in reading for adults with dyslexia. Many researchers attested that
morphological awareness improves reading comprehension of students diagnosed with
learning disabilities (Carlisle, 2007; Katz & Carlisle, 2009; Lovett et al., 2000). Children
with special literacy needs were likewise observed to benefit more from morphological
training compared with their normal reading peers (Bowers et al., 2010; Nagy, Carlisle &
Goodwin, 2014). A meta-analysis on 17 morphological awareness intervention studies
revealed that morphological instruction was specifically effective for children observed
to possess reading, learning, speech and language disabilities (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010).
These findings offer optimism for children demonstrating language disorders such as
those demonstrating language learning weaknesses.
Morphological Awareness and Other Cultures
The significance of morphological awareness and its relevance to reading cuts
across cultures because of the productivity of morphological systems. Bauer (2001)
defined productivity as the ability to perform morphological coining; which fundamentally
means creation of new words using morphemes. Knowledge of morphemes and how
they can be shifted to obtain or perceive words represent the core of morphological
productivity. Simply stated, it is crucial that users of a language acquire understanding
about its morphemes, the different possibilities of morpheme combinations or even
delimitations of its use. Whether such cognizance is implicit or explicit may be beneficial
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for both beginning and advanced learners in their reading and writing development
(McBride-Chang, 2016).
In alphabetic languages, much of the work related to morphological awareness
centers on unlocking the intricacies of morphemes in relation to grammar, prefixes or
suffixes. One of the earliest accomplishments in morphological awareness in the
English language revolves around verb tense usage. Learners must perceive the rule
that verb changes reflect meaning changes which may be inconsistent (e.g. go to goes;
jump to jumped and catch to caught).
English language learners must also become aware of the rules governing
pluralization of nouns (bug to bugs; bus to buses) and the correct usage of affixes (i.e.
prefixes and suffixes) that show relationships to words (e.g. uncut = un + cut;
underground is not un + derground). In the case of French, marking of the word to
indicate masculinity or femininity of nouns requires the employment of inflectional
morphemes (e.g. serveur - serveuse).
Meanwhile, other languages that utilize different inflectional and derivational
marks for word reading and writing in their scripts would be Arabic and Hebrew. In both
Arabic and Hebrew, children are tested in morphological awareness tasks to point out
root words amidst inflected and derived forms presented in front of them (Abu-Rabia,
2007; Ravid & Schiff, 2006). With regard to the Arabic language, marking shown by
using inflections to indicate person, number, gender and time appears as either prefixes
or suffixes (Abu-Rabia, 2007). The influence of morphology is so predominant that it has
been documented that children, as early as grade 1, already use morphological

90
processing for spelling (Saiegh-Haddad & Everatt, 2017). Meanwhile, in Hebrew, the
concept surrounding inflectional morphology awareness is demonstrated to be grasped
earlier by children than derivational morphology; much like in the English language
(Levin, Ravid & Rapaport, 2001).
With Chinese, however, a relatively few number of grammatical intricacies
relating to word forms exist. For instance, in the sentence the verb remains unchanged
and unaffected in form regardless whether the subject is either singular or plural
(McBride-Chang, 2016). Despite such features of the language, morphological
awareness is still crucial in both speaking and writing in Chinese. One of the reasons is
that the language makes use of a lot of homophones. Thus it is imperative, especially
for children to associate which particular meaning of a specific homophone or
homograph fits within the word or phrase (Packard, 2000; Perfetti & Tan, 1999). Even
though many syllables sound the same, their forms vary when written. Children, then,
must be able to distinguish meanings for the multitude of syllables that sound similarly
for comprehending spoken language and mapping on to new characters in the reading
acquisition process (McBride-Chang, 2016).
Another important aspect of morphological awareness in Chinese is that complex
vocabulary items can be created from simple morphemes, as the simple morphemes
are merged into a compound to build new meaning. Lastly, as opposed to English,
McBride-Chang (2016) noted that the Chinese language has a near perfect one-to-one
association of syllables and morphemes which proves beneficial for children to
concentrate solely on meaning.

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The Response to Intervention Model
In order to address the varying needs of children in terms of phonological
awareness and morphological awareness skills, evaluation and treatment approaches
must be customized to match the learner’s existing skill level and instructional content
(Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012). The Response to Intervention is one framework that
is suitable to target the differing needs by administering a three-tiered system of
appraisal and intervention. The aim of the RTI is to avert the possibility of academic
failure though implementation of evidenced-based classroom instruction, constant
checking and monitoring of learner’s progress, and the allocation of intensive levels of
assistance for children presented with difficulties (Ehren & Nelson, 2005; Griffiths,
Parsons, Burns, Van Der Heyden, & Tilly, 2006).
The RTI framework is intended to support the regular classroom curriculum by
executing three levels of assistance based on individual student academic needs
(Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006; Greenwood, Kratochwill, & Clements, 2008). Learners are
evaluated to identify the present level of performance and treatment services are given
to match such performance level in any one of the three existing tiers. Tier 1 which is
the first level of support focuses on ensuring that all learners in the classroom receive
high-quality, scientifically-based instruction. The first tier is where periodic screening
and monitoring is applied to gauge the trajectory of the child’s development over time. In
so doing, students who are not making adequate progress are recognized. The students
identified as non-progressing are provided with Tier 2 assistance. Such support is
presented in small group instruction within or outside the classroom for 30 minutes, and
conducted two or four times a week lasting for nine consecutive weeks. Constant
92
monitoring at Tier 2 provides educators the opportunity to identify which of the students
have positively responded or progressed to the additional instruction; in order for them
to return to Tier 1 support. For children in Tier 2 who are making limited progress, the
Tier 3 level of assistance is then offered. At this particular level, intensive, targeted and
customized one-on-one teaching is given for more than 30 minutes during school days
ranging from nine to twelve weeks. Complementary progress monitoring is still evident
at this level. The highest and most intensive tier (i.e. Tier 3) is often referred to as
“special education.” The RTI model is regarded as proactive, as it is designed to identify
children at-risk of experiencing continuous academic underachievement (Griffiths et al.,
2007; Nelson, 2010).
Research on reading confirmed that if reading deficiencies are left unattended,
the difficulties persist throughout a child’s academic life, resulting in a negative spiral of
underachievement (Bender & Larkin, 2009; Podhajski et al., 2009). It is then important
to highlight evidence from previous research suggesting that the provision of multi-
levels of interventions, grounded on the RTI framework, appear to reduce reading
problems of 75 to 90 percent of learners who were reported to initially grapple with in
their reading skills (Bender & Larkin, 2009; Hughes & Dexter, 2008; Torgesen, 2007).
The RTI framework has further been shown to tackle the problems of students with
reading difficulties and English language learners (Denton et al., 2006; Linan-
Thompson, Vaughn, Prater & Cirino, 2006; Lovett et al., 2008; Rinaldi & Samson, 2008;
Simmons et al., 2008). Hence, providing children with the necessary supplemental
instruction during specific periods helps them to get back on track toward successful
93
reading; and eventually onwards continuous academic progress (Denton et al., 2006;
Simmons et al., 2008).
Despite being employed primarily in the United States of America, the application
of the RTI framework in classrooms worldwide may offer a means to alleviate
inequalities in literacy achievement. Researchers Fuchs & Fuchs (2006), Greenwood,
Carta, McConnell, Goldstein, & Kaminski (2009) assert that in order for the RTI model to
work more effectively, screenings measures must not only be able to identify children
requiring intensive level of support, but also monitor advancement over periods of time
to improve relevant abilities during intervention. Still, the adoption of RTI must be taken
with a grain of salt, as the RTI may simply identify low achieving students rather than
students with learning disabilities. The research performed as part of this thesis,
therefore, can contribute to improving the implementation of RTI approaches by
providing educators with assistance on how to identify children with specific language
weaknesses requiring Tier 2 support. A second problem with RTI approaches is that the
period of time when success is evaluated can be difficult to determine. The research
reported in this doctoral thesis can support educators in determining the appropriate
duration and intensity of classroom-based language and literacy interventions needed to
elevate student achievement and bridge the gap of disparities encountered during the
acquisition of reading skill.
Intervention and socio-emotional factors
Previous research studies provide evidence for the potential of educational
interventions in improving not only academic reading-related skills (such as

94
phonological awareness, phonological processing speed, reading accuracy and other
early reading skills), but also socio-emotional development. For example, a research
investigation conducted by Wood (2015) comprising Kindergarten/Grade 1 pupils and
their parents in Ontario and Quebec, showed that parents given workshops on
strengthening children’s early reading and social skills had significant effects on
children’s academic and social success. The results revealed students’ improved scores
in initial sound fluency in DIBELS, increased sensitivity in grapheme-phoneme
correspondence, produced higher listening comprehension scores and showed marked
improvement in displaying positive prosocial behaviour. Similar studies highlighting
literacy-based interventions and socio-emotional development have revealed that such
programmes can promote academic learning gains and reinforce learners’ self-efficacy
to engage with other people (Denham, 2006; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). Wang, Haertel
and Wallberg (1993) confirmed in their research on student achievement that social and
emotional influences are one of the top contributors to individual learning. The evidence
provided in the aforementioned research studies warrant the need to further promote
literacy interventions among children with specific language deficits, for its positive
impact becomes two-fold in learners: advancement of early literacy and cultivation of
socio-emotional well-being.
Quantifying Intervention Effects
The computation of the effect size may serve as a means to quantify the degree
upon which an intervention approach has an impact on the participant’s learning. The
bigger the effect size, the greater the impact.

95
In the field of education, Hattie (2009) evaluated 800 meta-analyses of studies to
determine the most influential factors on learning in elementary and high school. This
work used the magnitude of effect size to identify gains in performance outcomes. An
effect size equivalent to 1.0 was associated with advancing the learner’s improvement
rate of learning by 50%. An intervention programme producing an effect size of 1.0
would indicate that 95% of average students who received the new instructional
approach responded at a higher level compared to 84% of children who did not receive
the treatment. According to Hattie (2009), any effect size above 0.40 would suggest that
the instruction worked better than expected. Effect sizes equivalent to 0.20 may be
judged to be small; those amounting to 0.40 would be deemed to be a medium effect;
and those reaching 0.60 constitute large effect sizes. However, Timperley et al. (2007)
in their book Teacher Professional Learning & Development: Best Evidence Synthesis
Iteration (BES), emphasized that an effect size between 0.20 and 0.40 should not be
interpreted as trivial, but rather considered as a small but educationally significant
effect. This conclusion was based on an analysis of 97 international studies of teacher
professional development that resulted in (these findings are endorsed by the New
Zealand Ministry of Education). Hence, attaining effect sizes between 0.20 and 0.40 for
the intervention training implemented in this thesis over the 10-week treatment period is
evidence for a small but potentially significant effect. In the present research, these
effect sizes would be based on the difference between the average score on a measure
before versus after an intervention divided by the standard deviation. These can be
calculated via the tables provided within the results sections. In addition, effect sizes
based on variability explained will be presented as part of the factorial analyses of

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variance conducted since these are better indicators of effect sizes for interaction
effects.
Bilingualism and English Language Learners
According to Jordan (2008), an estimated 70% worldwide are multilingual
speakers. With the unprecedented rates of human movement brought about by
migration and globalization, the number of bilingual speakers worldwide has grown
rapidly (Chaber, 2016). Since a bilingual’s acquisition of reading covers a myriad of
mental, social, cultural and other contextual factors distinct from a monolingual child’s
learning perspective (Bialystok, 2000; Datta, 2000; Kenner, 2004), the reading models
that were derived from monolingual English-speaking learners are now inadequate to
fully explain the complexities involved in bilingual children’s language and literacy
development.
Further complications exist when a bilingual’s language and literacy acquisition
occur primarily in the second language. McBride-Chang (2016) reported that such
situations transpire for children of immigrants around the world, who must constantly
thrive amidst academic challenges by adapting to the predominant orthographic scripts
used in their respective schools. The author added that this is observed in some parts of
sub-Saharan Africa, as post-colonial schools still implement the teaching of lessons in
their colonizer’s language (i.e. English, French, Spanish or Portuguese). In South Africa
as well, even though eleven languages are considered official languages, English still
remains the medium of instruction in many schools (Tsui & Tollerson, 2003). This trend
is likewise prevalent in Asia, where second-language reading has become widespread

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due to a great number of schools using English as the preferred language of instruction.
Datta (2000) concurred that the predominance of English led to second-language
reading even in India, where various regional and local home languages are officially
recognized. Second-language reading is becoming pervasive, as it is expected in the
Middle East, South America and large areas of Asia; particularly in countries in
Southeast Asia such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines
(McBride-Chang, 2016).
This research then investigates the possible impact of bilingualism on language
and reading-related skill development of English language learners. The research
explicitly focuses on whether the improvement of reading performance brought about by
the introduced treatment approaches is greatly influenced by children’s language ability.
Furthermore, the research focuses on English language learning in relation to changing
contexts and evaluates the impact of treatment intervention on bilingual children with
language weaknesses, reading for the first time in a second language.
Since several approaches are linked to particular types of bilingualism, it is
critically important to clarify the participants considered in this study. In light of this
research, a bilingual person is referred to as an individual who has awareness of two
languages and is able to employ either of the two in a communicative context. The
bilinguals observed in this study were further categorized into two. In New Zealand,
specifically, the investigation focused on simultaneous bilinguals (i.e. children acquire
two different languages at the same time due to early exposure from parents speaking
respectively in those languages). However, in the Philippines, the research explored

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participants described as sequential bilinguals. Sequential bilingualism takes place
when an individual becomes bilingual by initially learning one language and then
another (Girbau, 2010). In the case of this investigation, the Filipino children who
participated in the research were exposed to the English language first before learning
the Filipino language (i.e. Tagalog). This may further mean that although the children
are able to communicate in both languages they are exposed to, there is a stronger
preference in utilizing the language they perceive they are more comfortable in. This
was revealed during the interview when the Filipino participants said they find it more
convenient communicating in the English language, as they use it at home more often
than Tagalog.
Both simultaneous and sequential bilingual learners in this study are subsumed
under the term English language learners (ELLs). An ELL is a bilingual who has
developed communicative skills in English, yet is in the process of furthering their skills
in the language.
In the New Zealand study, the bilingual school-aged children and these children
were learning English as part of school literacy classes, but they also spoke a home
language that belongs to any of five languages: Spanish, Samoan, Mandarin Chinese,
Korean and Tagalog. Three of the languages can be classified as alphabetic writing
system (Spanish, Samoan and Tagalog), one alphasyllabic (Korean) and the other
logographic (Mandarin Chinese). Four of the writing systems could be as relatively
transparent or shallow compared to the English orthography. A transparent orthography
has a simpler mapping of letters onto phonemes. The Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog and
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Korean languages would fit this requirement for being a more transparent orthography
compared to English (Hemsley, Holm & Dodd, 2013; Montanari, 2011; Leonet Sieso,
Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; Westerveld, 2013). In contrast, Mandarin Chinese can be
characterized as deep or more opaque given the level of predictability between
pronunciation and the characters representing how to pronounce a written word (Lam &
Sheng, 2016). However, the way in which written Mandarin Chinese is opaque differs
from the way in which English is less transparent in its relationship between graphemes
and phonemes. In Mandarin Chinese, a character represents a whole-word
pronunciation, rather than different letters representing mostly part-word sounds in
English. Hence, there are clear differences between the written forms of the two
languages that these children are acquiring.
Limited research exists on the effectiveness of providing a morphological
intervention, implemented either as a stand-alone or incorporated in a multi-linguistic
awareness framework, with English language learners possessing language deficits in
the lower elementary grades. One of those few investigations was a study made by
Filippini et al. (2012) which observed grade one Spanish speaking ELLs from low socio-
economic backgrounds. The participants were administered intensive instruction for 15
minutes per day, four times a week for eight weeks in small groups. The instruction
focused on the following treatment approaches: (1) phonological awareness with
decoding; (2) phonological awareness and decoding merged with vocabulary
development through semantics; and (3) phonological awareness and decoding
integrated with vocabulary through morphological awareness. Results indicated that no

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significant between group differences were recorded in vocabulary or decoding.
However, students receiving treatments 2 and 3 made higher gains than those in
treatment 1. Also, ELLs given intervention with additional morphological awareness
showed the largest gains in decoding (d = 1.01) compared to those administered with
semantic intervention (d = .65), and those simply given phonological awareness with
decoding (d = .61).
These results indicate evidence surrounding the effectiveness of morphological
awareness intervention in conjunction with phonological awareness and decoding for
ELLs; specifically those presenting with language deficiencies.
Indeed, administering an intensive form of intervention targeting morphological
awareness skills alone or combined with other linguistic aspects has resulted in
performance gains in a variety of language and reading-related outcomes, including
phonological awareness, morphological awareness and reading (Bowers et al., 2010;
Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013). Such combined intervention proves beneficial to
individuals with disabilities, at-risk of later reading problems, and those classified as
ELLs (August & Shanahan, 2006; Bowers et al., 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013).
Moreover, results from the investigations indicated that merging morphological
awareness with other linguistic awareness areas such as phonological awareness and
letter-knowledge may improve literacy gains particularly word recognition, reading
comprehension and spelling for children with reading difficulties and ELLs (Filippini et
al., 2012; Morris et al., 2012; Wolter & Dilworth, 2013). There is further evidence that a
combined linguistic awareness intervention for students with low literacy skills, including
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ELLs, resulted to large gains compared to students reported with already higher skills
pre-treatment (Apel & Diehm, 2013; Filippini et al., 2012; Ramirez et al., 2013). The
preceding evidence then calls for further research that would determine the effect of
those interventions in remediating persistent reading deficits of children with specific
language weaknesses in the primary grade.
Combined Morphological and Phonological Awareness Interventions
Given the advantages of developing phonological and morphological awareness
knowledge may lead one to prefer the instruction of either the former or the latter.
However, a call for combined training in both essential features of the language may
prove beneficial to optimize children’s language and reading development. One reason
is that the English language is morphophonemic in structure. This means representation
of words are crafted through a combination of both morphological and phonological
principles (Reed, 2008). Hence, understanding the influential roles played by
phonological and morphological awareness is deemed necessary.
The following research studies further revealed that morphological awareness and
phonological awareness appear to be interrelated. Research on the interface between
morphology and phonology were investigated by Cohen-Goldberg et al. in 2013. The
authors explored the relationship between the two essential features of language by
observing an aphasic individual who displays impairment at the morpho-phonological
interface. They concluded that phonological and morphological processes are tightly
interrelated, especially in oral language. The researchers observed that morphological

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processes must merge the phonological content of morphemic units to create a
phonological representation appropriate for triggering phonological processing.
Further evidence that highlight the effectiveness of a combined language and
reading skills intervention was shown in the research conducted by Morris et al. (2012).
The authors administered two experimental treatment approaches for Grade 1 and
Grade 2 struggling elementary readers. The first experiment involved teaching
phonological awareness that included letter-sound and spelling patterns, followed by
sound mappings, then word recognition by analogy; using morphological knowledge on
prefix and suffix manipulation. Afterwards, a combination of orthographic, syntactic and
semantic features of words on top of phonology and morphology was introduced. In the
second experimental condition, children learned to ‘chunk’ specific words using spelling
and morphological patterns.
Compared with individuals placed in the control groups, learners in the multi-
component treatment approach displayed significantly higher gain scores after a year of
follow up that evaluated a variety of reading-related skills such as decoding, spelling,
word reading, fluency, and reading comprehension. The results showed no significant
differences exist across a range of demographic factors indicating the efficiency of
combined treatment approaches for young school-aged children with reading deficits.
One of the most recent studies exploring the benefits of a combined intervention was
conducted by Zoski and Erickson (2017). The researchers investigated ten native
Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) and seven native English speakers
in kindergarten who were below grade level literacy expectations. The students were
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given a six-week small group intervention program administered four times a week for
30 minutes a day. The participants were segregated into three intervention groups – a
phonological awareness (PA) and letter-knowledge (LK) intervention group, a
morphological awareness (MA) intervention group, a three-pronged intervention
combining PA, LK and MA. Analyses of the results revealed evidence that learners
within each group experienced significant gains in word reading, phonological
awareness and spelling, but it was the three-pronged intervention that resulted not only
in better word reading, spelling, and phonological awareness, but also significant
difference in morphological awareness. The study demonstrated further confirmation for
the feasibility of combined instructional approaches for at-risk English language
learners.
The benefits derived from developing phonological and morphological awareness
interventions in fostering improved reading ability are evident. Therefore, training
students to build on their existing repertoire of language skills, may result in a
deepening of a broad range of meta-linguistic skill set that struggling readers with
specific language weakness may employ during a reading task.
Significance of the Study
Efficiently integrating empirical evidence from research studies that support how
language and reading-related skills can be improved among all learners into the
classroom setting has always been the primary concern of researchers and educators.
Since inequalities in academic performance still persist in schools, which may put
students at risk or “fall into the cracks,” this doctoral research sought to contribute
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relevant knowledge to pedagogical practices that steer educational outcomes on both
micro and macro levels.
On a global scale, this thesis shall evaluate the significance of providing immediate,
short-term intervention approaches that target the development of reading
comprehension for children with specific language weaknesses. It would likewise
contribute additional information to the existing body of knowledge, vital for future theory
generation in the field of second language acquisition, linguistics, bilingual reading
development, and education. In addition, the findings of this investigation are hoped to
steer direction of educational policy-making concerning issues pertaining to children
presenting with language difficulties.
Meanwhile, on a national level, this research may offer a new lens in viewing current
reading literacy standards; and improve such, if needed, to further academic
achievement and reading experiences of school-aged children.
Specifically for New Zealand, where a large disparity between good and poor
readers exist based on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study in 2016,
this research endeavors to provide an alternative and responsive form of instruction that
aims to curtail underachievement, and to address specific learning needs of its
ethnically-diverse students.
With regard to the Philippine educational context, this investigation may shed light on
how educational practices may be enhanced; especially since emphasis in instruction
throughout the country is still on rote learning. The intervention approaches suggested
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in this thesis shall allow struggling bilingual students the opportunity to manipulate
understanding of concepts; which may prove vital in imparting knowledge to children
with specific language weaknesses.
Ultimately, this research presents new possibilities for teaching children with
language deficiencies to improve their reading abilities; which, in turn, is deemed to
result in a more positive self-perception of themselves as autonomous readers.
Thesis Synopsis
A critical issue in the field of education is to ensure that children entering schools
are equipped with reading-related skills that would assist them to effectively cope with
the ever-increasing academic demands posed by the curriculum. However, literacy
disparities exist due to the prevalence of reading deficiencies, and inequality in literacy
experiences; particularly instructional practices between proficient and weak readers.
Research documented by the 2018 UNICEF Innocenti Report Card suggest that even in
countries considered well-developed, children are still at-risk of falling behind in their
reading acquisition abilities. The reduction of existing literacy inequities is an intricate
process that requires the concerted efforts of stakeholders at various tiers of the
educational system.
One of the possible means available for contemporary education is embedded in
the process of introducing evidence-based approaches that foster the attainment of
literacy success within the confines of the classroom. The pieces of evidence outlined in
the preceding sections demonstrate the pivotal role played by phonological and
morphological awareness in advancing reading proficiency.

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On its own, the contribution of phonological awareness in the development of
reading competency has been widely tested and demonstrated in various feasibility
studies, longitudinal studies, case studies, correlational research and intervention
studies for over 30 years (Anthony, Williams, McDonald, & Francis, 2007; Bishop &
Adams, 1990; Bus & Van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Catts, Fey, Tomblin & Zhang, 2002; Ehri et
al., 2007; Gillon, 2004; Gillon & McNeill, 2009; Justice et al., 2013). The reputation of
phonological awareness as a robust predictor of reading-related skill and an effective
treatment approach for advancing at-risk learners’ reading skills make it an
indispensable form of language and reading support viable in implementing a more
responsive and informed instructional practice; required in elevating reading
performance outcomes against a national literacy standard.
Nonetheless, the value of morphological awareness in the development of
reading has been steadily gaining recognition; as it has been found to be a significant
skill able of contributing a unique variance to word-level reading of students from
second to eight grade, beyond that of the phonological awareness construct (Apel,
Wilson-Fowler, Brimo, & Perrin, 2012; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Roman, Kirby, Parrila,
Wade-Woolley & Deacon, 2009). Evidence also demonstrated that explicit instruction of
morphological awareness is proven to be effective for learners inadequate reading
capabilities (Good, Lance & Rainey, 201; Koutsoftas, Harmon, & Gray, 2009). In the
past few years, the attention of researchers had been directed to evaluating the benefits
of phonological awareness and morphological awareness training as it is merged with
regular classroom instruction within a heterogeneous classroom environment (Shapiro

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& Solity, 2008; Brimo, 2016; Zoski & Erickson, 2017). Issues that need consideration
would be the identification of the intensity of the treatment, its duration and the
awareness skills to be improved. The development of a time-efficient interventional
approach may be relevant in equalizing reading performance outcomes suitable in
arresting the development of reading difficulties that may advance unnecessarily
becoming severe.
A group of learners that are considered vulnerable to experiencing inequality in
reading performance outcomes are those English language learners presenting with
specific language weaknesses. This particular heterogeneous group were observed to
show evidence of below norm standard receptive language index score and weak letter-
sound knowledge; despite having no record of cognitive, sensory, or behavioral delays.
Such a profile puts them at a disadvantage, since the language skills usually needed to
foster immediate word recognition and reading comprehension are compromised in their
case. Thus, identifying these cohorts and improving their reading performance
outcomes to an appropriate level through consolidated treatment approaches are of
grave importance.
The ideal educational settings to test the efficacy of the treatment approaches
would be in countries that consistently displayed considerable inequities in literacy
education – New Zealand and the Philippines. International data monitored for more
than two decades showed that New Zealand has one of the widest literacy inequalities
between the reading performance of competent and poor readers based on
international studies that gauged developed countries’ national reading achievement

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levels (Martin et al. 2007; PIRLS, 2016; Prochnow, Tunmer and Arrow, 2015). Much like
New Zealand, the Philippines was cited to possess not only apparent gender literacy
gaps, but also literacy gaps at the community level (Philippine Statistics Authority
Report, 2017). The disparities in literacy achievement existing in these two nations can
pose as a challenging, yet ideal context to meticulously test whether the provision of a
classroom-based intervention program can significantly improve the language and
reading achievement of learners experiencing reading deficits. In line with this goal, the
experiments documented in this investigation addresses the following research
questions:
(1) Will a phonological followed by a morphological treatment approach facilitate
word knowledge and sentence comprehension better than initiating an
instructional awareness training in the reverse order among grade 1 students
with specific language weaknesses?
(2) Do children with specific language weaknesses equally benefit from a classroom-
based language intervention approach that targets improved reading
comprehension, through increased word knowledge and sentence
comprehension scores, in comparison to their typically-developing peers during
their first formal year in primary school?
(3) Is there a significant difference in the outcomes of monolingual language weak
versus bilingual language weak children after receiving the classroom-
implemented phonological and morphological instruction during their first year in
primary school?
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(4) Will the gains in the assessment scores of year 1 students administered with
classroom-based phonological or morphological awareness intervention
approach be maintained after five weeks post-completion of the treatment
program?
(5) Is there a common trend evident among the reading performance scores of
bilingual language weak participants in New Zealand and bilingual language
weak participants in the Philippines?
The first research question is discussed through the experiment reported in
Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 addresses the effectiveness of implementing a
phonological and morphological awareness intervention among monolingual and
simultaneous bilingual five-year old learners in their first formal year of school. In
Chapter 3, the impact of providing a phonological and morphological training among
typically and atypically-developing sequential bilinguals is reported. Chapter 4
explores whether children’s improved reading performance results in phonological
and morphological skills are maintained five weeks post-intervention. In Chapter 5, a
cross-country comparison identifying parallels among bilingual language weak
learners’ reading performance outcomes are presented and explained. Finally,
Chapter 6 is an aggregation of research findings from the studies reported in the
various chapters of this thesis. It gives an overall discussion and provides future
directions that guide further research initiatives related to improving the language
and reading-related outcomes of school-aged children; using intervention
approaches that bridge inequalities in literacy education.

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Chapter 2 Effectiveness of Phonological and Morphological

Awareness Training on the Literacy Outcomes of Children with
Specific Language Weaknesses in the First Year of Primary School –
A New Zealand Study
Introduction and Background
One of the most significant factors in gauging academic success is the
development of literacy (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Both phonological and oral
language skills act as the main pillars of literacy development (McConnell, Wackerle-
hollman & Bradfield, 2014; Senechal, LeFevre, Smith-Chant, & Colton, 2001; Snowling
& Hulme, 2012; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Therefore, it is not surprising that such
language skills have been given considerable importance by researchers and
investigators due to their robust connection and contribution to improved reading
outcomes across school grades (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Muter, Hulme, Snowling &
Stevenson, 2004).
Related research findings have shown that learners possessing strong
phonological awareness at an early age, particularly at the preschool and kindergarten
level, have greater probability of becoming more adept readers at third grade (Muter et
al., 2004; Wagner et al., 1997). In addition, Muter et al.’s (2004) research acknowledged
certain subset skills that comprise phonological awareness, such as rhyming,
alliteration, blending and elision, as factors that facilitate strong reading performance.
The researchers added that a learner’s performance in second grade tasks of word
reading and comprehension can be predicted based on his or her ability to distinguish
and segregate phonemes at age 4 and 5 years old. Similar findings have been reported
by Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen and Rashotte (2007) who discovered a high correlation
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between preschool-aged children’s scores on blending tasks and their early reading
assessments at the conclusion of grade 1.
The ability to contemplate and manipulate the sound structures of spoken words
has been confirmed to have a vital role in the development of reading among lower
grades in primary school (Anthony & Francis, 2005). Longitudinal studies (Bowey, 2005;
Ehri et al., 2001; Hulme, Bowyer-Crane, Carrol, Duff, & Snowling, 2012) also support
this claim, indicating that phonological awareness is a key predictor of success in
learning to read.
For children in the primary grades who are showing evidence of typical or
expected development, the connection between word reading efficiency and
phonological awareness shows stability over time (Blachman, 2000; Hogan, Catts, &
Little, 2005; Roman, Kirby, Parrila, Wade-Wooley, & Deacon, 2009). However, what
needs to be explored is how lexical processing can be improved such that it guarantees
long-term reading and linguistic proficiency, especially for those children experiencing
specific language weaknesses in learning a language. Learners with language deficit
are likely to find it challenging to attain a sufficient level of literacy competence. As they
mature, they will face greater complexity in the words they are supposed to read or spell
and hence further challenges in their literacy development.
However, phonological awareness is not the only skill that a child needs to learn
to read successfully. A study by Law and Ghesquiere (2017) cited research that has
shifted to a focus on exploring “alternative cognitive variables” that can explain extra
variance in the literacy difficulties faced by the individuals discussed in the previous
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paragraphs. The cognitive variable they were referring to was morphological
awareness. Like phonological awareness, morphological awareness is just one of the
several aspects of broader metalinguistic knowledge crucial in enhancing linguistic
proficiency. It is defined as the ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest
segments of meaning found within words (Ramirez, Walton, & Roberts, 2013).
Morphological awareness is a vital skill highlighted by researchers as ‘critical’ in
language development (Carlisle, 2000; 2003; Kirby et al., 2012; Nunes & Bryant, 2006;
Ramirez, Walton, & Roberts, 2013) among typically-developing and struggling language
learners (Deacon, Parrila, & Kirby, 2008). Moreover, several studies highlighted the
benefits of morphological awareness, even to learners with phonological awareness
deficits, such as those with dyslexia, as it may offer a certain level of compensation for
their underlying deficits in processing (Burani et al., 2008; Cavalli, Cole, Duncan, Elbro,
& El Ahmadi, 2016; Elbro & Arnbak, 1996; Law, Wouters, & Ghesquiere, 2015).
Research has indicated that cognizance of morphemes (i.e. the smallest
linguistic units containing meaning) supports word recognition, correct spelling and
reading comprehension, independent of Rapid Automatized Naming, vocabulary,
phonological awareness and orthographic processing (Carlisle, 2000; Casalis & Louis-
Alexandre, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Kirby et al., 2012; Kirby, Parrila, Wade-
Wooley, Roman & Deacon, 2009).
Several factors can be considered as to why morphological awareness is useful
to reading success. One is that individuals encounter morphemically complex
vocabulary, with 60% of those estimated to be new words possessing relatively

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transparent morphological structures learned by children in school (Nagy & Anderson,
1984). Another is that several multi-morphemic words in the English lexicon are difficult
to read in a single fixation (Law & Ghesquiere, 2017). This same thought was what
prompted Elbro in 1989 to posit that the decomposition of words to their morphological
structures would allow faster processing of lexical information during reading. Not only
does awareness of morphological structures help in lexical processing, but it can also
aid in the pronunciation of letter sequences (Bowers, Kirby & Deacon, 2010). For
example, in the words ‘realm’ and ‘realign,’ segmenting along morpheme boundaries
allows the correct pronunciation of the ‘ea’ in ‘realm’ where it is taken as one phoneme,
as opposed to the ‘ea’ in ‘realign’ where it is processed separately because of its
position in adjacent morphemes. Moreover, relying solely on phonics would make it
difficult to explain the majority of the inconsistencies in the English language, as many
of these inconsistencies only make sense from a morphological frame of reference
(Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 2006). For instance, the word ‘stealth’ does not follow
regular phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules, as the word is not written as ‘stelth,’
but is spelled ‘stealth’ to preserve the root morpheme ‘steal.’
There is a growing amount of research that provides evidence highlighting the
importance of morphemes as carriers of syntactic and semantic information which
paves the way for vocabulary acquisition (Carlisle, 2000, Nagy, Berniger & Abbott,
2006; McBride-Chang et al., 2005; Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000; Sparks & Deacon,
2015), as well as children’s reading comprehension (Carlisle & Feldman, 1995; Deacon
& Kirby, 2014), and adult’s reading comprehension (Nagy et al., 2006; Wilson-Fowler &
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Apel, 2015). Nagy et al., in their 2006 research, discovered a relationship between
vocabulary and morphological awareness, with learners’ reading skill to accurately
utilize real or pseudo-derivations and inflections in sentences, allowing the retrieval of
meaning.
Benefits of intensified classroom phonological and morphological awareness

instruction
Given associations between the development of metalinguistic knowledge (i.e.
phonological and morphological) and literacy acquisition, investigations of instructional
methods from controlled research settings to the actual classroom have been
conducted to address the widening gap in achieving academic literacy.
Studies of phonological awareness in classrooms have grown over the past few
years (Carson, Gillon & Boustead, 2013; McIntosh, Crosbie, Holm, Dodd & Thomas,
2007), with researchers advocating the inclusion of alphabet knowledge teaching in the
classrooms (Justice et al., 2010; Lonigan, Purpura, Wilson, Walker, & Clancy-Menchetti,
2013).
Hatcher et al.’s seminal work in 1994 introduced the approach of combining training
in phonological awareness with knowledge in understanding letter-sound
correspondence by reinforcing it in the context of reading. The work of Hatcher et al.
(1994) also influenced the practice of intervention trials conducted in classrooms.
A study by McIntosh et al. (2007) in Australia explored the effectiveness of teaching
phonological awareness to 97 children aged 4;5 to 5;1 in classrooms. The study lasted
for 10 weeks and involved teaching syllable and onset-rime level for two hours each
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week. After the program was introduced, significant increase in phonological awareness
skills were observed in the treatment group compared with that of the control group who
followed the regular curriculum. However, after a follow up investigation, it was revealed
that the increase in phonological awareness did not result in better reading and spelling
scores of the treatment group to that of the control. Researchers attributed the lack of
effect to their failure of focusing on individual phonemes (phoneme awareness) in their
instruction. This outcome is relevant given that previous research strongly advised on
giving further attention to increase students’ performance on phonological awareness
tasks by ensuring expansion of phonological skills at the phoneme level (Gillon, 2018).
Meanwhile, a Phonology plus Reading program designed by Hatcher et al. in 2006
was created to include a reading aspect into the method. This same program was
modified by Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008) to be more suitable for younger children with
the added component of reading together in a group and reading independently.
The focus on younger children was also apparent in the study by Tyler, Osterhouse,
Wickham, McNutt and Shao (2014). This time the study included children aged 3;10 and
4;11 who were categorized as “at risk” of literacy-related difficulties due to the lower
socio-economic income level of their parents or some evidence of speech and language
impairment. Instruction occurred 4 times per week, but would be considered low in
intensity as it was no longer than two hours in total (i.e., only 20 minutes per session). In
the intervention, the emphasis was on letter-sound knowledge, onset-rime, initial sound
awareness, phonemes, blending, and segmentation of compound words. As with the
previous study, the treatment groups receiving instruction in the phoneme tasks
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experienced significant improvement in their phoneme scores compared to the group
placed in the regular curriculum.
Another study by Carson et al. (2013) assessed the effectiveness of intensified
phonological awareness instruction among 129 participants aged 5;0 to 5;2 who were
exposed to the treatment approach for over a period of six months. The results were
promising as the researchers discovered that phonological awareness training, with the
inclusion of better representation activities, led to sustained gains in scores of students.
In contrast to the use of phonological awareness training, the implementation of
morphological awareness training among young learners (i.e. pre-school to grade 2),
has not been given much attention. Among those who had attempted such research,
much of the information pertaining to the investigation on the morphological
development in classrooms focused on inflections and derivations. Such studies have
also been conducted primarily on school-aged elementary native speakers of English
and there were few studies that have focused on English speakers from other
languages (Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu, & Shu, 2009; Hiebert & Bravo, 2010). However,
what evidence there is has suggested that morphological awareness in understanding
the English language can be promoted among second language learners and children
in early school grades. Such data argue that young individuals are responsive to
morphological awareness instruction. One such study was conducted by Lyster (2002)
who discovered that Norwegian children in their final year in preschool experienced
improvement in morphological awareness after exposure to morphological awareness
training for 30 minutes per week spanning 17 weeks. It was observed that the treatment
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group responded better than the controlled group who didn’t receive any form of
intervention. Similar positive outcomes were observed by Apel et al. (2013) who showed
that kindergarteners characterized as ‘at-risk’ of developing reading problems made
observable gains in multi-morphemic analysis of words after nine weeks (four times a
week lasting 25 minutes each time) of morphological awareness intervention training.
The researchers placed the children in small groups of four or five to be tutored by
trained research assistants.
The benefits linked with the two interventions in facilitating literacy proficiency has
led a substantial amount of researchers to argue for the inclusion of teaching
phonological awareness (Kelly, Leitao, Smith-Lock & Heritage, 2017; Carson, Gillon &
Boustead, 2013; McIntosh, Crosbie, Holm, Dad & Thomas, 2007) and morphological
awareness (Apel, Brimo, Diehm, & Apel, 2013; McBride-Chang et al., 2005; Ramirez,
Walton & Roberts, 2013) in typical mainstream classrooms. This, they argue would
provide a means of practical support for educators, as well as to promote effective
language learning and reading outcomes to struggling students. Despite the positive
evidence for explicit instruction of phonological awareness and morphological
awareness in the research literature, there is still no clear inclusion of phonological
awareness training in the Kei Tua o te Pae: Oral, Visual and Literacy (Book 17) (MOE,
2009), which has been created by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand to serve as
an appropriate model for educators teaching in the early grades (Carroll et al., 2016).
It is therefore timely to investigate the contribution of both phonological and
morphological awareness with regard to improving literacy outcomes in New Zealand.

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This would be particularly useful if the evidence supported gains in reading
comprehension skills, both in terms of word recognition and sentence understanding.
Given the increasing multi-cultural context of New Zealand, it would be even more
useful to show these positive outcomes in children from monolingual versus bilingual
backgrounds who show evidence of weaknesses in language. Targeting children in the
first year of school is likely to reduce negative outcomes in the long-term. This, in turn,
would provide additional evidence leading to the permanent inclusion of explicit
phonological or morphological awareness training in the New Zealand curriculum.
Furthermore, studies of young monolingual and bilingual learners should offer a better
understanding about the early stages of language acquisition and its influence on
reading development. For example, there is currently a paucity of information that
examines the relationship of morphological awareness development training and
reading comprehension, especially in grade 1. This study would provide further data on
whether initiating early literacy interventions focusing on morphological awareness
development facilitates reading comprehension, particularly amongst struggling
language learners in the early grades.
Adapting a Phonological Awareness Approach
The benefits brought about by phonological awareness, emphasizing a focus on
the development of phoneme-level skills is that it provides long-term reading and
spelling success (Ehri et al. 2001; Gillon, 2018; Shapiro & Solity, 2008). This suggests
that interventions focusing on phoneme-level skills may optimize short-duration
treatment approaches that aim to attain sustained literacy improvements. Also, it is

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important that phonological awareness instruction is blended with phonics, in which
alphabet knowledge teaching is emphasized (Justice et al., 2010; Lonigan, Purpura,
Wilson, Walker & Clancy Menchetti, 2013). Teaching that is clear, detailed and direct
will further enhance quality of phonological awareness instruction (Carson et al., 2013;
Hiebert & Fisher, 2002; Torgesen, Rashotte, Alexander, & MacPhee, 2003).
Operating on the framework described in the Carson, Gillon and Boustead (2013)
study, the adapted intervention program utilized in the current research can be
described as short in duration (i.e., less than one academic year), low intensity (i.e., less
than two hours of instruction per week) and broad (i.e., targeting a wide range of
phonological awareness levels (e.g., phoneme, onset-rime and syllable) with
prominence given on phonemic awareness. Although Carson et al.’s research (2013)
recommend high intensity instruction, low intensity instruction was selected due to
limited classroom time granted to the researcher by the participating schools, and it may
be more realistic in the current climate of a perceived packed curriculum.
The phonological awareness training program implemented in this research was
adapted from the Phonology + Reading Intervention (P+R) used by Bowyer-Crane et al.
(2008) in their previous investigation. It is an approach made up of working out letter-
sound correspondences, blending and segmenting, with the incorporation of group
reading and reading independently twice a week respectively.
A more detailed outline of the session and its activities is presented in the
succeeding table.
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Table 2.1 Sample Phonological Awareness Intervention Group Lesson Plan
Week 1 Key Component: Grapheme – Phoneme Association
Aim: To strengthen students’ understanding of letters and how each letter

in the alphabet corresponds to a specific sound
Duration: 45 minutes
Material: Detective Dog and the Disappearing Donut (Scholastic Books)
Target: Students shall be able to recognize and to identify target letters, as

well as produce appropriate sounds they represent
Activity: 1. Start with ‘Hello Song’

2. Introduce “Spot doll” for Phonics Lesson
3. Sing the Jolly Phonics Song
4. Segue into the letters in the alphabet and the specific sounds
they represent
5. Initiate reading time by introducing the book “Detective Dog and
the Disappearing Donuts”
6. Focus on Core Words (i.e. Dog and Donuts) emphasizing
target sound [d]
7. Read the book and encourage children to raise hands if they
hear the [d] sound
8. Help student in isolating and segmenting CVC words with [d]
sounds, as well as practice blending string of phonemes into
words
9. Distribute Donut-shaped letters
10. Ask students to get the letter corresponding to their first name
and sound it out
11. Cut and decorate the letters using colorful sprinkles
12. Close by focusing on the target sound
13. Sing the closing song “Goodbye”
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Implementation of a Morphological Awareness Intervention
The ultimate goal of reading is not only being able to recognize or sound out a
string of letters, but to comprehend the meaning conveyed in the text. However, children
with language weaknesses are at a greater disadvantage as they may possess a wide
range of problems in reading comprehension, listening comprehension, grammar,
narrative production, oral expression, figurative language, and vocabulary (Nation,
2005; Hulme & Snowling, 2009). Given that their difficulties are variegated, a
morphological awareness intervention may offer a strategy to compensate for, if not
surmount their shortcomings.
The current teaching program embedded research treatments that aimed to promote
morphological awareness and to facilitate reading comprehension. The treatment
approach was an adaptation of an oral language (OL) program described in Bowyer-
Crane et al. (2008) and Clarke et al. (2010). The modified version of the intervention
consisted of two 45-minute sessions per week (one conducted in a group and one done
individually) for ten weeks with a total of 15 hours of intervention per child. Each session
comprised of an introduction, followed by activities and a plenary session to consolidate
what was discussed during the day. All the activities were designed to revolve on a
particular theme and to be supplement by a text passage.
Following suggestions from Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008), the approach follows the
principle of distributed practice. It is made up of four main components namely:
vocabulary expansion, reciprocal teaching with spoken language, figurative language
and spoken narrative activities. In vocabulary expansion, children are introduced to the
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“words of the day,” These were taught using Beck et al.’s (2002) multi-context learning
approach. This technique requires focusing on the dialogue between the students and
mentor that supports them to put the introduced words in appropriate and known
contexts. It supplies children with the necessary tools they can employ to unlock
meaning of words that strengthen depiction and scaffolding of familiar texts into the
mind. Other related activities used within the multiple context learning approach include:
verbal reasoning, visual and physical mnemonics, concept diagram, and drawings.
Forty new words were presented to the participants (i.e., two words per session). After
the vocabulary expansion comes reciprocal teaching. Under this component, children
would first listen to a story read to them; then they would be asked to complete
exercises that activate reading comprehension. The activities were created to improve
learners’ knowledge of stories by instructing them to clarify unfamiliar words, to rely on
their own schema to predict succeeding events, to fill in missing information, to infer
implicit meaning, and to engage in inquiry. The programme encourages children to tap
on their pre-existing knowledge for understanding. In continuation, children practiced
figurative language through jokes, idioms, similes, metaphors and riddles to encourage
them to explore expressive language using spoken narratives.
In the spoken narrative, the child is asked to come up with a story based on a
sequence of pictures. Prior to closing each session, a run through of the topics
discussed in the entire lesson was made with students. Rewarding of learners with
stickers was also conducted to promote active participation.

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Below is an outline of session schedules for the morphological awareness
intervention.
Table 2.2 Outline of Session Schedule for Morphological Awareness Training
Morphological Awareness Intervention with Oral Language Training (adapted
from Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008) and Clarke et al. (2010) studies)
Group Session (45 mins.) Individual Session (45 mins.)
• Introduction - Day of the Week and • Introduction - Settling the child into
Outline of Activities for the day (5 the session (5 mins.)
mins.)
• Vocabulary Revision (10 mins.)
• New Vocabulary Teaching / Multi-

• Narrative Task (12 mins.)
sensory Learning (10 mins.)
• Listening, Speaking and
• Learned Vocabulary
Inferencing (15 mins.)
Reinforcement (12 mins.)
• Plenary - Session Review and
• Speaking, Listening and
Awarding of Gold stars (3 mins.)
Inferencing through Group
activities (15 mins.)
• Revision of work, Promotion of
sequencing, and Awarding of Gold
Stars (3 mins.)
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Reduction of student performance inequalities through PA and MA treatment

approaches in classrooms
A considerable amount of research has demonstrated the significance of
phonological awareness and its connection to reading across alphabetic languages,
despite existing individual differences in IQ, age, reading experience and vocabulary
knowledge (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Kirby, Parrila & Pfeiffer, 2003; Melby-Lervag,
Lyster & Hulme, 2012). A focus on phonological awareness offers a significant effect in
promoting reading skills of children with special needs, such as those with speech and
language impairment, Down syndrome, expressive phonological impairment, and
developmental verbal dyspraxia (Gillon, 2002, 2005; McNeill, Gillon & Dodd, 2009; Van
Bysterveld, Gillon, & Foster-Cohen, 2010).
Like phonological awareness, morphological awareness training offers a means
of assistance, or provides some levels of compensation to individuals experiencing
dyslexia (Burani et al., 2008; Cavalli, Cole, Duncan, Elbro & el Ahmadi, 2016; Elbro &
Arnbak, 1996; Law, Wouters & Ghesquiere, 2015).
Drawing on benefits observed from explicit phonological and morphological
awareness training, and using it in heterogeneous classroom settings to enhance
literacy skills of children in the early grades considered ‘at risk’ due to their language
deficits, may pave the way to provide necessary tools for such children faced with
linguistic difficulties to further optimize their potential in reading development. Hence,
the current study investigating whether a focused phonological awareness approach at

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the phoneme level, coupled with phonics and reading activities, or a morphological
awareness intervention through oral language, promotes the reading skills of weak
English language learners in the early grades. Assessing which approach results in
immediate gains in student literacy performance should also contribute to the
implementation of efficient and effective reading programs that target the enhancement
of literacy achievement, thereby reducing poor reading outcomes for this group of
learners.
The Present Study
The main goal of the research was to determine the effectiveness of
implementing a phonological awareness and morphological awareness treatment
approach, in advancing reading comprehension through word recognition and sentence
understanding, among year 1 monolingual and bilingual language weak learners in New
Zealand. It also evaluated which instructional training would be likely to offer immediate,
observable and significant effect size. As discussed above, the study examined the
potency of raising phonological and morphological awareness in children aged 5 to 6
years old, and children presenting with specific language weaknesses in learning the
English language.
In the context of this research, children with specific language weaknesses refer
to students exhibiting a score below the norm average of 85 in their Receptive
Language Index score in the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool,
2nd edition (CELF-P2). They also received below standard norm average scores for their
age group in 3 out of 6 subset measures in the Preschool and Primary Inventory of
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Phonological Awareness (PIPA). These children also showed evidence of weak letter-
sound knowledge. These weaknesses were evident despite the children having no
record of poor learning experience, sensory impairments or behavior problem, and them
producing a nonverbal intelligence score within the norm of 85 to 115 range, as
revealed by the Primary Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (P-TONI).
Research Questions
To reiterate, the current study aimed to better understand the effect of providing
phonological awareness training + reading and morphological awareness with emphasis
on oral language instruction, in facilitating the reading comprehension skills (i.e. word
recognition and sentence understanding) of early readers in grade 1.
It is among the few investigations conducted in the field of education and language
research that observed and compared the impact of using explicit intervention
approaches among children with specific language weaknesses in learning English
within a bilingual context. In this chapter, the following research questions are
addressed:
(6) Will the phonological awareness or morphological awareness intervention
approach implemented in the classroom result in a significant difference in the
language assessment scores, including word meaning and text comprehension,
after five weeks among monolingual and bilingual language weak year 1 students
in New Zealand?
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(7) Will the phonological awareness and/or morphological awareness intervention
result in significantly higher word meaning and text comprehension levels after
ten weeks?
(8) Is there a significant difference in the outcomes of monolingual language weak
versus bilingual language weak children after receiving the classroom-
implemented phonological and morphological instruction during their first year in
primary school?
Methods
Participants
Participants in the present investigation were selected after screening forty-five (45)
Year 1 children referred by classroom teachers as struggling language learners. Twenty
(20) participants were recruited in the study having met the inclusion criteria and
following university ethics committee approval. The mean age of participants was 5;8
years (SD = 4.47 months) and consisted of 11 monolinguals and 9 bilinguals. All
children from the bilingual group were born and raised in New Zealand, but used at
least one other language apart from English at home.
The students were from eight classes with an average of 20 to 25 pupils in each
within three schools in Western Christchurch, New Zealand. The students attend public
primary schools in urban areas in middle to high socio-economic areas (based on the
Ministry of Education’s school rating), and were taught using the same national
standards set by the ministry for its educational curriculum. The students were working
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to attain the same curricular standards needed in the development of reading and
writing.
Out of the chosen students, 12 were boys and 8 were girls. They were further
segregated into two groups, with roughly half of the monolinguals and half of the
bilinguals randomly assigned in Group 1 – PA1MA2 (i.e., students who begin with
phonological awareness (PA) followed by morphological awareness (MA) training), and
the remaining half from each group placed in Group 2 – MA1PA2 (i.e., students start
with MA followed by PA intervention).
School administrators and teachers received consent forms confirming participation
in the program. The teachers were also asked to distribute consent forms for both
parents and students enrolled in their classes to give permission for their child to take
part in the study. Table 2.3 illustrates the demographic profile of participants.
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Table 2.3 Demographic Composition of Phonological (PA1MA2) and Morphological (MA1PA2) groups in comparison to
primary school students aged 5-6 enrolled in the Canterbury and Chatham Islands Region Academic Year 2017
Note: The percentages used in the table represent the proportion of the groups, as opposed to the entire sample (e.g. in
Group B, 5 boys represent 55.56%)
*Canterbury & Chatham Islands Administrative Region and New Zealand wide demographic data were retrieved from
https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz
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It was ensured in the conduct of this research that any form of assessment by the
researcher had informed consent from the teachers, parents, students and school
administrators of the participating schools, in line with the standards set by the
University of Canterbury Ethics Committee and the College of Education, Health and
Human Development.
All assessments were conducted in a quiet area in a classroom during school hours.
Inclusion in the study required that none of the participants in the study were receiving
any form of treatment to address linguistic or reading deficiencies for the duration of the
research, other than that provided as part of the research.
For children with specific language weaknesses, a set of criteria necessary for
inclusion are as follows:
• No recorded hearing, visual or neurological disorders (as reported in
school records)
• Normal cognitive ability based on school reports
• Normal oral structure and function – articulation is within normal limits
• Non-verbal intelligence score between 85-115 based on standardized
assessment such as the Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (PTONI;
Ehrler & McGhee, 2008)

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• Scores on either the Receptive Language or Expressive Index measured
using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool 2nd
edition (CELF-P2; Wiig et al., 2006) below 85
• Score on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test III (WRMT - III; Woodcock,
2011) is one standard deviation below the mean
• Score is below the standard norm average in 3 out of 6 subset skill
measured by the Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological
Awareness (PIPA; Dodd, Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000)
In practice, children who perform at least one standard deviation below the mean
on a standardized measure of language functioning are considered to have impaired
language skills (Tomblin, Freese, & Records, 1992).
Standardized Assessment Measures
The following standardized instruments were used in the identification and
evaluation of the research sample:
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool 2nd edition- Australia and
New Zealand edition (CELF-P2; Wiig et al., 2006)
The CELF – P2 is a language assessment test that measures language
expression and language comprehension of children ages 3;0 to 6;11.The assessment
was utilized to get students’ receptive, expressive and core language skills profile. The
students completed six sub-tests: sentence structure, concepts and following directions,
word structure, basic concepts, expressive vocabulary, and sentence recall. The
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outcome of the sub-tests were obtained to produce receptive and expressive language
index scores. An example taken from the word structure sub-test would be to show
some pictures and ask the child to finish the things you say. “Finish what I say. This boy
(point to the image) is standing. This boy is…(point to the image)” The child should
answer “sitting.” The test-retest reliability correlation coefficients range from adequate
(0.79) to excellent (0.92) and internal consistency ranges from 0.82 to 0.96 across the
sub-tests.
Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness (PIPA ; Dodd,

Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000)
The PIPA provides a standardized profile of a child’s phonological awareness
ability. It is suitable for children aged three years old to six years and 11 months old.
The PIPA measures abilities in naming letters and their corresponding sounds,
identifying initial letter sounds, segmenting syllables, isolating individual sounds,
distinguishing number of sounds within words and detecting rhyming words. As an
example, in the letter-sound knowledge task, the examiner points to a printed letter on
the page and requires the child to produce the particular sound the letter makes. The
test-retest reliability correlation coefficients ranged from 0.72 to 0.97 across the six sub-
tests.
Primary Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (PTONI; Ehrler & McGhee, 2008)
This particular assessment measures the nonverbal intellectual ability of students
from as young as 3 up until 9 years and 11 months of age. The test requires participants
to inspect pictures on a page and distinguish which image appears to be the odd one
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out. The measure increases in difficulty from lower order reasoning skills, which focuses
on visual and spatial recognition, to the more advanced categorical formulation, as well
as sequential reasoning. The test-retest reliability was recorded to be excellent (0.96).
Woodcock Reading Mastery Test III (WRMT-III; Woodcock, 2011)
This assessment tool has been used to determine reading comprehension levels
of children as young as five years old. The test is helpful in determining individual
strengths and weaknesses related to reading that may direct the course of remediation
and instructional design. An example of one task in word comprehension (antonyms)
sub-test would be to say to a child one of the three printed words on a page and then
ask him/her to read the word out loud and to say its opposite. Test-retest reliability
scores ranged from 0.86 to 0.94 for the test.
Informal Morphological Awareness Measures

Inflectional and Derivational Morphological Awareness Task
An evaluation tool that assesses morphological awareness was adapted from
items used in Kirby et al. (2012). The task asks learners to fill in a missing word to form
an analogy using derived and inflected word forms.
A specific question pertaining to an inflectional morpheme item, for instance,
would be to complete a word analogy task such as “walk: walked: bump: _______.” It is
expected that the child will supply the correct inflected morpheme which contains the ed
morpheme. Test-retest reliability scores were 0.76 and 0.79 for the inflection and
derivation measures respectively. On the other hand, internal consistency was at 0.80.
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Tables 2.4 and 2.5 displays the groups’ school-entry performance on language and
non-verbal intelligence measures categorized by differing treatment approach and
language background.
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Table 2.4 School-entry performance on language and non-verbal intelligence measures based on treatment group
Note. PTONI = Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence Standard Scores (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Ehrler & McGhee, 2008);
CELF – P2 RLI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Receptive Language Index (M = 100, SD
= +/-15) (Wiig et al., 2006); CELF – P2 ELI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Expressive
Language Index (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Wiig et al., 2006); WRMT-III = Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (M = 100, SD =
+/-15) (Woodcock, 2011)
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Table 2.5 School-entry performance on language and non-verbal intelligence measures based on language group
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Procedure
A cross-over design for the two intervention programs included in the experiment
was employed to compare the linguistic performance scores of children at three
different time points: pre, mid, and post-tests. As highlighted in Portney & Watkins
(2009) research, the cross-over design permits for control of order effects by
methodically changing exposure to the treatment conditions.
A research assistant was used in order to ensure that all testing was completed
within the required time-frame for the study. The assistant was trained in the proper
administering of the assessment tools relating to the evaluation of students and was
blind to group membership.
The order of administration of the standardized assessment and experimental
measures was randomized to minimize the potential biases produced by the experience
of initial or final tests.
The study took place for over half an academic year, starting from May to
October 2017.
Controls for Treatment Bias
To regulate or control possible treatment bias, both intervention (i.e. phonological
awareness + reading and morphological awareness training through oral language
development) were structured and highly organized, with a clear set of direct
instructions provided for each session. In addition, the timing of the treatment
approaches was balanced in order to prevent possible tiring effects that can ultimately
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impact the children’s performance. Particularly, each group took part in two sessions
per week: one group received intervention every Monday morning and Wednesday
afternoon, whereas the other group received the treatment every Tuesday afternoon
and Thursday morning.
Reliability
All of the standardized tests were conducted and scored as prescribed in the
examiner’s manuals. An independent researcher verified 25% of the gathered
assessment data. Inter-rater agreement in scoring assessment measures were 99.8%
(97.2% - 100%) at pre-test, 100% at mid-test and 99.7% (97.1-100%) at post-test.
Discrepancies that arose were resolved through discussion until consensus was
achieved.
Treatment Fidelity
An established protocol was given for each training period; outlining the lesson
contents and target key learning outcomes for each session. Designated instructors
assigned in the two groups were asked to complete a phonological and morphological
awareness teaching log for each week related to instruction. In the log, the assigned
instructor was required to identify the phonological or morphological awareness skill
targeted in the lesson (e.g. phoneme segmentation or word derivation), the specific
activities that were utilized in the programme to tackle that target (e.g. tap along with the
phoneme or word work), and the amount of time spent on each activity (e.g. 15
minutes). The assigned teacher was also briefed that a short paragraph describing the
response of the children on a particular lesson, whether any participant displayed any
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difficulty on a task in comparison with their peers, was to be written in the log. Likewise,
the lead researcher set up a weekly meeting to discuss any issues in the
implementation of the lesson. There were four visits made to the assigned teacher in
the study during PA1MA2 and MA1PA2’s ten-week instruction period. These were
conducted to act as an observer and take down notes of the implemented programme
for the purpose of assessing treatment validity.
In addition, all minutes of the meeting with assigned instructor and research
assistant were recorded and notes documented. Twenty percent out of the total number
of teaching sessions administered were randomly chosen for evaluation. This would
further determine the treatment integrity of the instruction. A group comprising of an
independent researcher, a school principal and the grade level coordinators confirmed
that each training session was conducted as planned and the activities described in the
lesson plan were coordinated to advance relevant strategies for linguistic awareness. All
lessons (100%) assessed by the aforementioned group were found to adhere to the set
of teaching guidelines, ensuring consistency of intervention delivery.
Baseline measures
The baseline results were matched between groups through an independent
samples t-test, except for the variable gender where a chi-square test was utilized. The
chi-square test and t-tests did not reveal significant differences in the scores of
monolingual and bilingual participants on gender distribution (χ2 = .135, p = .714), age
(t(18) = -.691, p = .498), non-verbal intelligence (t(18) = -.130, p = .898), reading
comprehension (word and passage comprehension) (t(18) = -1.355, p = .204) and

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receptive language index score (t(18) =1.529, p = .149). There was a significant
difference though in the expressive language index score between monolinguals and
bilinguals which was (t(18) = 3, p = .008).
With regard to analysis of specific literacy outcomes, results did not reveal any
statistical differences between monolinguals and bilinguals on syllable segmentation
(t(18) = -1.582, p = .131), rhyme awareness (t(18) = -.398, p = .696), alliteration
awareness (t(18) = -.134, p = .895), phoneme isolation (t(18) = -.749, p = .467),
phoneme segmentation (t(18) = .531, p = .603), phoneme-grapheme correspondence
(t(18) = -1.572, p = .134), morphological awareness – inflection (t(18) = -.790, p = .460),
morphological awareness – derivation (t(18) = .441, p = .654), antonyms (t(18) = -1.610,
p = .125), synonyms (t(18) = -1.342, p = .225), word analogy (t(18) = -.921, p = .369) ),
and sentence comprehension (t(18) = -.164, p = .871.
Meanwhile, baseline measures of treatment groups were made by segregating
participants into those who would receive phonological awareness training first, followed
by a morphological awareness approach (PA1MA2) and those who would receive
intervention in reverse order (MA1PA2); and then determining whether significant
differences exist between the two. Results showed no significant difference in gender
distribution (χ2 = .002, p = .964), age (t(18) = -1.98, p = .063), non-verbal intelligence
(t(18) = -.593, p = .561, receptive language index score (t(18) = -2.091, p = .53) and
expressive language index score (t(18) = -1.479, p = .254).
The same is true for the following literacy measures: syllable segmentation (t(18)
= -1.172, p = .257), rhyme awareness (t(18) = -1.337, p = .198), phoneme segmentation

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(t(18) = -1.892, p = .082), morphological awareness – inflection (t(18) = .420, p = .673),
morphological knowledge – derivation (t(18) = -1.055, p = .295), antonyms (t(18) = -
1.610, p = .125), synonyms (t(18) = -1.342, p = .225), and word analogy (t(18) = -.643, p
= .966).
However, significant differences between the PA1MA2 and MA1PA2 groups
were identified on: alliteration awareness (t(18) = -4.114, p = .001), phoneme isolation
(t(18) = -3.372, p = .003), phoneme-grapheme correspondence (t(18) = -2.943, p =
.009), and sentence comprehension (t(18) = -3.109, p = .006).
Results
Data were collected at three different time points in the research. The results
from the first evaluation, referred here as Time1-Pre, were taken prior to any
intervention being introduced to the participants. The next data collection point occurred
after the first five weeks of intervention; referred to as Time2-Mid. The results from the
third assessment point were attained after the completion of the second intervention
(this will be referred to as Time3-Post). Findings associated with the impact of each
intervention on the children’s language and literacy skills will be evident by a
comparison of the first and second assessment results. Tables 2.5a and 2.5b, therefore,
presents the results (means and standard deviations) for each measure administered at
Time 1-Pre and Time 2-Mid, and this part of the results section presents the outcome of
a series of analyses of variance contrasting the Pre and Mid data for each measure
assessed on these two occasions. The second part of the results will then contrast the
Time1-Pre data with the Time3-Post data to assess the impact of both interventions.
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In the first portion of the results, given that children were evaluated at two time
periods, this was a repeated measures factor comprising of two levels (Time 1-Pre and
Time 2-Mid). In order to gauge the impact of the two treatment approaches, an
independent variable (Intervention) was incorporated that is made up of two varying
levels – phonological against morphological awareness. Differing effectiveness of
treatment would be determined by a significant interaction between the Intervention
variable and the Time factor. To assess whether any particular influences of the
intervention varied across two of the Language Groups, this variable was likewise
covered in the analyses as another independent factor with two levels: Monolingual
versus Bilingual with differing effects for the two groups evident in a three-way
interaction. Provided that a three-way interaction occurs, two-way analyses of variance
shall be utilized for each Language Group to find out if an interaction is found between
Time and the Intervention factors with one of the Language groups. Hence, the findings
for each of the measures were analyzed using a three-way analysis of variance (2x2x2),
with one repeated measures factor and two independent factors. These two will then be
reported throughout the results; however, additional significant main effects will be
reported where relevant to the subsequent discussion. Reports in this chapter will be
reported as F-values (with df), p-values and effect sizes (partial eta squared). Graphs
pertaining to the three-way interaction will be displayed to present the results visually,
but significant two-way interactions between Time and Intervention factors shall also be
shown to allow interpretations of findings.

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Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time2-Mid assessment data
In this section, the results for the first intervention are presented for each of the
measures in the study, starting with the phonological measures and progressing from
larger units of sound (syllable and rhyme) prior to phoneme-level sounds (alliteration,
phoneme isolation and segmentation), followed by the letter-sound measure and the
morphological measures (inflection and derivation), and ending with the word meaning
measures (antonyms, synonyms, analogies and text comprehension).

144
Table 2.6 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Monolingual group on
each of the study measures at the first and second assessment points
Phonological First Morphological First

Intervention Intervention
Assessment Measures
Time 1- Time 2- Time 1- Time 2-
Pre Mid Pre Mid
4.33 5.17 5.00 7.60

Syllable Awareness (12 items)
(2.81) (3.06) (2.00) (3.78)
3.67 5.17 3.60 6.60

Rhyme Awareness (12 items)
(2.73) (3.37) (.89) (2.88)
3.83 5.17 7.20 7.00

Alliteration Awareness (12 items)
(1.84) (3.37) (2.17) (2.92)
3.67 8.00 8.00 10.00

Phoneme Isolation (12 items)
(3.72) (3.52) (1.58) (1.0)
1.50 2.50 2.40 1.20

Phoneme Segmentation (12 items)
(1.38) (2.59) (2.07) (2.17)
4.00 15.33 8.80 22.40

Letter-sound Knowledge (32 items)
(3.23) (9.85) (.45) (4.67)
0.17 0.33 0.00 0.60

Morphological Inflection (10 items) (0.41) (0.82) (0.00) (0.89)
0.33 0.17 0.60 1.40

Morphological Derivation (10 items)
(0.82) (0.41) (0.55) (0.89)
0.50 1.33 0.80 1.60

Antonym Production (23 items)
(.55) (1.17) (0.45) (0.55)
0.00 0.50 0.20 0.60

Synonym Production (23 items)
(0.00) (0.84) (0.45) (0.55)
0.33 2.00 0.60 2.20

Word Analogy (40 items)
(0.52) (1.55) (0.55) (0.84)
0.50 1.67 1.20 2.60

Text Comprehension (38 items)
(0.84) (0.82) (1.10) (0.55)
145
Table 2.7 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group on each
of the study measures at the first and second assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Mid Pre Mid
5.40 8.00 7.50 4.00

(2.60) (0.71) (1.73) (1.83)
2.80 5.20 5.50 5.25

(1.09) (2.49) (2.08) (0.50)
3.20 6.80 8.50 10.00

(2.95) (3.56) (2.52) (1.41)
4.80 9.40 9.50 11.00

(3.83) (1.34) (1.92) (1.41)
0.40 1.60 2.75 4.25

(0.89) (1.52) (2.63) (2.87)
7.40 20.40 9.25 26.75

(2.61) (9.13) (1.89) (2.99)
0.20 0.80 0.25 1.00

0.20 0.80 0.50 1.50

(0.45) (0.84) (0.58) (0.58)
0.80 1.40 1.25 2.00

(.45) (1.14) (0.50) (0.00)
0.20 0.40 0.50 1.00

(0.45) (0.55) (0.56) (0.00)
0.80 1.40 0.50 2.50

(0.45) (1.14) (0.58) (1.29)
0.20 2.60 1.75 3.50

(0.45) (1.52) (0.50) (1.29)
146
Syllable awareness task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Syllable awareness
measure indicated a significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 10.26, p = .006, EF = .39)
– this can be seen in figure 2.1. Follow-up two-way analyses of variance indicated a
non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors for the
Monolingual children (F(1,9) = 1.74, p = .22, EF = .16), but a significant interaction
between the Time and Intervention factors for the Bilingual children (F(1,7) = 7.80, p =
.027, EF = .53). As can be seen in figure 2.1, for the Bilingual children (right-hand side
of figure), those in the Phonological intervention group showed an increase in scores on
the Syllable awareness task in contrast to the decrease shown by those in the
Morphological intervention group. For the Monolingual children (left-hand side of figure),
increases in Syllable awareness scores occurred for both intervention groups.
Figure 1 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance

147
Rhyme awareness task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Rhyme awareness
measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 2.83, p = .112, EF =
.15) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) <
1, p = .65, EF = .01). Figure 2.2 shows the results for the Rhyme awareness task. The
only statistically significant effect was a main effect of Time (F(1,16) = 7.25, p = .016, EF
= .31).
Figure 2.2 Rhyme Awareness Task Performance

148
Alliteration awareness task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Alliteration awareness
measure showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .83, EF < .01)
and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) =
2.02, p = .18, EF = .11). Figure 2.3 shows the results for the Alliteration awareness task.
There were statistically significant main effects of Time (F(1,16) = 5.93, p = .027, EF =
.27) and Intervention (F(1,16) = 10.63, p = .005, EF = .40) – the latter effect suggesting
that those in the Morphological intervention group performed better on this task than
those in the Phonological intervention group, which is most likely a chance effect of
randomization.
Figure 2.3 Alliteration Awareness Task Performance

149
Phoneme isolation task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Phoneme isolation
measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .79, EF < .01)
– this can be seen in Figure 2.4. However, there was a significant interaction between
the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) = 4.92, p = .041, EF = .24) suggesting that both
the Monolingual and Bilingual groups showed greater gains in the Phonological
intervention than the Morphological intervention. There were statistically significant main
effects of Time (F(1,16) = 25.77, p < .001, EF = .62) and Intervention (F(1,16) = 7.76, p =
.013, EF = .33).
Figure 2.4 Phoneme Isolation Task

150
Phoneme segmentation task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Phoneme segmentation
measure demonstrated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 1.11, p = .31, EF
= .07) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16)
< 1, p = .44, EF = .04) – see figure 2.5.
Figure 2.5 Phoneme Segmentation Task Performance

151
Letter-sound task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Letter-sound measure
indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .17, EF = .11) and a
non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) = 1.69, p =
.21, EF = .10) – see figure 2.6. There was a significant main effect of Intervention (F(1,16)
= 5.21, p = .037, EF = .25), with the Morphological group out-performing the
Phonological group, but this again is likely a chance effect related to random
assignment.
Figure 2.6 Letter-Sound Knowledge Task Performance

152
Morphological awareness inflection task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Morphological
awareness inflection measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) <
1, p = .70, EF = .01) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,16) < 1, p = .43, EF = .04) – see figure 2.7. There was a significant main
effect of Time (F(1,16) = 8.79, p = .009, EF = .36).
Figure 2.7 Morphological Awareness Inflection Task Performance

153
Morphological awareness derivation task
awareness derivation measure showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) <
1, p = .46, EF = .04) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,16) = 3.38, p = .085, EF = .17) – see figure 2.8. There was a significant main
effect of Time (F(1,16) = 9.02, p = .008, EF = .36) and of First Intervention (F(1,16) = 7.00, p
= .018, EF = .30).
Figure 2.8 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Awareness

154
Antonym production task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Antonym production
measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .85, EF < .01)
and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1, p
= .90, EF < .01) – see figure 2.9. There was a significant main effect of Time (F(1,16) =
9.92, p = .006, EF = .38).
Figure 2.9 Antonym Production Task Performance

155
Synonym production task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Synonym production
measure displayed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .55, EF = .02)
= .77, EF < .01) – see figure 2.10. There was a significant main effect of Time (F(1,16) =
5.90, p = .027, EF = .27).
Figure 2.10 Synonym Production Task Performance

156
Word analogy task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Word analogy measure
indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 2.14, p = .16, EF = .12) and a
non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) = 1.77, p =
.20, EF = .10) – see figure 2.11. There was a significant main effect of Time (F(1,16) =
34.17, p < .001, EF = .68).
Figure 2.11 Word Analogy Task Performance

157
Text comprehension task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Text comprehension
measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .37, EF = .05)
= .67, EF = .01) – see figure 2.12. There was a significant main effect of Time (F(1,16) =
49.15, p < .001, EF = .75) and of Intervention group (F(1,16) = 8.34, p = .011, EF = .34).
Figure 2.12 Text Comprehension Task Performance

158
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time3-Post assessment data
The next part of the findings will then contrast the Time1-Pre data with the
Time3-Post data to evaluate the impact of both interventions. In this particular section,
the results for the next intervention are presented for each of the measures in the study,
beginning with the phonological measures and advancing from larger units of sound
(syllable and rhyme) prior to phoneme-level sounds (alliteration, phoneme isolation and
segmentation), succeeded by the letter-sound measure and the morphological
measures (inflection and derivation), and ending with the word meaning measures
(antonyms, synonyms, analogies and text comprehension).

159
Table 2.8 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Monolingual group on each of the study measures at
the first and third assessment points

Assessment Measures
Time 1- Time3- Time 1- Time3-
Pre Post Pre Post
4.33 8.50 5.00 10.00

(2.81) (2.26) (2.00) (1.41)
3.67 6.00 3.60 8.40

(2.73) (3.58) (.89) (1.34)
3.83 5.33 7.20 8.40

(1.84) (3.50) (2.17) (2.07)
3.67 8.50 8.00 11.40

(3.72) (4.09) (1.58) (0.89)
1.50 2.17 2.40 2.20

(1.38) (1.84) (2.07) (0.84)
4.00 20.33 8.80 29.40

(3.23) (8.34) (.45) (1.52)
0.17 2.50 0.00 3.60

0.33 2.17 0.60 2.80

(0.82) (1.33) (0.55) (1.10)
0.50 1.50 0.80 3.00

(.55) (1.38) (0.45) (1.41)
0.00 1.33 0.20 2.0

(0.00) (1.03) (0.45) (1.0)
0.33 2.17 0.60 3.40

(0.52) (1.60) (0.55) (1.67)
0.50 3.50 1.20 5.80

(0.84) (2.67) (1.10) (1.30)
160
Table 2.9 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group on each of the study measures at the
first and third assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Post Pre Post
5.40 7.80 7.50 7.75

(2.60) (1.48) (1.73) (0.96)
2.80 7.80 5.50 7.00

(1.09) (3.42) (2.08) (2.45)
3.20 8.60 8.50 10.75

(2.95) (2.70) (2.52) (1.89)
4.80 11.40 9.50 11.75

(3.83) (0.89) (1.92) (0.50)
0.40 1.80 2.75 6.25

(0.89) (0.84) (2.63) (3.40)
7.40 24.80 9.25 30.25

(2.61) (7.34) (1.89) (0.96)
0.20 2.60 0.25 3.00

0.20 2.60 0.50 2.75

(0.45) (1.14) (0.58) (1.26)
0.80 2.0 1.25 2.50

(.45) (0.71) (0.50) (1.73)
0.20 1.40 0.50 1.75

(0.45) (0.55) (0.56) (0.96)
0.80 2.40 0.50 4.75

(0.45) (1.67) (0.58) (0.50)
0.20 4.20 1.75 4.75

(0.45) (1.92) (0.50) (2.63)
161
The results after conducting a three-way analysis of variance for the Syllable
awareness performance measure showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16)
= 2.06, p = .17, EF = .11) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and
Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1, p = .54, EF = .02). Figure 2.13 shows the results for the
Syllable awareness measure. There were statistically significant main effects of Time
(F(1,16) = 32.27, p < .001, EF = .67) and Language background (F(1,16) = 9.81, p = .006,
EF = .38) – the latter effect suggesting that the Monolingual children (left-hand side of
the figure) were the better group on this Syllable awareness task.
Figure 2.13 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance

162
measure indicated a significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 4.87, p = .04, EF = .23)
which can be observed in Figure 2.14. Further evaluation using two-way analyses of
variance revealed a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors for the Bilingual children (F(1,7) = 1.72, p = .23, EF = .20), but a significant
interaction between Time and Intervention factors for the Monolingual children (F (1,9) =
4.65, p = .05, EF = .34). As displayed in figure 2.14, the Monolingual children (left-hand
side of the figure) showed greater gains than the Bilingual group, in Rhyme awareness
scores following both intervention orders.

163
The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Alliteration awareness
measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 1.32, p = .27, EF =
.08) and a non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1,
p = .65, EF = .01). Figure 2.15 below shows the results for the Alliteration awareness
task. The only statistically significant effect was a main effect of Time (F(1,16) = 17.45, p
< .001, EF = .52)

164
The findings attained after conducting a three-way analysis of variance showed a
non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 1.23, p = .29, EF = .07) – this is shown in
Figure 2.16. However, there was a significant interaction between Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,16) = 4.82, p = .04, EF = .23). This suggested that both the Monolingual and
Bilingual groups showed greater gains in phoneme isolation when the phonological
intervention was administered first. There was also a statistically significant main effect
of Time (F(1,16) = 38.87, p < .001, EF = .81).
Figure 2.16 Phoneme Isolation Awareness Task Performance

165
The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Phoneme
segmentation measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 1.30, p
= .27, EF = .08) and non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,16) = 2.91, p = .11, EF = .15) – see Figure 2.17.
Figure 2.17 Phoneme Segmentation Awareness Task Performance

166
Letter-sound task
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the letter-sound
correspondence assessment showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1,
p = .87, EF = .002) and a non-significant main effect between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,16) = 3.87, p = .07, EF = .20) – see Figure 2.18. There was a significant main
effect of Intervention (F(1,16) = 8.64, p = .010, EF = .35), with those in the Morphological
treatment group out-performing the other intervention group.

167
awareness inflection measure demonstrated a non-significant three-way interaction
(F(1,16) < 1, p = .46, EF = .04) and a non-significant interaction between Time and
Intervention factors (F(1,16) = 1.80, p = .20, EF = .10) – see Figure 2.19. The was a
statistically significant main effect of Time (F(1,16) = 84.49, p < .001, EF = .84).

168
After conducting a three-way analysis of variance for the Morphological
awareness derivation task, the results revealed a non-significant three-way interaction
(F(1,16) < 1, p = .69, EF = .010) and a non-significant interaction between Time and
Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1, p = .87, EF = .002) – see Figure 2.20. The only
significant main effect recorded was that of the Time factor (F(1,16) = 46.77, p < .001, EF
= .75).
Figure 2.20 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Performance

169
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Antonym production
measure displayed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .37, EF = .05)
and a non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) = 1.01, p
= .33, EF = .06) – see Figure 2.21. There was a statistically significant main effect of
Time (F(1,16) = 20.61, p < .001, EF = .56).

170
The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Synonym production
assessment revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) < 1, p = .56, EF =
.02) and a non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1,
p = .47, EF = .03) – see Figure 2.22. There was a statistically significant main effect of
Time (F(1,16) = 63.07, p < .001, EF = .80).

171
Word analogy task
The findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Word analogy measure
yielded a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 2.17, p = .16, EF = .12) and a
non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1, p = .47, EF
= .03) – see Figure 2.23. There was a statistically significant main effect of Time (F(1,16)
= 63.07, p < .001, EF = .84).

172
The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Text comprehension
assessment revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,16) = 1.97, p = .18, EF =
.11) and a non-significant interaction between Time and intervention factors (F(1,16) < 1,
p = .75, EF = .01) – see Figure 2.24. There was, however, a significant main effect of
Time (F(1,16) = 62.15, p < .001, EF = .80) and Intervention (F(1,16) = 4.71, p = .04, EF =
.23), with the Morphological Intervention group out-performing their peers on this
measure.

173
Comparison Control Group
Understanding the effect of normal language development and the effects of
regular classroom instruction in Grade 1 will help with the interpretation of the results.
Due to ethical reasons, control data could not be collected over the period of the study.
However, data from previous research conducted by Carson et al. (2013) within the
same New Zealand context can be used for comparison purposes. The 95 children in
the Carson et al. study closely matched the students in the current research in terms of
age and school year level. In addition, the control group in Carson et al.’s study was not
previously exposed to additional reading support services nor did they receive any
formal training in relation to the development of phonological awareness. Matching was
made possible through close examination of assessment outcomes that were
accessible for the students in the control group. Table 2.10 compares the performance
on measures of verbal and non-verbal skills, upon school entry, of children serving as
participants in the present study with those observed in Carson et al.’s previous
research.
174
Note. TONI = Test of Non-verbal Intelligence Standard Scores (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Ehrler & McGhee, 2008); CELF –
P2 RLI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Receptive Language Index (M = 100, SD = +/-15)
(Wiig et al., 2006); CELF – P2 ELI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Expressive Language
Index (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Wiig et al., 2006); Portion of results derived from a computer-based phonological
awareness assessment designed by Carson et al. (2013), wherein RO = rhyme oddity, IPI = initial phoneme identity and
PS = phoneme segmentation.
175
Participants in the present study, who were provided with instructional training,
were observed to display gains in scores as early as five weeks; with improvement
continuously increasing toward final assessment (i.e. 10th week), compared to the slow
progression shown by children in the Carson et al. (2013) study who were assigned to
receive only the regular classroom literacy curriculum (i.e. whole language approach
concentrating on meaning plus phonics instruction) for the entire year. Figures 2.25,
2.26 and 2.27 contrast the trajectory of phonological awareness development across
time for the following measures: rhyme awareness, phoneme isolation and phoneme
segmentation. Learners in the present study, representative of the group of children with
specific language deficiencies who had been administered with explicit phonological
awareness training, shows immediate increase in scores in the first few weeks as
opposed to those students who were not placed in any form of intervention program.
176
177
Discussion
The research investigation presented in this chapter sought to assess the
effectiveness of implementing a phonological and morphological awareness intervention
approach, in facilitating the advancement of reading-related skills, with a particular focus
on reading comprehension in the form of enhancing word meaning and text
comprehension.
Findings from the experiment, taking into consideration the New Zealand context,
revealed that children exhibiting specific language weaknesses showed positive
responses to the administered treatment approaches; based on significant gains in the
scores on most measures assessed over the course of the study. Such findings suggest
that although the consequences of language deficits have been described as being
cumulative and pervasive on learning and acquisition of language, these deficiencies
are pliant to change over time and improvements can be attained given appropriate
intervention. A second point to note is that the present research indicated that the
amount of time required to enact favorable results in at-risk populations could be shorter
than found by previous researchers (for example Gillon, 2005 and Gillon & McNeill,
2009). In this thesis, children attended a maximum of 20 sessions equating to an overall
total of 15 hours intervention time. The improvement of performance scores in the
training program may be attributed to the weekly individual and small-group sessions
administered to the learners that may have reinforced the targeted literacy and
language skills in such a short time.

178
The findings also suggest that short-term interventions that focus on
metalinguistic awareness training, especially those that emphasize the development of
phonological and morphological knowledge, can be used in conjunction with regular
teaching occurring in primary schools in New Zealand. Such interventions may
complement with existing practice that focus on whole language approaches or phonics
instruction. This would further ensure that learners are developing the required
capabilities when they approach literacy instruction.
Likewise, the present study suggests that focusing on explicit instruction among
school-aged children with specific language weaknesses, through the use of
interventions that target syllable-level and phoneme-level skills, may lead to a positive
influence on the learners’ explicit awareness of the sound structures of a language.
Learners, especially those under the phonological awareness training, were able to
display increases in scores on the syllable awareness, phoneme isolation and text
comprehension tasks. This indicates the beneficial impact of phonological awareness
training in advancing perception of large and small units of sound and gives further
credence to the claim that children who struggled with literacy in the early years due to
severe limitations in phonological awareness can respond favorably to specific
phonological awareness instructional programs that incorporate phonological
awareness activities. The improvements in the processing of phonemes indicates that
even the most demanding of phonological tasks can be promoted after constant and
continuous exposure to explicit instruction.

179
In addition, the gains in scores observed in the text comprehension task may
signify evidence that children with specific language weaknesses can efficiently use
phonological cues in the reading process, if guided accordingly. The enhanced
performance may also have been influenced by the teaching approach made up of
working out letter-sound correspondences, blending and segmenting words in reading
connected text. Since phonological awareness was merged with sound-symbol
knowledge, students were not taught to simply decode sounds within words in isolation.
Hence, the disconnection that traditional instructional methods promote in reading
programs between grasping the strategy for learning and knowing how to derive
meaning from the text are prevented. Also, the significant gains in the text
comprehension task indicate that phonological awareness training may contribute to
reading comprehension through its relevance in boosting efficient word reading skills.
The outcome was consistent with previous research findings that have emphasized the
importance of developing phonemically-structured representations in successful reading
of alphabetic scripts (Metsala & Walley, 1998). Failure to enhance such representations
was deemed responsible for compounding deficits in learning to read (Hulme &
Snowling, 2009, Szenkovits & Ramus, 2005).
Moreover, morphological knowledge of derivations was recorded to have
improved after five weeks of intervention, this time, among participants initially provided
with morphological awareness training. This may be surprising because although Grade
1 students have basic knowledge of derived forms, such knowledge should be much
less than their understanding of base and inflected forms (Anglin, 1993): past research
180
on morphological awareness has pointed out that knowledge in inflections becomes
evident earlier than that of derivations (Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000; Tyler & Nagy,
1989). However, the increase in scores of students under the morphological awareness
group on the word analogy derivation task may be explained by the presence of words
that have high phonological transparency (i.e. base words remain intact in the derived
form after the word’s transformation). The number of phonologically transparent words
in the word analogy inflection task was only a third as much as that of the derivation
task. An example of phonological transparency evident in the word derivation task is
demonstrated in the item mess:messy::fun:______; where a child can easily supply the
missing derived form funny because the base word ‘fun’ remains the same and even
retains its pronunciation after the word transformation. Equally important to mention is
that many of the phonologically transparent items included in the word derivation task
are high frequency words leading to greater chances of familiarity (e.g. Item -
teach:teacher::work:______ Answer: worker). This finding was consistent with earlier
literature reporting that factors relating to word frequency, familiarity and transparency
perform a significant role in gauging a reader’s cognizance of morphological structure.
Carlisle and Stone (2005) reported that children can instantly and accurately read
derived words that are considered phonologically transparent and highly frequent;
compared to those that have low frequency and undergo greater phonological shifts in
transformation. The authors of the test from which the current measure was adapted
(Kirby et al., 2012), attested that the morphological awareness measure was reasonably
reliable for Grade 1 students (Reliability Coefficient = 0.80), and conducted regression
analyses to argue for the construct validity of the word analogy measures (see Kirby et
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al., 2012). However, future studies on different aspects relating to morphological
awareness to help clarify the inter-relationships between the factors discussed in this
paragraph are vital. Still, the results of the current research suggest that children
presenting with specific language weaknesses appear vulnerable to morphological
complexities of derived words with base forms obscured by the application of
phonological shifts (e.g. twelve to twelfth). This may indicate that the lack of a robust
fundamental knowledge on the phonological structures of a language may be linked to
learner’s deficiencies in generating the target derived forms.
The lack of a significant interaction effect observed for the task requiring
morphological knowledge on inflections, may be due to the more natural development of
such knowledge occurring within the Year 1 students. This may have led all children
showing the same level of increase in knowledge irrespective of the intervention
method. It was also observed that the participants encountered difficulty with
complicated inflection transformations, as they tend to overgeneralize rules applying the
past tense inflection –ed to signify the past tense form of the word. An example would
be in the item push:pushed::lose:_______, where all children answered ‘losed’ instead
of the correct word ‘lost.’ Such errors indicate that learners have an implicit
understanding of inflectional morphological rules despite supplying answers that are
orthographically and phonologically incorrect. This latter important aspect of
morphological tasks may also be influenced by phonological training – recognizing that
‘losed’ was phonologically incorrect may have supported performance in this task also.
Hence, as mentioned above, further research will be needed to determine the specific
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effects of such training, and how learning can be optimized with such young learners
with a range of language weaknesses.
The study showed no specific effects on the letter-sound knowledge task of
phonological awareness training. It was assumed that children administered with
phonological awareness training would better foster mappings of sound-symbol
correspondences than those training in morphological awareness. Previous research
investigations in the United States, involving 358 pre-school children tested using a
comprehensive battery of assessments in blending, rhyme, letter-sound knowledge,
elision, and receptive vocabulary, demonstrated that letter knowledge and phonological
knowledge have a bidirectional relationship (Lerner & Lonigan, 2016; Burgess &
Lonigan, 1998). However, both phonological and morphological awareness groups
showed improvements in letter-sound awareness. This may be attributed to the degree
of activation stimulated among the children upon seeing a component letter found in
morphemes they are familiar with. It is possible that learners create a visual or symbolic
representation of morphemic units that can be tapped when faced with a low frequency
or unfamiliar letter string. Hence, morphological training can also support the links
between letters and sounds as much as phonological training.
Within the context of this study, between the two treatment approaches, the
phonological awareness training resulted in immediate positive outcomes in text
comprehension as opposed to the morphological awareness intervention. This does not
suggest the complete disregard of teaching morphemic units, but rather the success of
a phonological approach may be due to the type of reading comprehension test derived
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from the WRMT-III. This test comprised short sentences with simple words that contain
conceptually straightforward ideas. The major factor in attaining success in the said task
was whether students can read the individual words within the sentence. In addition,
since phonological awareness instruction was complemented with letter-sound
knowledge, children initially introduced to the treatment may have effectively mapped
and blended graphemes symbolizing phonemes into recognizable forms. Also, use of
printed texts in the teaching activities may have helped in storing individual sight words
in the children’s memory and the stories discussed may have supported the retention of
the said connections in memory. On the contrary, the morphological awareness
approach relied more on spoken narratives and a good deal of inferring figurative
language through listening or graphic images unaccompanied by written text, which
may have led to less use of information learnt to future literacy tasks.
Furthermore, performance evaluation conducted after the second intervention was
implemented, showed that both intervention groups continued to display improvements.
In particular, those initially administered with phonological awareness instruction
followed by morphological awareness training further advanced participants’ phoneme-
level skills (phoneme isolation and alliteration awareness), even enhancing letter-sound
knowledge and text comprehension as evidenced by the said learners’ improved
scores. The positive literacy outcome showing an interface between phonological and
morphological awareness training may be explained by the idea of the English language
being morphophonemic in structure; signifying that representations of words are crafted
via the merging of phonological and morphological principles (Reed, 2008).

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On the other hand, those provided with morphological awareness training and later
given phonological awareness instruction also experienced increases in performance
scores on measures of morphology (inflection and derivation) and word-meaning
(antonyms, synonyms and word analogy). This specific finding corroborates the
discoveries made by Cohen-Goldberg et al. (2013) in their previous study which
conclude that phonological and morphological processes are closely interrelated. The
gains in morphological knowledge performance scores after the morphological
awareness training group received phonological awareness instruction (second
intervention) evinces the idea that substantial morphological knowledge heavily mounts
on recognition of phonological units and that struggling reader’s impediment with
morphology is at least a portion of the expression of some form of phonological
constraint (Fowler & Liberman, Shankweiler et al., 1995). Such outcomes in the study
suggests that phonological awareness may have a stronger influence on success than
morphological awareness for beginning readers with language deficits, as it boosts
reading comprehension by allowing straightforward processing of uncomplicated
English words. Although the participants observed may have identified words or
characters in the given assessments by initially sounding them out, the short words
involved may have allowed the ease and speed upon which individual words are
recognized and recalled based on adequate background knowledge.
The outcome further indicates that in designing literacy intervention strategies for
young children with language weaknesses, the establishment of adequate phonological
awareness and representations through efficient letter-sound mappings may be critical

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and can be paired with activities focusing on the enhancement of meaning via
morphemic awareness only if such multi-morphemic words occur with greater frequency
in text and possess high phonological transparency.
The current investigation also investigated whether the language background of the
students influenced performance results. Two groups of learners were compared: a
monolingual language-weak and bilingual language-weak group, both studying in New
Zealand. Statistical analyses revealed that no consistent significant difference between
monolingual and bilingual language weak learners were evident over the first five week
intervention. These results suggest that the two groups may have benefitted equally
from the metalinguistic awareness intervention. However, there were instances where
the bilingual language weak learners seem to outperform the monolingual language
weak learners on the phoneme-based measures. One possible explanation for an
advantage in the tasks may be that the bilingual learners’ exposure to shared phonetic
units in more varying settings (due to regular experience of another language) than their
monolingual counterparts. This may be partly related to the language backgrounds of
many of the participants in the bilingual language group: i.e. Tagalog, Spanish and
Samoan. These languages appear to have a certain degree of phonological similarity
with English, which may have led to positive cross-linguistic influences that increased
their phonological awareness. Much like the English language, Samoan, Spanish, and
Tagalog have a full series of voiced and voiceless bilabial stops (i.e. /p/, /b/ and /m/), the
three nasals (i.e. /n/, /m/ and /ŋ/), a liquid /l/, and fricatives (i.e. /f/ and /s/) (Montanari,
2011; Westerveld, 2013). Hearing two instead of one language may possibly have
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fostered an intensification of phoneme discrimination, allowing phonological
differentiation to develop precociously. However, further research is needed to
determine whether these positive effects are real and whether interventions can benefit
from them.
This, along with the combined intervention methods allowed them the opportunity to
consolidate such knowledge better than their monolingual peers. Still, it should be noted
that such close performance result between the two groups may be attributed to the
New Zealand bilingual language weak learners being exposed to a more English-
speaking dominant environment: English being the language of instruction utilized in
their schools, as well as the main language experienced in the community around them.
This implies that in such given context, interventions originally designed for a
monolingual population may be employed to enhance the same targeted skills for a
bilingual cohort.
Limitations and future directions
Still, a level of caution needs to be exercised when endeavoring to generalize
conclusions related to specific language weaknesses. First, for ethical reasons, a
control group comprising of students who were untreated was not included as part of
the study, Hence, it hindered proper evaluation of the effect of normal language
development or of regular classroom instruction in grade 1.
The relatively small number of participants comprising the sample may limit the
extent upon which the findings could be generalized. Nonetheless, the randomized
cross-over design and repeated measures ANOVA were designed to address such
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limitations and enhance accuracy of evaluation. In addition, the findings of the research
are consistent with previous studies that investigated phonological awareness
intervention effects (Zens et al., 2009 & Carson et al., 2013) and morphological
awareness training for learners in the early grades (Apel & Diehm, 2013; Ghesquière &
Law, 2017; Kirk & Gillon, 2007; Ramirez et al., 2013). Despite this, validation of the
outcomes of the treatment approaches described in this research would be supported
by research with a larger sample size of participants, and using a design that allowed
the inclusion of a control group.
Furthermore, a standardized measure of morphological awareness would be
useful to differentiate individual learners’ level of proficiency and provide a more reliable
distinction on how varying aspects of morphological awareness are developing in
relation to early literacy. Further research that clearly identifies the effectiveness of
various intervention models, content areas and delivery approaches will expand our
understanding of beneficial strategies and practices that will assist students optimize
their potential in all areas of linguistic development.
Clinical and Educational Implications
The research investigation involved the introduction of phonological awareness
training that demonstrated the effectiveness of developing not only larger sound units
(i.e. syllables and rhymes), but also phoneme-level skills crucial to the achievement of
early literacy outcomes (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Catts et al., 1999; Gillon, 2005; Carson
et al., 2013). These data highlight the value of detailed instruction of sound structures to
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emerging readers, as it facilitates later reading and spelling among children, including
those with language weaknesses (Carson et al., 2013).
The study also espouses the importance of morphological awareness and the
provision of explicit morphological awareness instruction involving smallest meaningful
word units (i.e. morphemes) to school-aged learners in English (Bowers et al., 2010;
Carlisle, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). The results indicate that young learners with
language weaknesses, regardless of whether they are monolingual or bilingual, can
show improvements both in phonological awareness and morphological knowledge.
Hence, the current study argues for the instruction of morpheme and phoneme
awareness to be introduced early to alleviate the detrimental effects of deficits in these
these areas on the development of literacy.
School-aged children who present with specific language weaknesses should be
considered “highly-vulnerable” for continuing literacy complications, as their linguistic
abilities create a negative impact on their reading and spelling skills. The findings from
this research advocate the need for an integrated phonological and morphological
awareness training, even for children aged 5 and 6 years old, in order to facilitate
improved discrimination of larger sound structures (i.e., rhyme & syllable), to enhance
phoneme-level skills, and to develop morphological knowledge (i.e., derivation), word
analogy skills and sentence comprehension capabilities. However, practitioners should
also realize that even when such students appear to attain success brought about by
early intervention, the need for constant supervision, practice and provision of self-
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teaching opportunities may be vital to develop lasting strategies that will equip children
to become autonomous language learners.
Conclusions
This study argues that both phonological and morphological awareness can be
taught to school-aged children as young as five years old and who show evidence of
language weaknesses. This is made possible by explicit teaching which paves the way
for advancing literacy skills of emerging readers. Such introduction of phonological
awareness will lead to improved awareness in larger sound structures (syllables and
rhymes), as well as develop familiarity and proficiency in identification of small sound
units (phonemes). Furthermore, morphological awareness training (strengthened by
phonological knowledge) should facilitate improvements in text comprehension. Both
treatment approaches can be effectively delivered through high-quality supportive
classroom-based instruction by a trained educator. The results of the research indicate
that intervention programs delivered individually and in small groups can further
outcomes in reading-related areas for children who may be deprived of experiencing
academic success by their inhibiting language deficits.

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Chapter 3 Impact of Classroom-based Phonological and

Morphological Awareness Intervention Approaches on Literacy Skills
of Emerging Readers in the Philippines – A Bilingual Context
The attainment of proficiency in reading words has been cited in previous
research as critical in the development of children’s literacy (Coltheart, 2006; Ehri, 2005;
Roman et al., 2009; Verhoeven, Reitsma & Seigel, 2011). This has become a
continuous challenge for countries that promote the importance of learning English as a
second language, such as the Philippines. The primary reason why this is a challenge is
that there is a complex relationship between spelling and sounds in English which can
impede learning. Although the English spelling system is not as irregular as some may
suggest (see discussions in Moats, 2006), with only 14% of common English words
classified as phonetically ‘irregular’ (Moats, 2000), there are still a large number of
potentially complex rules in English that are context or historically based, and
determined as much by morphological relationships as phonological form. For instance,
an individual may need to know when to use “ck” as in lock and when to use “k” as in
look. Likewise, complications arise when a phoneme such as /k/ can be represented by
two different letters, “k” and “c.” The latter takes on the /k/ sounds in cake, but is also
used to signify the /s/ sound as in century and celebrate. The English orthography rule
that the sound of “c” normally varies dependent on the following vowel sound (apart
from a few exceptions) shows that there is a degree of regularity, but that the
relationships are complex and rarely taught in schools explicitly. More variations in
phoneme-grapheme associations can be found in words that are orthographically
similar, but in fact do not rhyme (e.g. cough, plough; paid, said). Such variations are
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also present in words that are orthographically different, yet when read aloud do in fact
rhyme (e.g. rays, raise; air, heir). The importance of word origins and morphological
relationships can be seen in the latter examples: air comes from ‘aer’ or ‘aero’
(Latin/Greek origins), which links it to the old form of aeroplane, whereas heir (French-
Latin origins) is related to heredity, but is often pronounced without the /h/ sound that
would more easily link to its origins.
Prior studies made by reading specialists have shown the importance of
developing phonological and morphological awareness among learners (Carlisle, 2000;
Goswami, 2008; Kirby et al. 2012, Melby-Lervag, Lyster & Hulme, 2012) – and see
previous chapters in this thesis. Such awareness also holds great promise among
second language learners of English to enhance their competence in navigating the
seemingly endless shifting sands of language learning.
Phonological Awareness across languages
According to Gillon and McNeill (2014), the development of an individual’s
phonological awareness is not exactly language specific. This claim was supported by
earlier researchers who explained that the same mental process employed to create an
understanding of a sound structure inherent in words of a particular language can be
utilised by the other alphabetic language (Corneau, Cormier, Grandmaison & Lacroix,
1999). Chiappe and Segel (1999) discovered that bilingual children who were
introduced to alphabetic written language in their first language (L1), and who were
taught English as a second language, display related phonological awareness skills in
the two languages. Additionally, data suggest that the sequence of developing
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phonological awareness is the same across alphabetic languages. Studies by Denton et
al. (2000), which focused on pre-reading Spanish-speaking learners, revealed that
participants were able to show early awareness of syllable, rhyme and alliteration, but
only demonstrated knowledge of phoneme segmentation after being exposed to
reading. Similarly, Cossu et al. (1988) showed that Italian children acquired syllable
segmentation before phoneme segmentation; and Ecalle & Magnan (2002) found that
young French students displayed awareness of larger sound structures (i.e., syllabic
level) before smaller units of sounds (i.e., phoneme level). Comparable knowledge of
phonological units across two languages have been found for speakers of English and
Samoan (Hamilton & Gillon, 2006). Relying on the fact that the development of
phonological awareness is linguistically universal creates an opportunity for bilingual
children with specific language weaknesses to approach a target language with greater
optimism, as this signifies positive transfer of metalinguistic phonological skills from one
language to another.
An example where second language learners benefited from a strengthening
effect of phonological intervention to improve English word reading was conducted by
Quiroga et al. (2000). In this study, Spanish speaking bilingual children improved their
skill in reading English words after receiving phonological awareness training for six
weeks. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that there is evidence to support that in a
non-alphabetic language, such as Chinese, phonological awareness is a predictor of
word reading (Song et al., 2016). The research involved looking into longitudinal
phonological awareness growth patterns in the Chinese language among primary

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students in Taiwan. The authors evaluated tasks that assessed the children’s phoneme
segmentation ability and found that a mere 13% performed above chance levels in year
1, but this figure increased to 35% by year 5. It seems that children can be taught to
become conscious of the internal phonemic features of a language, even when learning
an orthography that is considered non-alphabetic in nature.
Still, despite the evidence from cross-language studies indicating commonalities
in certain aspects of phonological awareness across languages, its relationship with
early reading development seems to vary with orthography (Everatt et al., 2010;
Seymour et al., 2003). Seymour et al. (2003) observed grade 1 students’ reading ability
across 14 countries in Europe. The researchers discovered that phonological
awareness appears to be a predictor of beginning reading in the languages investigated
irrespective of the level of orthographic depth. However, the authors added that the
students at the end of their first year in primary school read accurately and fluently in
orthographies classified to be more transparent such as Finnish, Spanish, Italian, Greek
and German: i.e., such languages have a simpler relationship between letters and
sounds. In contrast, Seymour et al. (2003) stated that the Scottish participants in their
research only attained 34% word reading accuracy in English over the same period. An
orthography characterized by regularity in sound-symbol representations may offer
greater benefits in enabling an individual to utilize phonological knowledge, particularly
in spelling and reading (Liow & Poon, 1998; Mayringer & Wimmer, 2000).
Research into bilingualism and second language learning has also attempted to
determine the potential for cross-language influences that may facilitate reading
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acquisition. As Odlin (2005) explained, “transfer” pertains to identifiable skills in the
target language (L2) which possess or carry traceable attributes of the first language /
mother tongue (L1). One crucial finding brought about by previous cross-linguistic
studies is that robust skills present in one language may aid corresponding
shortcomings in a second language (Bialystok, McBride-Chang & Luk, 2005). Again,
from a pragmatic perspective, this implies that enhancing metalinguistic skills in one
language can lead to the support of the corresponding skill in a target language.
However, caution is required not to overgeneralize the relationship between the
cognitive skills in L1 and those in L2, as these transfer effects may be influenced by
variables such as orthographic features or structural relationships between the
languages involved (Bialystok et al., 2003; Dodd, So & Lam, 2008; Kuo & Anderson,
2012). Despite the need for caution, there is still a substantial amount of evidence
arguing for the transfer of phonological knowledge across languages (Adesope, Lavin,
Thompson & Ungerleider, 2010; Melby-Lervag & Lervag, 2011).
Morphological Awareness and bilingualism
Once young learners enter school, they immediately face an ever-increasing
demand of academic tasks that require linguistic competency. For bilingual English
language learning children with specific language weaknesses, school is likely to be
challenging, given the hurdles they face in producing and understanding two languages
in both oral and written forms. Given the fact that a multitude of linguistic factors serve
as areas of deficit for such individuals, it is crucial to consider and to offer an
intervention approach that targets the simultaneous improvement of both spoken and
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written modalities. One potential form of treatment that holds greater promise is the
explicit teaching of morphological awareness. Previous research has shown its capacity
to concurrently enhance decoding, semantics, syntax, spelling and reading
comprehension (Carlisle, 2003; Apel & Diehm, 2014; Tong, Deacon & Cain, 2014).
It has been documented that children expand their vocabulary knowledge by
utilizing meanings of familiar base words and affixes to the unknown words (Wolter &
Green, 2013; Anglin, Miller & Wakefield, 1993). For children learning a second
language, morphological awareness training may complement vocabulary development
in the target language. Furthermore, as vocabulary acquisition is facilitated, reading
comprehension should also be improved (Bowers & Kirby, 2010; Guo, Roehrig &
Williams, 2011; Deacon, Kirby, Cain & Parilla, 2011). For example, familiarization of
second language learners with words such as ‘odor’ (i.e., an unpleasant or distinctive
scent) and ‘dangerous’ (i.e. state of being in danger) may assist in the inference of the
new meaning of a previously unknown word ‘odorous’ (i.e. state of giving off a pungent
smell) (Carson& Nippold, 2007; Ram, Marinellie, Benigno & McCarthy, 2013; Wolter,
Carlisle, Goodwin & Wagner, 2012). Since the meanings contained in a number of
morphologically-complex words may be derived from meanings of their simplest
component units, conscious understanding of a word’s morphological structure may aid
the aforementioned children to learn new vocabulary and, in the end, comprehend novel
words they face in their reading (Baumann et al., 2002; Baumann, Edwards & Kame’
enue, 2003). Furthermore, morphologically complex words with meanings that are
easily visualized (e.g., autumnal) seem to be readily produced in a morphological

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awareness task compared to more abstract and obscure referents (e.g., wisdom)
(Wolter, 2015). The explicit instruction of morphological structure may also promote
word recognition and written word pronunciation, which may be beneficial to bilingual
school-aged students with language weaknesses who may be unaware that some
words they come across with have the same roots because of shifts in vowels (e.g.
relate, relative), modifications in production of consonants (e.g. magic, magician) and
non-utterance of letters deemed silent in some contexts (e.g. sign, signal) (Wolter &
Collins, 2017).
However, perhaps the most significant contribution of a morphological awareness
intervention is its potential to increase student motivation, implemented through learner-
facilitated problem-solving themes (Wolter & Collins, 2017) and themes of “student
detectives” (Bowers et al., 2010; Goodwin et al., 2012). Such approaches have been
shown to be invaluable to children, especially those with language learning difficulties
who may lack executive functioning or the ability to organize, consolidate and assess
one’s thought processes (Berninger & O’Malley, 2011). The same may be true for
young learners of a second language – again, these methods may increase motivation
to learn. Intervention that require children to utilize their executive functioning to solve
problems in activities presented as a game are likely to be beneficial. Self-discovery
provides a better means of sustaining student involvement compared to models that are
simply centered on memorization (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). In addition to engagement,
Hidi and Renninger (2006) adds that the morphological awareness approach leads to
self-regulated learning. When appropriately guided, students with language learning

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deficiencies may draw their attention to unfamiliar words in texts, determine
recognizable morphemic units and endeavor to derive meaning based on existing
understanding or background knowledge. They then learn to check their metalinguistic
decisions, which serve to scaffold language and literacy development.
The interest in the provision of morphological awareness instruction has been
fueled by positive results exhibited by explicit training to recognize and manipulate small
segments within words that carry meaning. Such interventions have been discovered to
boost literacy development, as it facilitates learners’ performance in both reading and
spelling (i.e. real words and pseudo-words in English) (Carlisle & Stone, 2005; Deacon
& Kirby, 2004; Nunes, Bryant & Bindman, 2006; Singson, Mahoney & Mann, 2000).
Research in the relative contribution of morphological awareness to language and
literacy development has also been conducted in languages other than English.
Languages that are considered orthographically-complex have yielded similar findings
for the efficacy of morphological awareness training in advancing reading and spelling
skills of learners. These were reported in studies of students with French (Casalis &
Louis-Alexandre, 2000) or Dutch (Assink, Vooijs & Knuijt, 2000) as their first language.
Other studies have focused on European languages characterized with highly
transparent orthographies; for instance, Finnish and Norwegian. In a Finnish language
study, authors Muller and Brady in 2001 revealed an association between
morphological awareness and reading. The researchers pointed out for those in their
first elementary school year, morphological awareness is a unique contributor to reading
comprehension. A study on kindergarteners using Norwegian as their mother tongue

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revealed similar findings, arguing for the importance of morphological awareness
instruction and its association to improved reading outcomes (Lyster, 2002). A
subsequent longitudinal study highlighted the impact of morphological awareness and
its long-term effects on the literacy skills of school-aged children six years after initial
training (Lyster, Lervag & Hulme, 2016).
Studies conducted in Greek, considered to possess a phonologically transparent
orthography (see Seymour et al., 2003), showed inflectional awareness contributing to
word and non-word reading in the lower grades of primary school (Rothou & Padiliadu,
2014; Pittas & Nunes, 2014). De Freitas, Da Mota & Deacon (2018) investigated the
effects of morphological awareness in relation to reading in Portuguese (another
relatively transparent orthography). The authors observed 132 fourth grade Portuguese
speaking children and found out that, after controlling phonological awareness and
nonverbal ability, morphological awareness influences word reading accuracy, word
fluency, and reading comprehension.
Not only is the morphological structure instrumental in furthering reading
outcomes in a first language, but it may also play a vital role in in supporting
comprehension of English as a second language. Searching for correlational evidence
that outlines the association between morphological awareness and reading the
outcomes of English language learners, Kieffer & Lesaux (2012) conducted an
investigation among grade six students who represented four major differing language
groups in the United States: Spanish, Vietnamese, Filipino and Native English
speakers. Analysis using multiple-group structural equation modelling applied on the

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data showed that morphological awareness contributed significantly to reading
comprehension, after controlling for the effects of word reading fluency and reading
vocabulary. It was noteworthy to mention that the effects were found to be similar
across the four language groups, suggesting an important role for morphological
awareness in influencing English reading comprehension across learners from diverse
home language backgrounds. Furthermore, a study by Zhang (2016) in Singapore
among fourth grade Malay-English bilinguals indicated that after conducting second
language (i.e., English) morphological awareness training, significant gains in English
word reading ability were evident among the participants. A more recent investigation
on weak English as Foreign Language (EFL) readers in Saudi Arabia by Kahn-Horwitz
and Saba (2017) revealed that English home language and knowledge of derivational
morphological structure directly predicted reading comprehension levels among female
high school Arabic students of low socio-economic background. In addition, the study
yielded that awareness of morphological structures mediated the link between first
language, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge and EFL reading
comprehension.
Variations in orthographic systems (alphabetic vs logographic) and morphological
structures (morphologically transparent vs morphologically complex) may also increase
our understanding of the impact of morphological awareness on reading comprehension
and whether cross-linguistic transfer of morphological skills is possible. In a study of the
contribution of morphological awareness to first language comprehension in a
morphologically complex language (i.e. Hebrew) by Vaknin-Nusbaum (2016), 60 second

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graders and 40 third graders reading comprehension was examined. An awareness of
inflections, derivations and construct formation was found to predict levels of Hebrew
reading comprehension after controlling for the effect of vocabulary. The results suggest
that in languages considered morphologically rich, morphological awareness has an
influence on reading comprehension starting at the early stages of reading acquisition.
Research on Mandarin Chinese revealed that Chinese second grade learners
use both sub-lexical (i.e. capability to employ meaning based on cues of semantic
radicals within a particular compound symbol) and lexical level morphological
awareness (i.e. capability to comprehend and manipulate single characters /
morphemes constituting Chinese compound words) in word reading (Tong, Tong &
McBride-Chang, 2017). In addition, their meta-analyses of data from 64 research
investigations indicated that morphological awareness showed good correlations with
reading levels both in English and in Chinese, with influences most evident on
measures of reading comprehension.
The Present Study
Although previous research investigations have reported the significance of
developing phonological and morphological awareness in helping children attain
literacy, many such studies have focused on native speakers of English. No study to
date, especially in the Philippines, has evaluated which between the two metalinguistic
skills (i.e., phonological and morphological awareness) would facilitate immediate
literacy improvement, particularly among typically-developing learners and language
weak students who were introduced to the English language first than their supposedly
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mother tongue. Thus, the primary purpose of the current research was to identify
whether a phonological or morphological awareness intervention would lead to
immediate observable gains in phonological awareness, morphological knowledge and
reading comprehension scores of grade 1 students in the Philippines.
A subsequent question of interest in the study was to assess whether a 15-hour
treatment approach, spanning ten (10) consecutive weeks, would advance
metalinguistic and reading comprehension skills of year 1 students experiencing
difficulties in learning the English language within a bilingual context.
In the current research, the same intervention methods and the same criteria for
selecting language weak children outlined in Chapter 2 were used. Children referred by
their teachers as having specific language weaknesses showed a range of language
weaknesses. For example, they were reported to have shortcomings in using copula
forms (i.e., a word linking the subject to its complement such as “She’s sad” or “The
boy’s naughty”).
Research Questions
(9) Will the phonological awareness or morphological awareness intervention
approach implemented in the classroom result in a significant difference in the
language assessment scores, including word meaning and text comprehension,
after five weeks among typically-developing bilinguals and bilingual language
weak year 1 students in the Philippines?

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(10) Will the phonological awareness and/or morphological awareness
intervention result in significantly higher word meaning and text comprehension
levels after ten weeks?
(11) Is there a significant difference in the outcomes of typically-developing
bilinguals and bilingual language weak year 1 students?
Methods
Participants
A total of thirty-two school-aged children were recruited in the research after
meeting the inclusion criteria and upon approval from the Educational Research Human
Ethics Committee of the University of Canterbury. However, this was reduced to 31
children after one child’s parents decided to remove their child from the study after the
first two weeks of data collection. Therefore, thirty-one students completed the program.
The mean age of students involved in the research was six years and three months (SD
= .274) and comprised of fifteen children with specific language weaknesses and
sixteen typically-developing bilingual language learners. The participants observed in
the Philippines were Filipino children capable of using two languages (i.e. Filipino and
English). They were all born and raised in the Philippines, and both parents were
Filipinos. The Filipino children who participated in the research study were exposed to
the English language first before learning the Filipino language (i.e. Tagalog). Although
the participants are able to communicate in English and Filipino, there is stronger
preference in using English rather than Tagalog. They use English as the language of
communication with teachers, friends and family. Formal exposure to Filipino would
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most often be during class time, when it is taught as a special subject in school: these
students were not experiencing a bilingual curriculum, as all teaching
instruction was conducted in English except for the Filipino language special
subject. However, these children will have needed to communicate in Tagalog in the
local community where they live and will have extended experiences of Tagalog as part
of media and cultural events (such as during church or social gatherings).
The learners who took part in the study were from twelve large classes with an
average of 20 to 25 students from three schools within the National Capital Region,
Metro Manila, Philippines. The participants attend private institutions with family income
classified in the middle to upper income class based on the 2015 (Family Income
Expenditure Survey conducted by the government agency Philippine Statistics
Authority.
Out of the total sample, fifteen were girls and seventeen were boys. The
participants were further placed into two groups, with roughly half of each group of
students randomly assigned to Group A – PA1MA2 (i.e., learners who started with
phonological awareness training followed by a morphological awareness approach) and
the remaining students placed in Group B – MA1PA2 (i.e., students who were
introduced to a morphological awareness instruction followed by a phonological
awareness intervention).
School administrators, teachers, parents and students were given information
sheets and research consent forms to confirm participation in the program. It was
ensured that drop-in sessions prior the implementation of the experiment were
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scheduled by the researcher to discuss the, overview, background, aims, procedures
and timeline of the research. The sessions also served as an opportunity to answer any
queries related to the study. The researcher ensured that standards set by the
University of Canterbury’s Educational Research Human Ethics Committee were
observed and maintained throughout the implementation and duration of the
investigation.
The assessments given to the participants were conducted in a quiet area of the
classroom within school hours. It was also ensured that none of the participating
students were enrolled in any other intervention that targets the improvement of
language or reading difficulties.
In order to be classified as typically-developing, children needed to attain a score
within or above the average range on the succeeding standardized language
assessments:
• Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool (CELF-P2; Wiig et
al., 2006): Receptive or Expressive Language Index Score is within or above the
composite score of 85-115
• Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness (PIPA ; Dodd
Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000): A standard score of 7-13
(considered the average range) in four out of six subset skills relating to
phonological awareness
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• Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (PTONI; Ehrler & McGee, 2008): A score
from 85-115 is regarded as within average range
Meanwhile, in order to be characterized as a child with specific language weakness,
the succeeding criteria for inclusion needs to be met:
• Cognitive ability is considered normal based on school and clinical reports
• Sight, hearing and neurological disorders are not present (as reported in school
records)
• Articulation is reported to be within normal limits, as evidenced by typical oral
structure and function
• Non-verbal intelligence score is within the range of 85-115 based on the Primary
Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (PTONI; Ehrler & McGee, 2008)
• Receptive or Expressive Language Index Score based on the second edition of
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool (CELF-P2; Wiig et
al., 2006) is below the norm average of 85
• Scores in three out of six subset skill measures relating to phonological
awareness are below the standard norm average as evaluated in the Preschool
and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness (PIPA ; Dodd Crosbie,
MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000)
Based on actual practice, a child whose assessed performance is at least one
standard deviation below the mean is regarded to have impaired language skills
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(Tomblin, Freese & Record, 1992). Hence, a cut off was set in this study which is at
least one standard deviation below the mean average. Following selection, the
participants were randomly assigned in either Group A (PA1MA2) or Group B
(MA1PA2).
Assessment Measures
All assessment measures, as well as administrative guidelines reported in the
previous chapter (Chapter 2), were adopted in the research investigation discussed
in this current chapter.
Nonverbal Reasoning
The author used the Primary Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (PTONI) to evaluate
the reasoning abilities of the school-aged children. The format of the test requires
the participants to observe a series of images printed in the picture book and to
identify which item does not belong to the group by pointing at it. The test lasts from
five to fifteen minutes and requires minimal instructions. The test-retest reliability
was recorded to be excellent (0.94).
General Language Ability
In order to evaluate the participants’ overall language performance, as well as
communication skills in varying contexts, the author utilized the Clinical Evaluation of
Language Fundamentals (CELF-P2; Wiig et al., 2006). It is a standardized measure
that helps to identify the presence of a language disorder and to describe the nature
of it. This test further assists in evaluating a learners’ language strengths and
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communication needs, as it provides description of the students’ language
deficiencies. A score within the range of 85-115 means that the person’s language
development is within normal limits. The test-retest reliability correlation coefficients
range from adequate (.76) to excellent (.91). On the other hand, internal consistency
was measured ranging from 0.82 to 0.96 across the sub-tests.
Reading Comprehension
Children involved as participants in the study were given the Woodcock Reading
Mastery Test – 3rd edition (WRMT-III; Woodcock, 2011). The assessment measures
students’ understanding of word meanings by assessing antonyms, synonyms and
word analogies. In the context of this research, word meaning measures will be used
to refer to performance on these tasks.
The exam further tests another core component of reading - passage
comprehension. The said section of the test gauges the capability of a child to
examine a short passage, varying from one to three sentences, and provide the
missing word that suitably fits the sentence’s context. In this study, text
comprehension was the referent used to more clearly explain the task. A test-retest
reliability ranged from 0.83 to .88
Phonological Awareness
The standardized measure used tin the research to identify children with poor
phonological awareness was the Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological
Awareness (PIPA ; Dodd, Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000). The PIPA
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measures abilities in identifying initial letter sounds, isolating individual sounds,
naming letters and their corresponding sounds, segmenting syllables, distinguishing
number of sounds within words and detecting rhyming words. As an example, in one
measure such as the phoneme segmentation task, the examiner would show child a
picture, and would say the word referring to the image. The child would then be
given counters to show how many sounds are found within the word. Each of the
aforementioned subset test in the PIPA takes 4-5 minutes to administer, with the
whole test completed within 25 to 30 minutes. The test-retest reliability correlation
coefficients ranged from 0.78 to 0.96 across the six sub-tests.
Morphological Awareness Task
The measurement of morphological awareness was adapted from Kirk et al.’s
(2012) study that used word analogy to assess children’s ability to recognize and to
decompose the smallest meaningful units in the language. The test requires
students to provide the missing inflected or derived word in a series. The expected
answer is one that appropriately fills in the blank space. For example, in a particular
inflectional morpheme item, the learner is given the words “push : pushed; jump :
_______.” The student is expected to supply the word “jumped” which contains the
morpheme ‘– ed.’ Test-retest reliability were 0.72 and .077 respectively for test of
morphological knowledge in inflection and derivation.
Table 3.1 provides a summary of the mean student performance results in
various assessment measures, classified by treatment group (i.e. PA1MA2 vs
MA1PA2) administered. Meanwhile Table 3.2 outlines mean student performance

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results categorized by language ability (i.e. typically-developing bilingual English
language learners vs Bilingual English language learners with specific language
weaknesses). It may be seen from the aforementioned table that a receptive-
expressive gap exists for typically-developing bilinguals. The lower expressive
language index score may be attributed to typically-developing bilinguals having less
opportunities for contact and interaction with English-speaking individuals apart from
family context and educational institution settings. This aligns to the findings of
Gibson et al.’s (2014) research, which indicated that the extent of language
exposure is associated with the size of the expressive-receptive language gap
existing in bilingual children. Hence, the data suggested that participants still follow a
typical course of development, but at a slower pace, but the discrepancy between
expressive and receptive language skills was not observed atypical enough to be
considered a deviant language development.

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Table 3.1 School-entry performance on language and non-verbal intelligence measures based on treatment group
Note. PTONI = Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence Standard Scores (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Ehrler & McGhee, 2008);
CELF – P2 RLI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Receptive Language Index (M = 100, SD
= +/-15) (Wiig et al., 2006); CELF – P2 ELI = Clinical Evaluations of Language Fundamentals Preschool-2, Expressive
Language Index (M = 100, SD = +/-15) (Wiig et al., 2006); WRMT-III = Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (M = 100, SD =
+/-15) (Woodcock, 2011)
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Table 3.2 School-entry performance on language and non-verbal intelligence measures based on language ability
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Procedure
Two group of participants were selected to take part in the research. The first
group were bilingual English language learners observed to follow expected
language development based on results of the standardized language assessment.
The other group were also bilingual English language learners, but were
characterized to possess specific language weaknesses after meeting the set of
inclusion criteria.
Given the time required altogether for the pre-test standardized assessments,
roughly half of each group of children were randomly assigned in Group A (PA1MA2)
and the remaining half in Group B (MA1PA2). In the first treatment condition (i.e.
Group A – PA1MA2), the participants were first administered a total of 7.5 hours of
phonological awareness through individual and small group sessions lasting 45
minutes each for five weeks. The individual and group sessions were conducted
once a week each in a quiet area of the classroom within school hours. After five
weeks, an assessment using the described language measures mentioned earlier
was used to evaluate gains in students’ performance. Then, a morphological
awareness training commenced with the same number of treatment sessions and
the same allocated time duration periods as that of phonological awareness training.
Meanwhile, in treatment condition B (Group B – MA1PA2), the participants involved
received the reverse order of the intervention over the same time frame. The
particular crossover design used did not have a control group for ethical reasons.
Both interventions shared the same length of duration, and the two treatment
groups commenced their specific intervention in the same week. There was a two-
week wash out period (i.e., a period when an intervention was not implemented to
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eliminate possible carry-over effects of previous treatment) applied after
implementation of five weeks of training.
All the standardized language assessments were administered in groups of two
or three by the author and trained research assistants who are certified special
education teachers in the Philippines. A certified speech language pathologist
provided counsel and support. Individuals comprising the research team were blind
to the membership of each group and were not involved in the assignment of
learners to certain treatment approach. The members of the research group served
as liaison officers and carried out tests in selected schools. In this research, the
arrangement and implementation of the standardized assessment and informal
measure (i.e., morphological awareness test) were all administered in random order.
Drop-in sessions involving the primary researcher, research assistants, parents,
teachers and school administrators were scheduled to clarify research objectives,
discuss teaching content, outline procedures, streamline lesson delivery, answer
existing queries and identify areas of improvement. The joint sessions and
discussions were also done continuously with the research team to ensure
consistency and reliability of the treatment approach. An associate supervisor from
the University of the Philippines-Diliman likewise monitored the progress of the
study.
The results obtained from various standardized assessments were scored based
on the examiner’s manual included in the testing kits. The study took place from
November 2017 to April 2018, with a two-week washout period that was aligned with
the school holiday break at the end of the fifth week for students.
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Treatment Approaches
The two instructional training programs were designed to have equal period of
duration. The learners in Groups A and B were given an individual and group training
session both lasting 45 minutes each session for a total of 900 minutes or 15 hours
for ten weeks.
Uniformity in treatment delivery was maintained through the preparation and
production of a user guide that delineates activities for both interventions used in the
study. In addition, an introduction week was implemented to help establish rapport
with the learners. During this period, individual and group discussions were
implemented and children were given a class schedule based on arrangements
conducted with the participating schools. The schedule of intervention was varied to
control the impact of time effects on children’s performance. After the intervention, a
final week was allocated for synthesis and consolidation of lessons covered.
Phonological Awareness Training
In this research treatment approach, children were given explicit instruction
with the aim of intensifying their foundation on the sound structures that make up a
language; hence, learners were taught syllabic and phonemic awareness, letter-
sound knowledge and articulatory awareness were also emphasized. Meanwhile,
the development of the participant’s vocabulary was made possible through direct
instruction where they had the opportunity to interact with stories from books that
connect to their pre-existing knowledge. The phonological awareness training which
incorporates reading intervention was an adaptation of that used in Bowyer-Crane et
al.’s (2008) study. The current approach is similar as it integrates printed literature
through the use of books; with lessons on phoneme-grapheme knowledge, rhyming,

215
blending and segmenting. However, the present phonological awareness training is
shorter in duration, as group and individual sessions were only conducted once a
week due to limited approved contact hours set by participating schools. This was in
contrast to the twenty-week intervention program by Bowyer-Crane et al. (2008) that
lasted longer and that required students to attend sessions four times a week.
Morphological Awareness Training
Similar to the phonological awareness treatment approach, the morphological
awareness consists of two 45-minute lessons delivered every week for a total of 15
hours. The said program was a modified version combining Bowyer-Crane et al.’s
(2008) and Clarke et al.’s (2010) intervention approaches that aimed to increase
students’ ability to recognize, decompose and manipulate morphemic structures
through spoken narratives that require them to predict subsequent events, supply
missing information, infer underlying meaning and participate in the discovery of
meaning. The learners were constantly reminded to listen ‘proactively’ and to
remember key information vital in the completion of learning targets and attainment
of reading comprehension. Expansion of vocabulary was ensured by introducing
‘words of the day’ that were conveyed in lessons using the multi-context learning
approach devised by Beck et al. in 2002. The said method ensures learning of new
words through the employment of visual and physical mnemonics, drawings, concept
diagrams and verbal reasoning.
Strengthening of verbal skills was supported through vocabulary enrichment,
expressive language development, listening skill enhancement and spoken narrative
ability advancement. Activities embedded in each session required learners to
sequence and discuss events, describe events and places mentioned in the stories,
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give a personality profile of main subjects in the narratives and provide comments
about their relationship with other characters. The participants were given the
chance to monitor their own responses, as well as those of their peers.
The program was implemented by the primary researcher with emphasis on
simultaneous strengthening of specific language areas that include unlocking word
meanings, familiarizing with structure of words and spelling patterns found in words.
The main emphasis was to get students acquainted with commonly occurring
orthographic patterns that would enable them to make generalization of their learning
to a multitude of words. For instance, a particular task in the intervention required
sorting words that show orthographic change to the root word by adding the suffix –y
(i.e. sun to sunny; bubble to bubbly and rock to rocky). Despite having the same
suffix ending, the way the base word was spelled changed. In the first example, the
final consonant was repeated to keep the vowel short. Only the last word ‘rock’
retained its original base word.
Moreover, participants were encouraged to put newly learned vocabulary into
sentences to promote semantic awareness. They were likewise challenged to come
up with new words from a set of given affixes.
Both individual and group sessions follow a generalized format which include:
• Introduction and review of previous lesson
• Teaching of new vocabulary
• Speaking, listening and inferencing tasks
• Plenary (i.e. reflection on what was learned and achieved)

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Treatment Fidelity
The same measures implemented in the New Zealand study were adopted in
the Philippine study to ensure fidelity of treatment.
Furthermore, twenty percent of the total number of sessions implemented
were randomly selected for assessment in order to determine treatment integrity of
the training approach. An independent researcher, together with participating school
administrators and coordinators, confirmed that the treatment sessions were done as
intended and that it contained activities aptly described in the research design which
aimed to promote relevant strategies for linguistic awareness. Direct observations of
intervention sessions were randomly and continually conducted to ensure
consistency and accuracy of training to the research design. Weekly meetings with
the research team were conducted to identify any issues encountered and safeguard
experiment against any protocol deviations.
Data Analyses of the Philippine Cohort
Baseline Measures
A baseline assessment was conducted to ensure that participants in the
research met the inclusion criteria of the study. A series of independent samples t-
test were conducted to compare baseline students’ performance between the two
groups of participants (Group A - PA1MA2 and Group B – MA1PA2). The variable
gender was an exception as it was analysed using a Chi-square test.
The baseline results revealed that there is no significant difference between
typically-developing children and those presented with specific language
weaknesses in gender (χ2 = .313, p =.576), age (t (29) = -.133, p = .892) and non-
verbal intelligence (t(29) = -.189, p = .898). With regard to the language assessment
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measures, no significant difference between typically-developing and children with
specific language weaknesses were recorded in syllable segmentation (t (29) = .383,
p = .704), phoneme isolation (t (29) = -.785, p = .439) and synonyms (t (29) = -.967,
p = .341. However, there were significant differences between the groups in reading
comprehension (t (29) = -11.679, p < .001), receptive language index (t (29) = -
10.505, p < .001), expressive language index (t (29) = .199, p < .001), rhyme
awareness (t (29) = -3.194, p = .003), alliteration awareness (t (29) = -2.437, p =
.021), phoneme segmentation (t (29) = -3.046, p = .005), phoneme-grapheme
correspondence (t (29) = -2.325, p = .027), morphological awareness – inflections (t
(29) = -2.557, p = .016), morphological awareness – derivations (t (29) = -3.895, p =
.001), antonyms (t (29) = -5.934, p < .001), word analogy (t (29) = -2.462, p = .020)
and text comprehension (t (29) = -5.364, p < .001).
Baseline results comparison of students in the two treatment conditions (i.e.
Group A - PA1MA2 and Group B – MA1PA2) showed that there were no significant
differences in gender (χ2 = .027, p =.870), and age (t (29) = -.366, p = .717).
Statistically significant differences were not found on non-verbal intelligence (t (29) =
- 1.757, p = .090), receptive language index (t (29) = -.929, p = .361), expressive
language index (t (29) = .344, p = .512), rhyme awareness (t (29) = -1.039, p = .307),
phoneme segmentation (t (29) = -.641, p = .527), phoneme-grapheme
correspondence (t (29) = -1.389, p = .175), morphological awareness – inflections (t
(29) = -1.475, p = .151), morphological awareness – derivations (t(29) = -1.012, p =
.320), antonyms (t (29) = 1.284, p = .209, synonyms (t (29) = -1.034, p = .310, word
analogy (t (29) = -1.760, p = .089) and sentence comprehension (t (29) = -1.71, p =
.098). However, statistically significant differences were observed on syllable

219
segmentation (t(29) = -2.542, p = .017), alliteration awareness (t (29) = -3.557, p =
.001), and phoneme isolation (t (29) = -2.536, p = .017).
In addition, comparison of learners with specific language weaknesses
assigned in different treatment groups (i.e. Group A - PA1MA2 and Group B –
MA1PA2) showed that non-verbal intelligence was within normal limits based on the
ranges reported in the manual of the standardized measure PTONI (Ehrler &
McGee, 2008). It also revealed that participants in treatment condition A (PA1MA2)
and treatment condition B (MA1PA2) were not significantly different from each on
measures of receptive language index (t (13) = -1.495, p = .159), expressive
language index (t (13) = .556, p = .588), syllable segmentation 9t (13) = -1.819, p =
.092), rhyme awareness (t (13) = -.233, p = .820), alliteration awareness (t (13) = -
2.115, p = .054), phoneme segmentation (t (13) = -.654, p = .524), phoneme-
grapheme correspondence (t (13) = -.505, p = .622), morphological awareness –
inflections (t (13) = -.258, p = .800), morphological awareness – derivations (t (13) =
1.205, p = .250), antonyms (t (13) = -1.369, p = .194), word analogy (t (13) = -1.225,
p = .242) and text comprehension (t (13) = -1.359, p = .197). Only the phoneme
isolation measure resulted in a significant difference between the two language weak
groups (t (13) = -2.792, p = .015). Scores on the synonyms measure were zero for
both groups.
Results
Assessment data were collected at three main points in the study. Results
from the first assessment (referred to as Time1-Pre) were obtained prior to any
intervention; results from the second assessment were obtained after the first five
week intervention (referred to as Time2-Mid); and the results from the third
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assessment were obtained after the completion of the second intervention (this will
be referred to as Time3-Post). Findings related to the influence of each intervention
on the children’s language and literacy skills will be evident by a comparison of the
first and second assessment results. Tables 3.3 and 3.4, therefore, presents the
results (means and standard deviations) for each measure administered at Time1-
Pre and Time2-Mid, and this first part of the results section presents the results of a
series of analyses of variance contrasting the Pre and Mid data for each of the
measures assessed on these two occasions. The second part of the results will then
contrast the Time1-Pre data with the Time3-Post data to assess the impact of both
interventions.
For this first part of the results, given that each child performed the
assessments at both time points, this was a repeated measures factor with two
levels (Time1-Pre and Time2-Mid). To assess the effects of the two interventions, an
independent factor (First Intervention) was also included that comprised two levels:
Phonological versus Morphological. Differential influences of the intervention would
be identified by a significant interaction between the Intervention factor and the Time
factor. To assess whether any specific influences of the intervention varied across
the two Language Groups, this was also included in the analyses as an independent
factor with two levels: language weak versus language typical – with different effects
for these two groups being evident in a three-way interaction. Given a significant
three-way interaction, two-way analyses of variance will be performed for each
Language Group to determine if there is an interaction between Time and
Intervention factors for only one Language Group. Therefore, the results for each
measure were analysed using three-way (2x2x2) analyses of variance, with one
221
repeated measures factor and two independent factors. The main results of interest
were the three-way interaction between the three factors and the two-way interaction
between the Time and Intervention factors. Therefore, these are the two that will be
reported throughout the results – though additional significant main effects will be
reported where relevant to the subsequent discussion. Results will be reported as F-
values (with df), p-values and effect sizes (partial eta squared). Graphs for the three-
way interaction will be reported throughout in order to present the findings visually,
but significant two-way interactions between the Time and Intervention factors will
also be presented to allow interpretations of findings.
Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time2-Mid assessment data
In this particular section, the results for the first intervention are shown for
each of the measures in the study, beginning with the phonological measures and
advancing from syllable and rhyme (the large units of sounds) before alliteration,
phoneme isolation and segmentation (considered smallest or phoneme-level of
sounds). Then letter-sound measure follows next together with the morphological
measures (inflection and derivation), and concluding with the word meaning
measures (antonyms, synonyms, analogies and text comprehension).

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Table 3.3 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group with specific language weaknesses
on each of the study measures at the first and second assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Mid Pre Mid
6.63 8.25 8.57 9.86

(1.77) (1.98) (2.37) (1.46)
4.13 6.63 4.43 5.14

(2.03) (2.97) (2.99) (2.41)
4.0 8.38 6.57 7.57

(2.27) (2.67) (2.44) (2.70)
7.88 10.88 10.43 11.29

(2.17) (1.13) (1.13) (0.76)
1.13 2.25 1.57 2.14

(1.25) (1.49) (1.40) (2.80)
19.63 26.75 21.0 26.71

(5.58) (4.27) (4.87) (4.68)
0.50 2.13 0.57 2.57

1.38 2.13 0.57 3.14

(1.60) (0.99) (0.79) (1.22)
0.63 2.00 1.29 2.86

(0.92) (1.20) (0.95) (1.35)
0.00 1.00 0.00 1.14

(0.00) (1.07) (0.00) (1.46)
0.00 4.25 1.29 6.57

(0.00) (1.49) (2.98) (4.54)
0.50 3.75 1.14 6.14

(0.76) (2.71) (1.07) (3.98)
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Table 3.4 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Typically-developing bilinguals on each of the
study measures at the first and second assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Mid Pre Mid
6.50 9.63 8.00 10.50

(1.85) (1.41) (1.69) (1.07)
6.50 9.38 8.25 10.13

(3.51) (3.16) (2.12) (1.36)
5.75 10.63 6.57 11.13

(2.66) (0.92) (2.44) (0.84)
9.13 11.75 10.25 11.88

(2.70) (0.46) (1.67) (.35)
3.13 4.88 3.50 6.00

(2.17) (2.80) (2.33) (2.73)
22.75 29.75 26.5 31.13

(6.84) (2.87) (2.33) (1.25)
1.13 4.75 2.50 5.63

2.13 4.62 4.00 5.25

(1.55) (1.77) (1.07) (0.89)
3.25 4.63 4.13 8.75

(1.17) (2.77) (1.81) (1.28)
0.00 2.75 0.13 3.13

(0.00) (1.39) (0.35) (1.36)
2.00 11.63 4.38 13.25

(2.83) (1.69) (3.96) (0.89)
4.00 9.75 7.00 13.5

(3.30) (3.69) (2.62) (1.20)
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The results of the statistical analyses using repeated measures ANOVA for
the Syllable awareness measure, which compared pre-intervention scores with
student performances after five weeks of treatment, showed a non-significant three-
way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .82, EF = .002). It also revealed a non-significant
interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .45, EF = .02),
but a significant interaction between Time and Language ability (F(1,27) = 4.56, p =
.04, EF = .15). The latter interaction suggests that Typically-developing bilinguals
showed more of an effect of the intervention than the language weak. Figure 3.1
displays the results for the Syllable awareness task.
Figure 3.1 Syllable Awareness Task Performance

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The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Rhyme awareness
measure showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .64, EF =
.01) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors
(F(1,27) = 2.79, p = .11, EF = .09). Figure 3.2 shows the results for the Rhyme
awareness task. The only statistically significant effect was a main effect of Time
(F(1,27) = 22.78, p < .001, EF = .46).

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The findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Alliteration
awareness measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p =
.64, EF < .001) – this can be observed in Figure 3.3. However, there was a
significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) = 12.72, p =
.001, EF = .32) indicating that both the Bilingual language weak and the Typically-
developing bilinguals showed greater gains in the Phonological intervention than the
Morphological intervention. There were statistically significant main effects of Time
(F(1,27) = 38.55, p < .001, EF = .59) and First Intervention (F(1,27) = 6.15, p = .02, EF =
.19)

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The results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Phoneme isolation
measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .38, EF =
.03). However, there was a significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) = 6.09, p = .02, EF = .18) – as seen in Figure 3.4 below. The finding
suggests that greater improvements were demonstrated by both the Bilingual
language weak and the Typically-developing bilingual groups administered initially
with Phonological awareness intervention compared to those who started with the
Morphological awareness intervention. Likewise, there were statistically significant
main effects of Time (F(1,27) = 40.50, p < .001, EF = .60) and Intervention (F(1,27) =
5.56, p = .03, EF = .17).
Figure 3.4 Phoneme Isolation Task Performance

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Learners’ ability to clearly separate each sound within a word were analysed
using three-way analysis of variance. Phoneme segmentation measure indicated a
non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .50, EF = .02) and a non-
significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .92, EF
< .001). The only statistically significant effect was a main effect of Time (F(1,27) =
9.91, p = .004, EF = .27) – see Figure 3.5.

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Letter-sound task
Findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Letter name and sound
matching task indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .78,
EF = .003) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) = 1.23, p = .28, EF = .04) – see Figure 3.6. The only statistically
significant effect was the main effect of Time (F(1,27) = 51.14, p < .001, EF = .65).

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The three-way analysis of variance conducted on the pre-test and mid-test
performance scores for the Morphological awareness inflection measure yielded a
non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .54, EF = .014) and a non-
significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .93,
EF < .001) – see Figure 3.7. There was, however, a significant interaction effect
between Time and Language background factors (F(1,27) = 4.87, p = .04, EF = .15).
This indicates that Typically-developing bilinguals showed greater gains than the
Bilingual language weak group on knowledge pertaining to morphological inflections.

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awareness derivation measure revealed a significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) =
7.84, p = .01, EF = .23) – this can be seen in Figure 3.8. Follow-up analyses of
variance indicated a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors for Typically-developing bilinguals (F(1,14) = 2.78, p = .12, EF = .17), but a
significant interaction between the Time and Intervention Factors for the Bilingual
language weak children (F(1,13) = 5.16, p = .04, EF = .28). As shown in Figure 3.8, for
the Bilingual language weak students (left-hand side of figure), an increase in scores
occurred for both interventions, but those experiencing the Morphological awareness
intervention showed much greater improvements.

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The findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Antonym production
measure demonstrated a significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) = 6.29, p = .018, EF
= .19). Further analyses suggest a non-significant interaction between the Time and
Intervention factors for Bilingual language weak learners (F(1,13) < 1, p = .79, EF =
.006), but a significant interaction between Time and Intervention factors for
Typically-developing bilinguals (F(1,14) = 11.43, p = .004, EF = .45). As depicted in
Figure 3.9, for the Typically-developing bilingual children (right-hand side of figure),
increases in Antonym production scores transpired in both interventions, but those
experiencing the Morphological awareness intervention showed much greater gains.

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Evaluating results using a three-way analysis of variance for the Synonym
production measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p =
.91, EF < .001) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .69, EF = .01) – see Figure 3.10. Still, there was a significant
interaction between Time and Language ability (F(1,27) = 14.03, p = .001, EF = .34)
suggesting that the Typically-developing bilinguals showed greater gains following
intervention than the Bilingual language weak students.

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Word analogy task
The findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Word analogy
measure yielded a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .44, EF = .02)
and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) <
1, p = .90, EF = .001) – see Figure 3.11. There was a significant interaction effect,
however, recorded between Time and Language ability (F(1,27) = 16.65, p < .001, EF
= .37). Again, the Typically-developing bilingual learners showed larger gains than
their Bilingual language weak peers.

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The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Text
comprehension measure indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1,
p = .59, EF = .011) and a non-significant interaction between the Time and
Intervention factors (F(1,27) = 1.88, p = .18, EF = .07). However, a significant
interaction effect between Time and Language ability was obtained (F(1,27) = 4.82, p =
.03, EF = .15). As can be seen in Figure 3.12, the Typically-developing bilingual
group showed greater gains in scores on the Text comprehension measure across
both intervention methods.

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Comparisons of Time1-Pre versus Time3-Post assessment data
The next part of the findings contrasts the Time 1- Pre performance scores
with the Time 3 – Post data to evaluate the influence of both interventions. The
results for the second intervention are shown for each of the measures in the study.
It begins with the phonological measures; advancing from syllable and rhyme (the
large units of sounds) before proceeding to alliteration, phoneme isolation and
segmentation (considered smallest or phoneme-level of sounds) measures. Then
letter-sound measure follows next together with the morphological measures
(inflection and derivation), and ending with the word meaning measures (antonyms,
synonyms, analogies and text comprehension).

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Table 3.5 . Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group with specific language
weaknesses on each of the study measures at the first and third assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Post Pre Post
6.63 9.13 8.57 10.50

(1.77) (2.23) (2.00) (1.27)
4.13 8.13 4.43 8.29

(2.03) (2.03) (2.99) (2.43)
4.00 7.88 6.57 9.0

(2.27) (2.99) (2.44) (2.31)
7.88 11.50 10.43 11.71

(2.17) (1.07) (1.13) (0.49)
1.13 5.38 1.57 5.86

(1.25) (2.77) (1.40) (2.91)
19.63 28.25 21.0 27.86

(5.58) (2.71) (4.87) (2.12)
0.50 2.38 0.57 3.43

Morphological Inflection(10 items) (0.54) (2.13) (0.54) (1.99)
1.38 3.88 0.57 4.14

(1.60) (1.13) (0.79) (1.22)
0.63 4.25 1.29 4.43

(0.92) (2.12) (0.95) (1.72)
0.00 2.88 0.00 2.57

(0.00) (2.10) (0.00) (2.15)
0.00 4.63 1.29 7.29

(0.00) (2.45) (2.98) (4.42)
0.50 4.63 1.14 6.57

(0.76) (2.13) (1.07) (3.87)
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Table 3.6 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Typically-developing bilinguals on each of the
study measures at the first and third assessment points

Assessment Measures
Pre Post Pre Post
6.50 9.75 8.00 11.50

(1.85) (1.67) (1.69) (0.76)
6.50 9.88 8.25 11.38

(3.51) (3.14) (2.12) (0.74)
5.75 10.25 9.63 11.25

(2.66) (1.28) (1.99) (1.17)
9.13 11.88 10.25 11.88

(2.70) (0.35) (1.67) (0.35)
3.13 8.75 3.50 8.88

(2.17) (1.83) (2.33) (1.36)
22.75 30.88 26.50 31.25

(6.84) (0.99) (2.33) (0.71)
1.13 4.88 2.50 6.38

2.13 6.00 4.00 6.50

(1.55) (1.20) (1.07) (1.51)
3.25 5.63 4.13 7.75

(1.17) (1.19) (1.81) (1.28)
0.00 4.88 0.13 6.38

(0.00) (0.99) (0.35) (1.06)
2.00 11.00 4.38 13.25

(2.83) (3.38) (3.96) (2.12)
4.00 11.25 7.00 12.88

(3.30) (4.30) (2.62) (2.75)
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The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Syllable awareness
measure, which compared pre-intervention scores with post-intervention ones,
showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .56, EF = .013). It also
yielded a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27)
< 1, p = .85, EF = .001). The only significant effect was a main effect of Time (F (1,27)
= 79.03, p < .001, EF = .75). Figure 3.13 illustrates the results of the Syllable
awareness measure.
Figure 3.13 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance

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task revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .96, EF < 1) and
a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) < 1, p
= .84, EF = .002). Figure 3.14 displays the findings for the Rhyme awareness task.
There were statistically significant main effects of Time (F(1,27) = 59.18, p < .001, EF
= .69) and Language ability (F(1,27) = 12.89, p < .001, EF = .32).

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The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Alliteration
awareness measure showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p =
.47, EF = .02). Nonetheless, there was a significant two-way interaction between
Time and Intervention (F(1,27) = 4.86, p = .04, EF = .15) suggesting that for both
Bilingual language weak and Typically-developing bilinguals, those initially
introduced with the Phonological awareness intervention displayed greater overall
gains. In addition, there were statistically significant main effects of Time (F(1,27) =
40.18, p < .001, EF = .60) and Intervention (F(1,27) = 11.63, p = .002, EF = .30).

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Phoneme Isolation task
The results of the statistical analyses using repeated measures ANOVA for
the Phoneme isolation task revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) <
1, p = .37, EF = .03), but a significant interaction between Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) = 6.90, p = .01, EF = .20) – see Figure 3.16. The findings suggest
greater gains for the language weak and the Typically-developing bilinguals who
experienced the Phonological awareness intervention first. There were likewise
statistically significant main effects of Time (F(1,27) = 49.58, p < .001, EF = .65) and
Second Intervention (F(1,27) = 5.14, p = .03, EF = .16).

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The output of the three-way analysis of variance for the Phoneme
segmentation measure displayed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p
= .90, EF = .001) and a non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .92, EF < .001). – see Figure 3.17.

244
Letter-sound task
Evaluating results of the three-way analysis of variance for the Letter-sound
task indicated a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < 1, p = .62, EF = .009)
and a non-significant three-way interaction between the Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) = 2.65, p = .12, EF = .09). Figure 3.18 shows the results for the Letter-
sound matching task. The only statistically significant main effect was a main effect
of Time (F(1,27) = 80.46, p < .001, EF = .75).

245
The outcome of a three-way analysis of variance for the Morphological
awareness inflection measure revealed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27)
< 1, p = .60, EF = .01) and a non-significant interaction between Time and
Intervention Factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .50, EF = .02) – see Figure 3.19. There was a
significant factor of Time (F(1,27) = 58.49, p < .001, EF = .68) and of Intervention
(F(1,27) = 7.33, p = .01, EF = .21).

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Assessing the results of the three-way analysis of variance for the
Morphological awareness derivation measure indicated a significant three-way
interaction (F(1,27) = 5.33, p = .03, EF = .17) – this can be seen in Figure 3.20. Further
analyses of variance revealed a non-significant interaction between the Time and
Intervention factors for Bilingual language weak learners (F(1,13) = 2.35, p = .15, EF =
.15), but a significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors for the
Typically-developing bilingual learners (F(1,14) = 4.72, p = .05, EF = .25) . As can be
observed in Figure 3.20, for the Typically-developing bilingual learners (right-hand
side of the figure), those administered first with Phonological treatment showed
greater gains in scores on Morphological awareness of derivations.

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The findings of the three-way analysis of variance for the Antonym production
measure demonstrated a non-significant interaction (F(1,27) = 2.16, p = .15, EF = .07)
and a non-significant interaction between the Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) <
1, p = .52, EF = .015) – see Figure 3.21. There was a significant effect of Time (F(1,27)
= 117.26, p < .001, EF = .81) and of Intervention (F(1,27) = 4.93, p = .03, EF = .15).

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The outcome of the three-way analysis of variance for the Synonym
production measure indicated a non-significant interaction (F(1,27) = 1.96, p = .17, EF
= .07) and a non-significant interaction between Time and Intervention Factors (F(1,27)
< 1, p = .38, EF = .03) – see Figure 3.22. There was, however, a significant
interaction effect between Time and Language ability (F(1,27) = 22.43, p < .001, EF =
.45). This indicates that Typically-developing bilingual learners showed greater
increase in scores on the Synonym production task compared to the Bilingual
language weak learners.

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Word analogy task
The results attained on the Word analogy measure after a three-way analysis
of variance showed a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) < .001, p = .58, EF
= .01) and a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and Intervention
factors (F(1,27) < 1, p = .65, EF = .008) – see Figure 3.23. There was a significant
interaction effect between Time and Language ability (F(1,27) = 7.16, p = .01, EF =
.011). This suggests that the Typically-developing bilingual learners showed greater
gains than their Bilingual weak peers in the Word analogy measure.

250
Results of a repeated measures ANOVA for the text comprehension measure
suggest a non-significant three-way interaction (F(1,27) = 2.65, p = .12, EF = .09) and
a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and Intervention factors (F(1,27) <
1, p = .97, EF <.001). However, a significant interaction effect between Time and
Language ability (F(1,27) = 4.72, p = .04, EF = .15) was obtained. This indicates that
Typically-developing bilingual learners showed greater gains than their Bilingual
weak peers in the Text comprehension measure. This can be seen in Figure 3.24
below.

251
Discussion
The study discussed in this particular chapter examined the impact of literacy
interventions in enhancing reading comprehension through the development of
phonological and morphological awareness skills among typically and atypically-
developing bilinguals in the Philippines.
The findings indicated that bilingual school-aged children with specific language
deficiencies performed worse than their typically-developing age-matched peers on
measures typically associated with later reading success. The group’s low level of
performance on these assessment measures may not be simply due to second
language experience, since these children would have been exposed to English from a
very young age. Additionally, difficulties were not concentrated to a fixed area, but
expanded across a number of measures related to early literacy as well as weaknesses
in varying measures of language understanding. The group was also weaker than the
typically-developing bilingual learners in letter-sound knowledge that may be considered
to rely to some extent on phonological processing abilities. Nevertheless, the current
research demonstrated that the administration of an integrated phonological awareness
intervention among bilingual language weak children can lead to improvements in
phoneme-level awareness. This was evident in the atypical bilingual children’s
significant increase in scores on measures of alliteration awareness and phoneme
isolation. This suggests that, overtime, negative effects of specific language deficits may
be reduced by the delivery of a highly structured program that facilitates phonological
awareness. This may then lead to greater growth of early reading proficiency. The
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effectiveness of implementing phonological training activities among children with
language difficulties in fostering awareness in a language’s sound components are
consistent with earlier studies by Gillon (2000), van Kleeck, Gillam and McFadden
(1998), Warrick, Rubin and Rowe-Walsh (1993), and Webster et al. (1997).
The study likewise indicated that the establishment of phoneme-level skills
among bilingual language weak children may be promoted by brief, specific and direct
instruction that emphasizes phoneme identification, phoneme segmentation, phoneme
manipulation, phoneme isolation and phoneme integration. It is also possible that the
students’ enhanced performance in the various phoneme-related tasks may have been
supported by activities that incorporated an understanding of letter-sound
correspondence, which should allow learners to create associations between speech
and print. Overall, the outcome of the research suggested that Year 1 pupils provided
with phonological awareness instruction showed progress on phoneme awareness
tasks that approximated to near typically-developing bilingual students’ levels in only
five weeks. Such accelerated growth may be a result of constant delivery of combined
small-group and individual instruction among the bilingual language weak participants.
Moreover, additional improvements were continuously observed not only in alliteration
awareness and phoneme isolation tasks, but also in rhyme awareness measures after
ten weeks. This indicates the robust effect on early literacy among bilingual language
weak learners brought about by a combined form of metalinguistic awareness
instruction (see Chapter 6 for further discussions).

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With regard to the impact of the morphological awareness intervention among
the bilingual language weak learners, statistically significant effects in morphological
knowledge of derivations task were recorded among students initially administered with
explicit morphological awareness instruction. Such finding were surprising considering
that morphological development theories highlight that knowledge pertaining to
morphological derivations takes a longer time to acquire. This is because the formation
of derivatives or creation of new words taken from existing ones by adding affixes (e.g.
dis- or –ful) to produce a different word class is determined by context. The rules
governing word derivations mean that learners often need to decide on the suitable form
on a case by case basis. This would result in learners memorizing every acceptable
word combination to form each derivative item. This may be particularly difficult for
children with language deficiencies and limited semantic knowledge brought about by
deficits in semantic organization (Sheng & McGregor, 2010). One possible explanation
for this slightly surprising effects would be that several items included in the
morphological awareness measure were found to take patterns that demonstrate
regularities that do not pose constrain on the suffix choice of bilingual language weak
participants in the formation of derivatives (e.g. paint:painter::bake____;
teach:teacher::work:______; and anger:angry::sun:______). In addition, the
morphological awareness intervention incorporates teaching learners to organize affixes
(e.g. un- and dis- means ‘not’ implying something negative or –ful means ‘full of’ or ‘a lot
of’ implying something positive in essence) and even words into categories (e.g. jump is
an action word) which may have allowed children to develop a useful and efficient word
retrieval strategy.
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Bilingual children presenting with specific language deficits generally displayed
lower performance scores on oral morphological awareness measures compared to
normally-developing bilingual children that may suggest an overall shortcoming in their
ability to adeptly regulate and manipulate properties of meaningful language units.
Despite the potential difficulties faced by such children with morphological tasks, gains
in scores on morphological measures were recorded for bilingual children with language
weaknesses. Hence, appropriate intervention has the potential to be associated with
gains in such skills, and it may be that a longer period of intervention would have
effectively consolidated the acquisition of morphological skills targeted in the study.
However, overall findings argue for morphological awareness to be an aspect of
language development that is challenging and which may require more intensive
remediation for the desired acquisition of skill to be achieved.
In contrast to the language weak students, the results indicated that typically-
developing learners experienced immediate gains in phonological, morphological, word
meaning and text comprehension measures. The performance outputs obtained for
phonological awareness, linguistic proficiency and reading comprehension were
consistent with the norms for monolingual English native speakers, suggesting that the
typically-developing bilingual participants were performing like native speakers of
English. This may be consistent with the level of English language exposure these
children experience in the Philippines including phonics instruction in kindergarten as
part of their early literacy learning (during drop in sessions, parents of the participating
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children revealed that their children had been provided with phonics prior to the
implementation of the current study).
Such outcomes may also have been reinforced by a combined one-on-one
training and small group method of instruction. Small group interactions were observed
to encourage more opportunities for children to provide random responses that trigger
active participation from the rest of the members in the group. It even allowed modelling
of correct responses by the other students, highlighting observational learning moments
for children. The small group discussion activities that focused on dialogues with
students to use introduced words in appropriate and known contexts, may likewise have
supported scaffolding and further enrichment of language through vocabulary
expansion. The activities also encouraged them to approximate the target language by
encouraging them to express themselves and explore acceptable usage of words in
varying contexts. Meanwhile, the one-on-one teaching provided direct instruction on
areas of improvement. It even granted proper monitoring of individual progress
throughout the intervention period. Immediate feedback pertaining to acquisition of
language skills that include correct use and explicit strategy implementation were
provided.
Finally, the advancement of the Filipino participants approximating near native
levels in the assessment measures may be brought about by being raised by more
educated parents who may model correct language use and provide early training,
through formal (e.g. enrolment in additional language classes) or informal (e.g.
encouraging appropriate English word use) means, that in turn facilitate wider
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vocabulary skills and understanding of meaning. These may further lead to effective
discrimination of sounds within words, deeper cognizance of meaning of words that
would likely advance morphological awareness and improve levels of reading
comprehension. The influence of home environment is supported by the ecological
systems theory conceptualized by Urie Bronfenbrenner in 1986. Bronfenbrenner’s
theory espouses that learners move within enmeshed multiple ecological systems that
interact and exert influence in their lives; categorized from the most immediate
environment (i.e. the home and community environment) to the broadest (i.e. time-
related contexts such as changes in child’s circumstances). This simply means that the
child’s immediate context, such as the family, directly impacts the child’s literacy
development. In addition, the family investment model (Conger & Donnellan, 2007)
elucidates a similar idea that students’ immediate family provides access to a variety of
human and social resources to nurture a more conducive learning environment.
Limitations and Future Directions
Although the present study showed promising results, the outcomes were taken
from a small sample size (n = 31). Hence, validation of the programs’ effectiveness may
be achieved by replicating the study using a larger sample size, and a non-intervention
control group. Also, the current study focused solely on Grade 1 six-year old learners
coming from a high socio-economic background. A previous study by Lyster (2002)
mentioned socio-economic status (SES) as a predictor of variability in reading words.
Thus, it would be interesting to observe whether bilingual children from a range of socio-
economic backgrounds benefit differently from similar metalinguistic training programs

257
to those used in the study. It would equally be interesting to observe gains from such
intervention methods across a range of bilingual contexts or different languages (maybe
those with more regular grapheme-phoneme conversion rules or more complex
morphological structures). Additionally, investigations looking at different types of
language deficits – those with receptive versus expressive deficits or those with word-
finding versus sentence understanding problems. This may help expand knowledge on
the impact of bilingualism in different contexts and utilize such awareness in deepening
understanding of second language learning and/or acquisition.
Data collection and analyses in the study were restricted to recording responses
relating to words read or expressed orally. Future studies might include assessments of
spelling in order to determine if the intervention methods can support a mastery of
relevant orthographic patterns. This may be particularly interesting when considering
morphologically complex words and how they are represented in print. It may be that an
awareness of morphology would be equally if not more advantageous than phonological
awareness in such circumstances.
The treatment approach administered to the participants was set at two 45-
minute sessions per week for ten weeks. It may be more beneficial; however, to expand
the coverage period from ten weeks to twenty weeks and increase contact frequency to
five 30-minute sessions a week. This may provide an even more intense and focused
stimulation to reading-related skills brought about by repeated exposures not only on
decoding, but also deriving meaning to words. The reinforcement of semantic and
phonological cues may likewise deepen and broaden word learning for students with
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language deficits. The teaching of semantic cues may incorporate description of
physical attributes of subjects, provision of item function and the particular word’s
category. For instance, the teacher may say: “This is a computer; it is something you
use to send important documents; it’s a device.” On the other hand, a teacher
capitalizing on the instruction of phonological cues may include highlighting the first
syllable or initial sound, segmenting the number of syllables by clapping out the word, or
associating a given word using rhymes (e.g. “The word is fawn; it sounds like your
classmate’s name Shawn!”). The integration would cement learners’ newly acquired
language skills, as opportunities for honing metalinguistic skills further are set in place;
which may lead to continuous growth.
In addition, reliable standardized measures that test various morphological
awareness skills and provide normative values at different age levels may prove
beneficial for comparative analysis. Standardized measures can offer guidance to
researchers, educators, clinicians and therapists in devising efficient, strategic and
effective teaching plans by comparisons with expected levels of performance. Such
information can guide the design of an innovative school curricula that accommodates
the inclusion of evidence-based intervention approaches, which guarantees age-
appropriate and context-appropriate lessons for bilinguals with different types of
language deficits (i.e. receptive versus expressive deficits).
Clinical and Educational Implications
The outcome of this research investigation may provide instructional guidance
and improve practice in the Philippines. The Philippines patterns its educational system
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on the United States. Part of its Language Arts curriculum is to teach weekly list of
words deemed as commonly encountered or read by students at particular grade levels.
However, the words are often isolated in context and the linguistic properties of words
are rarely taken into account. The findings of this study argue for the curricula to be
modified to include words based on regularities in their linguistic structures so that they
can undergo changes observable to struggling learners. This means that transparency
of relationships in learned words (e.g. teach in teacher) are explicitly discussed. As
children become competent in identifying phonological and morphological aspects of
words, the level of difficulty of the words used as examples can be gradually increased
to teach words with less transparent changes such as “twelve” to “twelfth” or “wide” to
“width.”
The findings that typically-developing readers advance faster in morphological
awareness knowledge indicate that they can detect patterns easily, as opposed to
language weak students who may require essential and sufficient instruction in
morphological structure of words to attain the same level of proficiency. Thus,
considerations to include morphological awareness intervention as part of the early
childhood curriculum may demonstrate far-reaching benefits for learners with persistent
language deficiencies.
Conclusions
The investigation presented in this chapter was one of the few intervention
studies on bilingualism that sought to address the relative effectiveness of adopting

260
phonological and morphological awareness training to improve word knowledge and
sentence comprehension in a bilingual context.
The findings demonstrated that instruction leading to improved awareness in
both phonological and morphological knowledge can be possible for school-aged
bilingual English language learners. The integration of a short and focused phonological
treatment approach at the start of the academic year offers opportunities for both
normally-developing and at-risk learners. Such targeted interventions can be used to
attain reinforced syllable and phoneme-level awareness skills relevant as a decoding
strategy to identify and read words (Catts & Kamhi, 2012; Gillon, 2004). This, in turn,
becomes crucial as it facilitates later reading success (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Muter,
Hulme, Snowling & Stevenson, 2004), since an understanding of the sound structures in
language lays the foundation for attaining the ability to read (National Reading Panel,
2008) by ensuring the emergence of early literacy (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).
The results of the research likewise offers evidence of the potent compensatory
aspect of morphological awareness in the advancement of reading comprehension skills
among developing bilingual children. Such morphological awareness training can lead
to improved word meaning and text comprehension outcomes for bilingual students.
Instruction in recognizing the smallest meaningful units of words can support an
understanding of text at word, phrase and sentence levels (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010).
Additionally, it implies that a morphological treatment approach can be used in teaching
practices even in the early grades of learning.

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The study equally highlights the importance of not simply teaching students to
learn how to read, but to ultimately develop reading for meaning, as it offers a proactive
response to child intervention; moving away from what Greenwood et al. (2011)
describes as a “wait to fail” approach.
Although there is yet no panacea that has been found to meet the literacy
requirements of every individual in the classroom, the results presented in this chapter
deliver evidence for educators interested in raising academic achievement by
enhancing literacy-related skills of learners experiencing specific language difficulties
from a bilingual background. Such interventions have the potential to lead to long-term
self-sufficient learners and academic success across the school curriculum.

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Chapter 4 A Follow-up Study Evaluating the Impact of Phonological

and Morphological Awareness Intervention Programs on School-aged
Children with Specific Language Weaknesses
Evidence from previous research and meta-analyses has demonstrated the
effectiveness of reading intervention to foster children’s reading skills in the short-term
(Bus & Van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Carson et al., 2013; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl & Willows, 2001;
Suggate, 2010; Swanson, Hoskyn & Lee, 1999; Zens et al., 2009). Such findings solidify
the importance of providing intensive, early and targeted interventions to disadvantaged
learners in need of literacy support. For example, Carson et al. (2013) discovered that
providing a short and highly-intensive phonological awareness development training to
at-risk Year 1 primary students led to enhanced phonemic awareness relevant for word
recognition. Similarly, Zens et al. (2009) found that children diagnosed with specific
language impairment improved performance outcomes not only in phonological
awareness measures, but also in tests assessing semantic skills after receiving an
accumulated 24-hours worth of reading intervention.
Despite such confirmation that short intervention approaches lead to post-
intervention improvements in reading proficiency there is a need to show that these
positive impacts can be maintained over the long-term. Such research also informs
decisions about the best reading intervention approaches. Monitoring long-term effects
may lead to better insights on the influence intervention features such as content,
teacher-student ratio and length of intervention on the success of the program.
Monitoring children’s long-term progress is also critical to assess whether children are
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integrating and employing the acquired skills in reading. Definitive answers regarding
whether transfer to wider reading skills have been attained can only be provided by the
examination of follow up data.
The findings discussed in Chapter 2, from a study that focused on the
administration of a short intervention program for struggling Grade 1 students in New
Zealand, indicated that children with specific language weaknesses made significant
gains in phonological awareness at the phoneme level. In the same vein, word analogy
and sentence comprehension test scores increased significantly following a
morphological awareness treatment approach that aimed to enhance reading
comprehension skills. The data reported in this chapter extends the information about
these instructional intervention approaches by examining the treatment effects five
weeks following the completion of the phonological awareness and morphological
awareness treatment program.
Research Questions
In line with past investigations, it was expected that the interventions would display
positive short-term effect sizes that slowly decline during follow-up. Likewise, given the
accessible information depicting subtle differences on impact of long-term effects, the
succeeding research questions were devised:
(12) Will the assessment scores of Year 1 students in New Zealand,
experiencing both phonological and morphological awareness training result in
statistically significant improvement five weeks post completion of the program?

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(13) Are there statistically significant differences in the assessment scores of
monolingual versus bilingual year 1 children with specific learning weaknesses,
five weeks after the conclusion of the instructional training programs?
Methods
Participants
This follow up study involved twenty (20) participants presenting with specific
language weaknesses who met the inclusion criteria and who received phonological
and morphological awareness instructional training support as described in Chapter 2.
These children were re-evaluated five weeks after the completion of the intervention
program. Chapter 2 provides a more detailed description of the children enrolled in the
research. Consistent with the intervention period, no participants received any form of
intervention or supplementary instructional training post-intervention and up to the
assessment point described in this chapter.
Procedures
All of the participants were re-evaluated on the measures described in the second
chapter of this doctoral thesis. All the tests were carried out by the author with the help
of a research assistant who is a certified speech language therapist. The measures
were given individually to each child, in a quiet area in the classroom during school
hours. The order of administering the different assessment measures was random, and
learners were examined at different times during the day to prevent any influence
caused by the effects of timing on their performance scores. The Primary Test of Non-
verbal Intelligence (PTONI), designed to gauge students’ reasoning abilities (Ehrler &
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McGee, 2008), and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool 2nd
edition (CELF-P2), created to measure language expression and language
comprehension (Wiig et al., 2006), were not re-assessed during the follow-up
evaluation.
Assessment Measures
The standardized language and reading comprehension tests, as well as an informal
morphological awareness test, were administered to the participants with specific
language weaknesses five weeks after the completion of the intervention. A thorough
description of each assessment measure is provided in Chapter 2 of this thesis. The
tests used were:
Standardized Assessment Measures
• Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness (PIPA ; Dodd,
Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000)
• Woodcock Reading Mastery Test III (WRMT-III; Woodcock, 2011)
Informal Morphological Awareness Measure
• Inflectional and Derivational Morphological Awareness Word Analogy Task (Kirby
et al., 2012)
Reliability and Treatment Fidelity
In order to ensure the integrity of procedures, all assessments were recorded.
The first author conducted and scored all the assessment measures. The standardized
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tests were all administered and marked as suggested in the examiner’s manual. An
independent assessor and researcher marked a quarter (25%) of the total assessment
data on aspects of supervision, documentation and evaluation. Inter-rater consensus
(100%) was achieved on levels of supervision and administration of the standardized
assessments and experimental measure. Meanwhile, inter-rater agreement on scoring
was 98.6% and documentation was 99.5%. Discrepancies concerning inter-rater
agreement were eliminated through re-checking of the data and discussions about
scoring. The author verified all data before entry and errors were corrected.
Results
Data were collected at two different time periods in the research. The results
from the first evaluation, referred here as Time1-Pre, were taken prior to any
intervention being introduced to the participants. The next data assessed were obtained
five weeks after Time 3-Post which served as the follow up period to monitor children’s
maintenance of language and literacy skills. In this study, this was referred to as Time
4-Follow up. In order to assess the impact of both interventions on the children’s
language and literacy skills upon follow-up, a repeated measures ANOVA was used to
contrast data from two time points: Time 1-Pre and Time 4-Follow up – these were the
two levels of the repeated measures factor in the analyses. This factor was contrasted
across two of the Language Groups, which was an independent factor with two levels:
Monolingual versus Bilingual. Hence, the findings for each of the measures were
analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance (2x2), with one repeated measures
factor and one independent factor. The two-way interaction will be reported throughout
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the results; however, additional significant main effects will be reported where relevant
to the subsequent discussion. Reports in this chapter will be reported as F-values (with
df), p-values and effect sizes (partial eta squared). Graphs pertaining the two-way
interaction will be displayed to present the results visually to allow interpretations of
findings.
Comparison of Time 1-Pre versus Time 4-Follow up assessment data
In this particular section, the results of the first intervention are displayed for each
of the measures in the research, starting with the phonological measures and
progressing from larger units of sound (syllable and rhyme) prior to phoneme-level
sounds (alliteration, phoneme isolation and phoneme segmentation). This is followed by
the letter-sound knowledge measure and the morphological awareness measures
(inflection and derivation), ending with the word meaning measures (antonyms,
synonyms, word analogies and text comprehension). The results for each group are
presented in Table 4.1.

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Table 4.1 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Monolingual group and Bilingual group on each of the
study measures at the first and fourth assessment points
Monolingual Weak Bilingual Weak

Group Group
Assessment Measures
Pre FollowUp Pre FollowUp
4.64 10.82 6.33 10.78

(2.38) (1.72) (2.40) (1.48)
3.64 9.18 4.00 8.89

(2.01) (1.99) (2.06) (2.76)
5.36 8.00 5.56 10.33

(2.58) (3.80) (3.81) (1.73)
5.64 10.18 6.89 11.67

(3.61) (2.86) (3.86) (0.71)
1.91 3.36 1.44 5.89

(1.70) (1.36) (2.13) (2.32)
6.18 26.36 8.22 30.44

(3.40) (6.73) (2.39) (1.74)
0.09 3.91 0.22 4.33

0.45 3.36 0.33 3.89

(0.69) (1.57) (0.50) (1.97)
0.64 3.82 1.00 3.44

(0.51) (1.60) (0.50) (1.42)
0.09 2.91 0.33 2.67

(0.30) (1.47) (0.50) (1.32)
0.45 3.64 0.67 4.11

(0.52) (2.16) (0.50) (2.03)
0.82 6.36 0.89 6.00

(0.98) (2.66) (0.93) (6.20)
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Syllable Awareness Task
The results of the repeated measures ANOVA for the Syllable awareness
measure, which compared pre-intervention scores with student performance scores at
the follow up period, showed a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and
Language Background factors (F(1,18) = 2.14, p = .16, EF = .11). The only statistically
significant effect was a main effect of Time (F(1,18) = 79.94, p < .001, EF = .82). Figure
4.1 shows the results for the Syllable awareness task.
Figure 4.1 Syllable Awareness Task Performance

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Rhyme Awareness Task
As with the syllable segmentation assessment, the repeated measures ANOVA
conducted on the rhyme awareness test scores showed no significant interaction
between Time and Language Background (F(1,18) < 1, p = .61, EF = .02). The factor
Time was the only variable which registered a statistically significant main effect (F(1,18)
= 67.55, p < .001, EF = .79). Figure 4.2 displays the students’ performance outcome for
the Rhyme awareness task.

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Alliteration Awareness Task
The results of the two-way analyses of variance for the Alliteration awareness
measure indicated a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and Language
Background (F(1,18) = 2.37, p = .14, EF = .12) - see Figure 4.3 below. Furthermore, there
was a statistically significant main effect of Time factor (F(1,18) = 28.46, p < .001, EF =
.61).

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Phoneme Isolation Task
Analyzing test results of the period prior to the introduction of any treatment
approach and five weeks after the completion of the program on children’s ability in
identifying initial sound in words revealed a non-significant two-way interaction between
Time and Language background (F(1,18) < 1, p = .87, EF = .002) - this can be observed
in Figure 4.4 below. In addition, there was a statistically significant main effect of the
factor Time (F(1,118) = 47.72, p < .001, EF = .73).

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Phoneme Segmentation Task
Learners’ ability to clearly separate each sound within a word was analyzed
using a two-way analysis of variance. The phoneme segmentation measure indicated a
significant two-way interaction between Time and Language background (F(1,18) = 7.59,
p = .013, EF = .30) was recorded – see Figure 4.5. The effect suggests that the
Bilingual language weak group showed larger improvements than their Monolingual
peers on this particular measure. Likewise, a significant main effect of the factor Time
(F(1,18) = 29.54, p < .001, EF = .62) was observed.

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Letter-sound Task
Letter and sound matching which evaluates student’s ability to recognize, name
and produce sound/s associated to alphabetic letters, clusters and digraphs was
likewise assessed through a repeated measures ANOVA. Findings indicated a non-
significant two-way interaction between Time and Language background (F(1,18) = 1.79,
p = .20, EF = .09). The only statistically significant effect was the main effect of Time
(F(1,18) = 773.25, p <.001, EF = .98). Figure 4.6 displays the students’ performance
outcome for the Letter-sound task.
Figure 4.6 Letter-Sound Task Performance

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Morphological Awareness Inflection Task
A 2x2 analysis of variance conducted on the pre-test scores and performance
scores during the follow-up period for the morphological awareness inflection measure
revealed a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and Language background
(F(1,18) < 1, p = .73, EF = .01) – this is displayed in Figure 4.7 below. There was,
however, a statistically significant main effect of Time factor (F(1,18) = 89.60, p < .001, EF
= .83).

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Morphological Awareness Derivation Task
The results of the analysis of variance for the Morphological awareness
derivation measure revealed a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and
Language Background factors (F(1,18) < 1, p = .40, EF = .04) which is shown in Figure
4.8. Nonetheless, there was a statistically significant main effect of Time (F(1,18) = 75.79,
p < .001, EF = .81).

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Antonym Production Task
The results of the two-way analysis of variance for the Antonym production
measure demonstrated a non-significant interaction between the Time and Language
background factors (F(1,18) = 1.22, p = .29, EF = .06) – see figure 4.9. There was a
significant effect of Time (F(1,18) = 70.76, p < .001, EF = .80).

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Synonym Production Task
The two-way analysis of variance for the Synonym production measure yielded a
non-significant interaction between the Time and Language background factors (F (1,18) <
1, p = .40, EF = .04) – see figure 4.10. There was a significant effect of Time (F(1,18) =
85.56, p < .001, EF = .83).

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Word Analogy Task
The results obtained on the word analogy measure after a two-way analysis of
variance showed a non-significant two-way interaction between the Time and Language
background factors (F(1,18) < 1, p = .77, EF = .005) – see figure 4.11. There was a
significant main effect of Time (F(1,18) = 57.65, p < .001, EF = .76).

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Text Comprehension Task
Results of a repeated measures ANOVA for the assessment measure text
comprehension yielded a non-significant two-way interaction between Time and
Language background factors (F(1,18) < 1, p = .64, EF = .013). There was, however, a
significant main effect of Time (F(1,18) = 137.45, p < .001, EF = .88). Figure 4.12 displays
the students’ performance outcome for the Text comprehension task.

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Discussion
The purpose of the current investigation was to evaluate the impact of
phonological and morphological awareness training on the performance of Year 1
students with language weaknesses five weeks after the completion of the intervention
programs. In short, it seeks to determine whether these interventions lead to long-term
gains that may signify reinforcement and deepening of learning.
The evaluation of New Zealand Year 1 students’ assessment scores revealed
that children with specific language weaknesses showed maintenance of acquired
language and literacy skill performance scores. There was no evidence of reverting
back to pre-intervention levels more than a month after the intervention was completed.
It showed that students experiencing language learning difficulties may retain significant
information which could be applied in tasks that are deemed demanding in terms of
encoding, recalling and processing perspectives. This is in contrast to previous reports
that described children with language deficiencies as having reduced attentional
capacity and restricted mental energy needed to optimally perform in a given task (see
Alloway & Archibald, 2008; Mainela-Arnold & Evans, 2005; Windsor et al., 2008).
Perhaps the participants in this particular study were able to capitalize on the particular
aspects of phonological awareness intervention that helped in creating word
associations from previously known words; which allowed students to comprehend and
hear similar sound patterns found inside words. Evaluation of results are encouraging
as they suggest that there is a form of retention of concepts that last until follow-up for
at-risk learners: explicit phonological awareness interventions may foster lasting effects
among children with language weaknesses. And the same may be true for improved
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morphological knowledge following the morphological awareness instruction. The
findings suggest that given appropriate training, children with specific language
weaknesses can extract regularities from language and build word familiarity
associations pivotal for lexical growth.
The aforementioned findings contradict those of Suggate, Schaughency, &
Reece (2013) suggesting that the impact of early interventions tend to wash out over
time. The diminishing of effects in such previous studies may be due to several factors;
one of which is the inadequacy of participants to sustain their enthusiasm in the
program after some time (Rushton, 1995). According to Rushton (1995), ensuring the
active participation of children requires educators to provide meaningful learning
experiences that emphasize basic skill acquisition within context. Another possible
contributing factor for the disappearance of initial gains would be the lack of parental
involvement (Halpern, 1990). Halpern (1990) observed that intervention training which
include parents from the outset of the program’s implementation tend to persist in the
long term, for parents take on an active role in the child’s education process by
extending teaching experience out of the classroom walls. Parents who are attuned to
their children’s education allow the establishment of a more positive learning experience
by bridging those competencies that had been learned at school to that which is
supported in the home.
A third possible contributing aspect to the attenuation of intervention effects is the
absence of the program’s continuity carried through into school (Farran, 1990). Effects
of early intervention fail to optimize potential benefits because the process of transition
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is not properly managed. Intervention programs may ensure the attainment of program’s
continuity by maintaining effective assessment and establishing efficient systems that
allow constant monitoring of student progress. Hence, continuity becomes evident when
there exists appropriate aligning of curriculum and intervention approach that permit
suitable progression in the participant’s learning (Rumbold, 1990). In the research,
undertaken as part of this PhD thesis, school administrators disclosed during a follow-
up session that they had developed a means of evaluating the progress of students who
had joined the training program. It was revealed that the school administrators
instructed their Year 1 teachers to monitor the students’ involvement in the study by
testing their knowledge in phoneme identification, phoneme isolation, phoneme
blending and letter-sound matching skills. These were done using informal assessment
measures designed by the local school examiner. The teachers mentioned that all tests
were moderated by the grade level coordinators and reported to the principal. Records
of test scores were tallied and observation notes were made to systematically provide
an overview of the learners’ progress, in relation to the intervention training provided to
them by the researcher. Outcomes of the formative tests were shown during the
meeting which provided an overview of steady improvement. The teachers were
likewise directed by the school administrators to provide interactive learning activities on
phonemic awareness twice a week after the completion of the research study and to
write a summative report to be sent to the parents of the children; which detailed what
specific learning outcomes were achieved and suggested related engagement activities
on how particular skill areas can be supported at home. These aforementioned

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practices set by the schools may have contributed to the maintenance of gains among
the New Zealand language weak children.
In a similar vein, the results of the analyses seem to indicate that even after
follow-up, New Zealand monolingual and bilingual school-aged participants with specific
language deficits show similar levels of development in language and literacy-related
skills; except maybe in terms of the phoneme segmentation measure. The New Zealand
bilingual language weak students performed better on the said sub-test of phonological
awareness than their monolingual counterparts. Such may be explained by two possible
reasons. One is that for many of the bilinguals (i.e., Spanish-English, Filipino-English
and Samoan-English bilinguals), the sound structures of their home language are more
similar to the English language. The concept surrounding the consonant-vowel
alternation may have provided greater familiarity for the participants, as the set of
languages may be favorable to the discovery of well-established patterns in
phonological structures compared to languages with differing actual sound patterns.
The explicit instruction in perceiving sound components in a language, coupled with the
amount of time afforded to the bilingual language weak learners, may have synthesized
their metalinguistic knowledge about the languages involved. Additionally, the home
languages of the bilingual weak learners may prove to be an advantage. For instance,
the simple phonetic structure inherent in the Spanish language (de Manrique &
Signorini, 1994), Filipino language (Schachter & Reid, 2008) and Samoan language
(Hengeveld & Leufkens, 2015), may have facilitated the access to phoneme
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segmentation proficiency in English. The structures of the said languages may have
paved a viable cross-linguistic transfer into the students’ reading of the English words.
The administered phonological intervention approach further enhanced both the
New Zealand monolingual and bilingual language weak learners’ awareness of larger
sound units, as evidenced by higher gain scores in syllable segmentation and rhyme
awareness for more than a month after the post-intervention assessment. The same
positive outcome could be said for phoneme level skills, for performance scores in
measures such as alliteration awareness and phoneme isolation proficiency were
recorded to have also increased during the follow up assessment. This finding provides
strong support for the idea that children presenting with specific language weaknesses
may attain consolidation and strengthening of learning. Their capability to perceive and
process speech information may be furthered by working around a structured form of
learning devised to assist in reducing and storing information pertaining to “regularities”
or consistent patterns fundamental in language input across varying levels. Hence,
under certain conditions (i.e., highly supportive and intensive intervention approaches),
learners with specific language deficiencies may develop language competence which
is pivotal to word decoding and later text comprehension, as a result of acquiring
adaptive strategies derived from explicit instruction.
Given the evidence that larger sound units such as syllable and rhyme
awareness could be improved above chance levels and be maintained upon follow-up
assessment, previous researchers such as Gillon (2002) and Justice (2006) suggested
not to focus too much time on teaching larger components of sound; as they could be
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advanced without intensive training. Knowledge in phonemic awareness was deemed a
priority by researchers and conveyed that such could be developed even without early
training in rhyme and syllable awareness (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991; Gillon,
2000; Ukrainetz, Cooney, Dyer, Kysar & Harris, 2000). On the contrary, for children with
specific language impairments, capitalizing on the awareness of larger sound units may
be deemed critical to stimulate multi-syllabic word reading fluency and link to
morphemic knowledge that may later result in independent reading. For example, the
explicit instruction for children with language deficits on syllable units may help students
to attend to patterns found in the English words and train them for familiar
configurations in letter-sound associations that provide hints on vowel sounds, leading
to more accurate decoding (e.g., the vowel amidst or followed by one or more
consonants is generally pronounced short - put or best; while vowels not closed by
consonants usually are pronounced long – be or so). Although exceptions to such
patterns may be found in common words, children can be taught to read them by sight
(e.g., do and to). This development of accuracy and fluency in decoding via instruction
of syllable types was previously cited in research to assist comprehension (Doignon-
Camus & Zagar, 2013; McKenna, 2008; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Also, instruction
on syllable awareness may be shifted to teaching how to chunk letter groups or
combinations of letters that frequently occur. This would enable language weak learners
to map them easily to create phonological representations that become readily
available. The automation may later be produced driven by increasing sensitivity for
these types of learners to orthographic redundancy. Teachers could explicitly introduce
students to high-frequency prefixes (e.g., re-, dis-, non-, un-) and suffixes (e.g., -ed, -
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ing, -ly, -er, -est). Another means to allow students’ sufficient practice to develop fluency
is the ‘peel off’ strategy, where students are directed to read smaller words they could
recognize or word parts they can easily figure out. One activity based on ‘peel off’
reading requires students to underline affixes in a word (e.g. unkind, redo, careless,
unfaithful).
Likewise, the fact that both larger and smaller components of sound are being
developed at the same time for New Zealand school-aged learners with specific
language deficits indicate that learners obtain phonological responsiveness abilities in
co-occurring or overlapping stages rather than discrete phases. This is consistent with
the previous studies highlighting difference in complexity of mental performance
(Anthony et al., 2003; Lonigan et al., 2000; Stanovich, 2000). The seemingly parallel
growth in different aspects of phonological awareness seem to suggest that learners do
not need to focus on mastering one level of phonological ability (e.g. syllable
segmentation) before developing abilities at another level (e.g. phoneme isolation). This
further suggests that when creating activities for children with specific language
deficiencies, teachers can design tasks that target varying relevant aspects of
phonological awareness.
In summary, the present research investigated a follow-up evaluation on the
impact of early literacy interventions among children presenting with specific language
weaknesses. It was demonstrated that lasting effects in the context of early intervention
are possible for children presenting with language deficits. This further elevates the
importance of introducing interventions in addressing literacy challenges among

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emergent readers. Still, knowledge base of long-term effects require more studies with
longer follow-up of student functioning after cessation of intervention. In so doing, a
better understanding of children’s exposure history in relation to the applied intervention
approaches may be gleaned. The results of this particular investigation indicate that the
adoption of targeted intervention that incorporate various techniques highlighting
pattern-based derivation from the English language may not only supplement an
already existing comprehensive reading program, but may develop further the
metalinguistic abilities of children with known language deficiencies, who in the end are
hoped to find enjoyment in effective independent reading by becoming code breakers of
meaning.
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Chapter 5 Assessing Literacy Intervention Impact – A Cross-country

Comparison of New Zealand and the Philippines
With the ever increasing complexity of challenges faced by society in the advent
of the information age, education remains a pivotal driver in a nation’s constant renewal,
and one factor in securing the maintenance of success for a community. Such
adaptation and success for a whole community is fostered by the education sector
guaranteeing equal access to educational opportunities for every individual, irrespective
of social or economic background. Given that literacy may be one of the foundations of
educational success, ensuring that literacy equality is sustained continues to test not
only resource-lean countries, but also well-developed states. In New Zealand, for
instance, the latest 2016 survey report of Progress in International Reading Literacy
Study (PIRLS) indicated that children face increasing challenges in learning to read.
The wide distribution of scores pertaining to reading-related skills, including a relatively
lengthy “tail” of weak performers, continues to be evident in the New Zealand results.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, although literacy rates have been reported to be high
(within the 80% to 90%, range particularly for those in aged 10 years and older:
Christina & Vinogradova, 2017), such rates were documented to be higher for women
than for men (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2011). In addition, the recorded statistics in
the Philippines fail to convert into global competitiveness, as it is reflective only of
decoding abilities (sans comprehension) of enrolled students and school leavers, and is
not inclusive of high school dropout rates, which congregate in particular sectors of the
population. Owada et al. (2019), in their study of determinants of functional literacy

290
variability among school-aged children in the Philippines, noted that the pace of
progress in the country to deal with disparities in the national literacy rates has been
sluggish. These researchers recommended the introduction of targeted and integrated
interventions in schools.
This particular chapter discusses further the findings presented in previous
chapters in this thesis (i.e., Chapter 2 and Chapter 3), and provides comparison of
results across the two countries in which the research was performed. These analyses
aim to identify similarities in the data collected in New Zealand and in the Philippines, as
well as to determine whether there was evidence for specific impacts of the
interventions focused on a particular country/educational context.
The Present Study
The analyses presented in this chapter provide a cross-country comparison that
examines data from a research-based model of literacy support incorporating explicit
instructional training of metalinguistic awareness at the classroom level. Implementation
of the treatment approaches in each country was complicated by language use, as well
as differing educational policies. Keeping these differences in mind is vital when
interpreting the outcomes of the interventions. On the other hand, similarities in effects
may suggest that these differences have less of an impact than the intervention
methods. Results will be presented as descriptive statistics, along with graphical
presentation of changes in performance over the course of the study and across the two
countries.
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Research Questions
The analyses aim to investigate the following research questions:
(14) Are there differences in task performance of bilingual language-weak
learners across the two countries?
(15) Do the intervention approaches demonstrate similar or different gains
among the language-weak bilinguals across the two countries?
Methods
Data Source
The focus of this chapter was on the data produced by the language-weak bilinguals
identified in the two countries’ contexts. There were 9 language-weak students in the
New Zealand cohort and 15 language-weak bilingual students in the Philippines.
Although both groups of learners were in their first formal year in primary school, the
participants in New Zealand were younger than those in the Philippines due to literacy
instruction of children in New Zealand primary schools beginning at age five compared
to the age of six in the Philippines. A complete description of the participants was
provided and discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis.
Procedures
In both country cases, students were evaluated at baseline (Time 1 – Pre), mid-point
(Time 2 – Mid) and end-point (Time 3 – Post) on literacy-related skills using
standardized and informal assessment measures (these are again described in detail in
Chapters 2 and 3). At baseline, all students were represented in the pre-test data.
However, half of the total number of participants were represented in the mid-test data
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for the phonological intervention (i.e., 8 for the Philippines and 5 for New Zealand), and
the rest were represented for the morphological awareness intervention (i.e., 7 for the
Philippines and 4 for New Zealand). After mid-point, a cross-over of interventions was
implemented. This means that in the end-test, the phonological awareness intervention
data were represented by 7 participants from the Philippines and 4 for New Zealand;
while the morphological awareness intervention data were comprised of performance
scores from 8 participants in the Philippines and 5 from New Zealand.
In order to look at the effects of a specific intervention, comparisons of pre-test and
mid-test for those taking an intervention first, and mid-test and end-test for those taking
an intervention second were made. Differences in scores were calculated for each
student and the scores were combined to produce one analysis with all 15 participants
for the Philippines and all 9 participants for New Zealand. Afterwards, a two-way
ANOVA was used to make a comparison on the mean differences between the two
groups of bilingual language weak learners, with country and intervention as the
independent subject factors. The two-way ANOVA allowed the comparison of the
different intervention effects across the two countries and provided a means of
determining the main effect of country in relation to task performance. Meanwhile,
procedures for administering the assessments and prior ethical approval details can be
found in Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis.
Results
The present analyses focused on the data from assessments of bilingual
language weak students either in New Zealand or in the Philippines. Assessments were
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conducted before any form of intervention occurred or the baseline (Time1- Pre), after
the first five weeks of the intervention (Time 2 – Mid), and after ten weeks of
intervention (Time 3 – Post). Growth in performance on the assessment measures
across the three time points would be evidence for the benefit of such interventions,
with differences between the country groups indicative of the potential influences of
factors related to group composition (culture, language or education system).
In the results displayed for the New Zealand data in the succeeding section,
Time 1 – Pre represented all 9 participants assessed. At Time 2 – Mid, only 5
completed the phonological interventions first. The remaining 4 completed the
phonological intervention second. The same approach was applied for the morphology
interventions. At Time 2 – Mid, 4 students had completed the morphology intervention
and the rest of the students (5 participants) completed the morphology intervention
second.
For the Philippine data, Time 1 – Pre was represented by all of the 15
participants. At Time 2 – Mid, 8 participants were assessed following the phonological
intervention. The rest (7 participants) completed the phonological intervention second.
On the other hand, for the morphology interventions, Time 1 – Pre included all the 15
participants. At Time 2 – Mid, 7 participants completed the morphological instruction first
and the remaining 8 students went through the morphological intervention second.
Findings related to the influence of each intervention on the learner’s language
and literacy skills became evident by a comparison of the obtained combined scores of
participants in either New Zealand or the Philippines, which were derived from the
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difference in scores. This score difference was calculated during comparisons made
between pre-test and mid-test performance outcomes for learners given an intervention
first, and mid-test and end-test for students administered with an intervention second.
The combined data was then analyzed using a two-way ANOVA; in order to produce a
single analysis for participants in New Zealand and in the Philippines.
In this section, the performance outcomes were presented using descriptive
statistics for each measure used in the study. Comparison of skills between the two
bilingual language weak groups assessed using two-way ANOVA were illustrated using
summary tables and graphs to present the findings visually. This results section
contrasted the scores in each country context to assess the impact of the two
interventions. The results were shown beginning with the phonological measures that
primarily feature larger components of sound such as syllable and rhyme, then
proceeds to the phoneme-level units of sound (alliteration, phoneme isolation and
segmentation). Afterwards, knowledge in letter-sounds are displayed, succeeded by the
morphological measures (inflection and derivation). The section then concludes with the
presentation of findings taken from word meaning measures (antonyms, synonyms,
analogies and text comprehension).
Tables 5.1 and 5.2 below display the means and standard deviations assessed
at three time points for the bilingual language weak students in the two country
contexts. Meanwhile, Tables 5.3 and 5.4 below display the means and standard
deviations for the calculated difference between score before and after the intervention
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indicating the effects of specific intervention for the bilingual language weak students in
their respective countries.

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Table 5.1 Means and Standard Deviations of Pre-test, Mid-test and Post-test Scores of Year 1 Bilingual Weak Learners on Tasks, by Intervention
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Table 5.2 Means and Standard Deviations of Pre-test, Mid-test and Post-test Test Scores of Year 1 Bilingual Weak Learners on Tasks, by Intervention
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Table 5.3 Effects of Interventions among Year 1 Bilingual Language Weak Learners on Tasks
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Table 5.4 Effects of Interventions among Year 1 Bilingual Language Weak Learners on Tasks
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A two-way analysis of variance for the Syllable awareness measure yielded a
significant interaction effect (F(1, 44) = 13.33, p < . 01, EF = .23), suggesting that the
difference between the two intervention approaches was larger for the New Zealand
group than those in the Philippines. A statistically significant main effect for the
Intervention factor (F(1, 44) = 14.91, p < .001, EF = .25) was also recorded, indicating that
the mean change score was significantly higher for those participants in the
phonological awareness approach (M = 1.92, SD = 2.26) than those in the
morphological awareness approach (M = .04, SD = 2.51). However, the main effect of
Country was non-significant (F(1, 44) = .42, p = .521, EF = .009). Figure 5.1 illustrates the
effect of interaction of the Syllable awareness measure across the two countries.
Figure 5.1 Effects of Intervention on Syllable Awareness by Country

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The two-way ANOVA for the Rhyme awareness task scores indicated a non-
significant interaction (F(1, 44) = .43, p = .52, EF = .01). There was also no significant
main effect of the Intervention (F(1, 44) = 3.26, p = . 08, EF = .07) nor Country (F(1, 44) =
.13, p = .72, EF = .003) - see Figure 5.2. However, the Intervention effect was
approaching significance, which may suggest a possible trend for the phonological
intervention to produce greater improvements than the morphological intervention in
both country contexts.
Figure 5.2 Effect of Intervention on Rhyme Awareness by Country

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A two-way ANOVA conducted on the Alliteration awareness measure yielded no
significant interaction effect between Intervention and Country (F(1, 44) = 1.9, p = .18, EF
= .041). Likewise, no significant difference was recorded on the variable Country F (1, 44)
= .27, p = .61, EF = .006). However, a statistically significant difference on the main
effect of Intervention was recorded (F(1, 44) = 5.02, p < . 05, EF = .10), indicating that the
mean change score was significantly higher in the phonological awareness approach (M
= 2.75, SD = 3.20) than in the morphological awareness approach (M = .75, SD = 1.8)
Figure 5.3 illustrates the learners’ performance for the Alliteration awareness measure.
Figure 5.3 Effect of Intervention on Alliteration Awareness by Country

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The two-way ANOVA for the Phoneme isolation measure revealed a non-
significant interaction ( F(1, 44) = .002, p = .97, EF = .000). There was a near statistical
significant effect of Country (F(1, 44) = 3.62, p = .06, EF = .08), and a significant effect of
Intervention (F(1, 44) = 3.76, p = .05, EF = .08). This suggests that phonological
awareness’ influence may provide a greater influence than the morphological
awareness approach – see Figure 5.4. The near-significant effect of Country suggested
that there was a trend for the New Zealand cohort to benefit slightly more from both
interventions compared to those in the Philippines.
Figure 5.4 Effect of Intervention on Phoneme Isolation by Country

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The results of the analysis of Phoneme segmentation measure revealed a non-
significant two-way interaction (F(1, 44) = .04, p = .84, EF = .001). There were also non-
significant main effects of Intervention (F(1, 44) = .43, p = .52, EF = .010) and Country
factors (F(1, 44) = 1.15, p = .29, EF = .025). See Figure 5.5 for the illustration of
performance scores of participants for the Phoneme segmentation task.
Figure 5.5 Effect of Intervention on Phoneme Segmentation by Country

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Letter-sound task
The results of the two-way ANOVA for the Letter-sound measure indicated a
non-statistically significant interaction effect between Country and Intervention factors
(F(1, 44) = .46, p = .50, EF = .01). There was also no significant difference on main effects
of the Intervention factor (F(1, 44) = .03, p = .87, EF = .001). However, a significant main
effect for the Country factor was recorded (F(1, 44) = 10.81, p = .002, EF = .20), indicating
that bilingual language weak in New Zealand showed greater gains across the two
interventions compared to the bilingual language weak in the Philippines - see Figure
5.6.
Figure 5.6 Effect of Intervention on Letter-Sound Knowledge by Country

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Findings from the two-way ANOVA for the Morphological awareness inflection
measure revealed a non-significant interaction effect between Country and Intervention
factors (F(1, 44) = .112, p = .74, EF = .003). There were also no statistically significant
main effects of Intervention (F(1, 44) = .009, p = .92, EF = .000) and Country (F(1, 44) = .06,
p = .81, EF = .001) – see Figure 5.7.
Figure 5.7 Effect of Intervention on Morphological Awareness - Inflections by Country

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The two-way ANOVA for the Morphological awareness derivation task, revealed
a non-significant interaction effect between Country and Intervention factors (F(1, 44) =
.91, p = .35, EF = .02). In addition, there was also no significant main effect of Country
(F(1, 44) = .8, p = .38, EF = .02). There was, however, a statistically significant main effect
of Intervention (F(1, 44) = 5.99, p = .02, EF = .12). This indicates that participants who
received the morphological awareness intervention performed better than those
experiencing the phonological awareness instruction. Figure 5.8 displays the effect of
intervention based on the performance scores of participants for the Morphological
awareness derivation task.
Figure 5.8 Effect of Intervention on Morphological Awareness - Derivations by Country

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A two–way analysis of variance for the Antonym production measure yielded a
statistically non-significant interaction effect between Country and Intervention factors
(F(1, 44) = .20, p = .65, EF = .005). Likewise, there was no significant main effect of
Intervention (F(1, 44) = .54, p = .47, EF = .01). Nevertheless, a significant main effect of
Country was identified (F(1, 44) = 7.63, p = .01, EF = .15). This suggest that bilingual
language weak in the Philippines showed greater gains on the Antonym production task
compared to those bilingual language weak in New Zealand - see Figure 5.9.
Figure 5.9 Effect of Intervention on Antonym Production by Country

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Results of the two-way ANOVA for the Synonym production measure indicated
no significant interaction effect between Intervention and Country variables (F(1, 44) = 0, p
= 1, EF = 0). There were also no statistically significant main effects of Intervention (F(1,
44) = .64, p = .43, EF = .01) and Country (F(1, 44) = 3.29, p = .08, EF = .07). Figure 5.10
below displays the effects of intervention on for the Synonym production measure by
country context.
Figure 5.10 Effect of Intervention on Synonym Production by Country

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Word analogy task
The two-way analysis of variance on the Word analogy measure produced a non-
significant interaction between Intervention and Country factors (F(1, 44) = .001, p = .98,
EF = .00). In addition, there were no significant difference on main effects of
Intervention (F(1, 44) = .01, p = .92, EF = .00) and Country (F(1, 44) = 2.20, p = .15, EF =
.05) – see Figure 5.11.
Figure 5.11 Effect of Intervention on Word Analogy by Country

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The 2x2 analyses of variance for the Text comprehension measure indicated
non-significant interaction effect between the independent factors Country and
Intervention (F(1, 44) = .46, p = .50, EF = .01) There were also no significant main effects
of Intervention (F(1, 44) = .16, p = .69, EF = .004) and Country (F(1, 44) = .54, p = .47, EF =
.012). This is illustrated in Figure 5.12.
Figure 5.12 Effect of Intervention on Text Comprehension by Country

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Discussion
The particular analyses reported in this chapter focused on comparisons of the
effects of the phonological versus morphological instructional training across the two
country contexts (New Zealand versus the Philippines). The aim was to determine
whether gains in performance on the equivalent assessments differed across these
separate educational, language and cultural contexts.
The results of the investigation seem to suggest that regardless of context,
explicit instruction at the classroom-level, which concentrates on targeting phonological
skills, proved more successful in facilitating improvements of young learners’ language
skills. The advancement of syllable segmentation, alliteration awareness and phoneme
isolation performance scores suggests that such phonological awareness training has
the potential to foster phonemic awareness, which has the potential to support literacy
acquisition by helping children understand the association between speech and print.
As discussed before, the research literature indicates that a perception among learners
at an early stage of acquisition that words can be segmented into smaller constituent
sounds is an essential foundation to effective word recognition proficiency and later
literacy outcomes (Bus and Van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Ehri et al., 2001). Such research
suggests that the significance of phonological awareness, which appears universal in
learning to read, lies in its role of allowing the isolation of speech segments (e.g.,
syllables or phonemes) and mapping those oral referents to specific graphic
representation (Hu & Catts, 1998).

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Also, the lack of statistically significant interaction effects (for all performance
measures except Syllable awareness analysis) between Intervention and Country seem
to suggest that any gains produced by the two intervention approaches are not too
dissimilar across the two country contexts. Hence, if a phonological awareness
intervention produced more gains than the morphological awareness intervention, then
it is true across both countries.
It is further worth noting that the evaluation of results concerning follow-up
assessment scores of bilingual language weak students in New Zealand, and in
comparison of these with the assessment scores of typically-developing bilingual
students in the Philippines, who were given 10 weeks of intervention, revealed
interesting information (see Chapter 3 results for comparison). For instance, the syllable
awareness task performance scores after the follow-up assessment of New Zealand
bilingual language weak students were similar to those attained by older typically-
developing bilinguals in the Philippines. In addition, the same results were recorded for
phoneme isolation and alliteration awareness tasks, where New Zealand bilingual
language weak students garnered scores that are akin to the typically-developing
bilingual levels reported in the Philippine research data. This indicates that the
perception range in the sound structures of a language seems to be most responsive to
the effect of amount of intensive input. It then gives the impression that attaining the
appropriate use of English language phonological awareness finiteness rests on the
degree of exposure to the said language. It is surmised that although typically-
developing bilingual children in the Philippines may have been older and started
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phonics training early via direct formal instruction, the New Zealand bilingual language
weak learners seem to “catch-up” with typically-developing bilinguals in the Philippines;
as the former experienced consistent amounts of practice in phonological storage,
retrieval and analysis via the phonological awareness intervention administered twice
every week for 10 weeks.
Meanwhile, a surprising outcome in this particular investigation was that the
bilingual language weak children in New Zealand garnered higher scores in the letter-
sound knowledge performance task; as they were more accurate in the pronunciation of
the sound a particular symbol conveyed. It was assumed by the researcher that since
the bilingual language weak participants in the Philippines had earlier phonics training,
such children would perform better on the said measure than their New Zealand
counterpart. However, the Philippine bilingual language weak cohort were observed to
display common errors in pronouncing /s/ and /f/. A possible reason was that those who
committed errors in sounding out the /f/ sound tend to produce /f/ with an added schwa
sound /ə/ at the end. This may have been an influence of syllable saliency surrounding
the nature of Tagalog, it being a syllable-timed rather than a stress-timed language
(Schachter, 1990). On the other hand, error also occurred in the pronunciation of /s/
which may be associated with the palatized allophone [sy] in Tagalog. Such a palatized
sound requires raising the front of the tongue toward the hard palate. The [sy] sounds
like an intermediate between the /s/ phoneme and the digraph /sh/ (Schachter &
Otanes, 1972). The aforementioned shortcomings in letter-sound matching by the
Filipino bilingual language weak learners may also be explained by the fact that certain
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speech sounds such as /s/ or /f/ were recorded in previous research to be difficult to
pronounce by young children and mastered later than other letters (McBride-Chang,
2016).
Moreover, it was observed that bilingual weak language participants under the
morphological awareness approach received higher gains in the morphological
knowledge - word derivation measure. This may be attributed to the inclusion of several
high-frequency words (i.e., common words children encounter regularly in reading) in
the test that could be recognized immediately by sight due to considerable familiarity.
An example in the measure would be the item paint:painter::bake:______; where a
student can straightforwardly provide the derived word baker because of the base word
bake. Since learners in the morphological awareness intervention group were trained to
look and inspect a word, it became easy for them to immediately and accurately provide
the answer.
Additionally, bilingual language weak learners in the Philippines were able to
demonstrate evidence of improved Antonym knowledge. The result was higher
performance scores in the said measure compared to the New Zealand bilingual
language weak group. This may be attributed to the preference of the Filipino bilingual
language weak children investigated in this study to a contrast-based learning style.
This was observed during actual teaching activities where learners would most often
prefer that concepts be explained using opposite categories or from contrastive
information. For instance, during a particular lesson with the participants, the children
were able to distinguish different meanings of novel adjectives when semantic opposites
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were provided (e.g. Give me the enormous doll, not the tiny one). The idea that young
learners favor contrastive contexts as bootstraps in the acquisition of the meanings of
relational words in general was supported by a previous investigation conducted by
researchers Murphy and Jones (2008).
The overall similarities in effects observed across the two countries studied (New
Zealand and the Philippines), may suggest that differences in culture, language use and
differing educational policies have less of an impact than the intervention method.
Studies investigating the impact of literacy interventions among bilinguals across
country contexts are relatively small; and further impact research on this topic, including
rigorous designs is needed for conclusions to be confirmed. Furthermore, succeeding
investigations should concentrate not only on identifying potential treatment approaches
that work, but also identify contributing factors leading to such cross-country differences
that could possibly be improved (e.g. teaching practices, duration of programs,
sequence of treatment, etc.). Such generalized best practice recommendations should
help to minimize prevailing gaps in literacy skills worldwide. Cross-country data also
offer relevant opportunities to broaden and deepen our awareness of literacy,
specifically what might lead to the displayed similarity in literacy-related skill processes
across languages in various nations around the globe. This type of research represents
an interesting and promising avenue for future research.
Given such limitations, the current study was able to provide relevant evidence
demonstrating similar effects of explicit intervention programs to the language and
literacy skills of Year 1 bilingual language weak students coming from two differing
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country contexts. Such cross-country research, that highlight varying bilingual language
weak children’s English language exposure, signify phonological awareness to be one
of the universal and fundamental ingredient in literacy acquisition that guarantees
scholastic achievement.
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Chapter 6 General Discussion

Introduction
The investigation reported in this particular thesis explored treatment approaches
that could be merged effectively into the regular classroom environment. Since
interventions have been found to be a potent means of improving children’s reading
skills (Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl & Willows, 2001; Suggate, 2010;
2016; Swanson, Hoskyn & Lee, 1999), this study assessed the impact of two
recognized forms of instructional training that previous research has indicated can
contribute to reading successes of emerging readers – phonological and morphological
awareness. As a robust precursor and prognostic indicator of early literacy,
phonological awareness has been extensively examined among children under highly-
controlled research conditions (Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Ehri et al., 2001; Gillon 2000,
2005; Gillon & McNeill, 2009). Emerging studies incorporating phonological awareness
in classroom interventions also showed promising results (Carson et al., 2013; Tyler et
al., 2014). On the other hand, morphological awareness has been currently gaining
considerable interest too, as it promotes skilful identification of underlying morphemic
units that directly activate lexical representations of words in the mind. Researchers
mentioned the compensatory strategy morphemic knowledge affords individuals
presented with learning difficulties (Elbro & Arnbak,1996) and its ability to explain
unique variance in reading-related skills, particularly in measures of word recognition,
reading comprehension and spelling, and language, such as measures of vocabulary
development (Carlisle, 2003; Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; McCutchen, Logan & Biangardi-
Orpe, 2009). It is because of these reasons that both phonological and morphological
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awareness have been deemed significant in improving literacy outcomes of students
characterized with language and literacy deficits (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010;
Carlisle, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010; Goodwin, Lipsky & Ahn, 2012; Hulme, 2012;
Munro, Lee & Baker, 2008; Reed, 2008;Ritter, Park, Saxon, & Colson, 2013; Segers &
Verhoeven, 2004; Tyler, Osterhouse, Wickam, McNutt, & Shao, 2014; Wake et al.,
2013). Thus, knowing how to channel and utilize the benefits provided by the said
treatment approaches, which provides the opportunity of synthesizing and applying
these to actual classroom curricula, will be invaluable in supporting endeavours to
reduce underachievement in reading acquisition, including among those with language
weaknesses. Such initiatives can translate to citizen empowerment and ultimately lead
to economic development.
In order to inform such work towards better practice and intervention, particularly
for bilingual children with language-related difficulties, four studies were conducted to:
1.) identify whether phonological and/or morphological awareness, administered in a
short period of time, leads to immediate reading outcomes (see Chapter 2 and Chapter
3); 2.) determine whether a significant difference exist between monolingual and
bilingual participants on measures of literacy/language skills after intervention (see
Chapter 2); 3.) assess whether differences between typically and atypically-developing
bilingual English language user occur in measures of literacy/language following the
treatment approaches (see Chapter 3); 4.) gauge whether gains in literacy skills related
to the interventions are maintained over the long-term (See Chapter 4); and 5.) compare
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and contrast the potential effects of the intervention methods across two distinct country
contexts (see Chapter 5).
This specific chapter provides a general discussion of the investigations
conducted. The succeeding sections of this chapter enumerate implications for
advancing classroom teaching and reading practices, outline the study limitations and
specify the future directions for further research.
Impact of Classroom-Based Literacy Interventions
Considering the results of the experiments conducted in this thesis, the overall
findings support the view that interventions can be implemented early for young school-
aged children with language delays. Such interventions would then be expected to
foster foundations associated with literacy development. The provision of intervention
services to learners experiencing language deficiencies may also mitigate the risk of
experiencing persistent literacy difficulties, as it veers away from the traditional practice
of allowing children to demonstrate prolonged periods of struggling with reading before
any form of mediation is implemented. The practice of incorporating appropriate
intervention instruction in the first year of school, as implemented in this study, is
supported by similar arguments made by Tunmer and Chapman (2015) who also
highlight the significance of early intervention as a mechanism for promoting long-term
reading success. Tunmer and Chapman (2015) likewise mentioned that secondary
outcomes of systematic intervention studies in the form of the creation of a positive
learner self-concept, which can equip learners with an essential competence to
surmount literacy challenges. In the research undertaken as part of this thesis, it was
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observed that children were more interactive and eager to participate in the literacy
tasks during each intervention session, and to display their ability to decode and
comprehend words to their peers. Such finding present relevant implications, for once
children with language weaknesses realize relative triumphs in their literacy journey, the
more likely they would remain in school and less likely to experience burn out or entirely
drop out of class (Finn, 1989).
Moreover, the implementation of early intervention, as demonstrated in this
particular thesis, paved the way for the enhancement of language and literacy skills
among students with persevering language deficits. This outcome strengthens the claim
that language weaknesses can be countered by a systematic treatment approach and
that advancement in literacy-related skills can be supported among learners despite
low-level language abilities. Hence, children’s poor reading outcomes impacted by
shortcomings in language proficiency can be effectively managed by a responsive
instructional program. Additionally, the capability of the interventions to generate
immediate results in a limited amount of time may prove essential for children to learn
the skills required to interact with their peers and eventually adapt to the academic
challenges posed by the school environment. This result was contrary to the
recommended 20 hours of structured phonological awareness instruction by Gillon
(2000). However, the attained adequate levels of improvement recorded in the current
study may have been realized with the help of a combined small-group and one-on-one
instructional training which entailed close monitoring of students’ progress. The

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possibility that combined small-group and one-on-one instruction can produce more
immediate gains is worthy of further research.
The data obtained in this investigation further indicate the facilitative effect of
short-term interventions that have the potential to provide an accelerated form of
learning (see also Billard et al., 2010; Cunningham & Stanovich,1997). It is interesting to
mention that the inquiry conducted in this study revealed that bilingual language weak
learners, growing up with extensive exposure in an English language environment,
progress in much the same way as their monolingual equivalents. This indicates that
classroom-based intervention approaches and activities may be applicable to both
groups of struggling learners despite the existing diversity of linguistic backgrounds. The
result confirmed previous finding made by Carlo et al. (2004) who found no significant
difference in treatment effects between “language minority learners” (the author’s term)
and their monolingual English-speaking peers. Such findings suggest that delivery can
be simplified by avoiding the need to separate varying groups of learners, and by
targeting the same learning outcomes.
Usefulness of Phonological and Morphological Interventions
The administration of phonological awareness training in young children with
specific language weaknesses, as conducted in this study, was observed to improve
participants’ literacy skills through the facilitation of phonemic awareness (e.g. phoneme
isolation) and text comprehension. This suggests that children, perceived to have
persistent literacy difficulties, have the potential to overcome their disadvantage by
means of explicit training on sound structure awareness. The finding of this

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investigation, which included outcome measures of reading, supports previous studies
by Carson, Gillon & Boustead (2013) and Zens (2009).
The thesis data also revealed that phonological awareness intervention
accounted for improved phoneme-level skills of bilingual language weak children across
two countries differing in methods of literacy instruction and culture. Such outcomes
highlight the relative potency of phonological awareness in the promotion of learning to
read in English despite cultural and instructional intricacies.
Previous cross-linguistic research investigation highlighted the influence of first
language in the development of phonological awareness in the second language (Liow
& Poon, 1998). The said authors showed evidence that exposure to a shallow
alphabetic script (i.e., Bahasa Indonesia) resulted in high scores on spelling tasks
involving real English words and pseudowords that necessitate knowledge of phonemic
awareness. Given that an individual’s first language has the capacity to effect the
development of phonological awareness in the second language (English), it may
likewise be possible that the development of phonological awareness in the second
language (English) may support the development of phonological awareness or even
foster reading skills of a child in his/her first language; especially when there are cross-
language phonetic similarities between the two languages/orthographies. For instance
in the case of Tagalog, which shares a Latin-based alphabetic orthography with English.
Also, there are existing phonological parallels with the English consonant inventory.
Both languages have full series of voiced and voiceless labials (i.e., /p/, /b/, /m/ and /w/);
alveolar/dental (i.e., /t/, /d/, /s/ and /n/) and velar stops (i.e., /k/, /g/ and /ŋ/) (Montanari,
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2011). Montanari (2011) also noted that English and Tagalog demonstrate at least three
nasals (i.e., /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/), share two glides (i.e., /w/ and /j/) and the liquid /l/. There
are even similarities in the fricatives /f/ and /s/. Nevertheless, further research on
possible transfer effects between Tagalog and English is needed to establish the
potential for these commonalities to show cross-language influences. In addition, direct
comparison of children from differing linguistic backgrounds, taking into consideration
those with a first language possessing either shallow or deep orthographies, are
imperative in order to shed light on such aspects of early cross-language reading
development.
The evaluation of student performance scores on phonological awareness
measures seem to indicate a reciprocal relationship between reading and phonological
awareness. At the outset of literacy learning, phonological awareness seems to show
an impact on reading as the participants appear to consolidate their knowledge of sound
structures, as well as apects of texts, while they read. Children can be observed to
sound out the letters, and may comment about how certain words sound the same.
Similar observations were made by the researcher in the current study when children
were noticed to utilize their understanding of letters to decipher words and to remark on
how to vocalize them, demonstrating their ability to draw upon their phonological
knowledge (i.e., ability to recognize sound patterns of words which comprise rhyming
structures and phoneme manipulation within words). Reciprocity between these skills
can be displayed when gains in phonemic awareness knowledge supports the reading
of words, and as gains in reading occur, further gains in phoneme manipulation are
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evident, which later stimulate additional gains in reading. However, phonological
awareness is not the only skill developing over this period. For example, during
evaluation periods, the older Filipino bilingual language weak participants were noticed
to read the words “jumped”, “helped”, “baker”, “teacher” and “painter” fluently, which
may be consistent with the development of more sight-word processing. The seemingly
developmental shift from effortful reliance on phonology to recognize words via skilled
sight word reading corroborates previous findings from research conducted by Ehri
(2007). This may be supported by the morphological processing skills used as part of
the training procedures used in the current study; though the exact influences of whole-
word and morphological lexical access processes have yet to be determined.
Additionally, it was revealed that during word meaning measures requiring lexical
access, the participants were quick to detect and decompose morphemic sub-units of
orthographically transparent words evident in the item “longer:long::taller____”. This
seem to be an indication of what Beyersmann et al. (2015) referred to as embedded
stem activation mechanism. This is a particularly automatized means of word
segmentation which may be reliant on children’s use of schema or pre-existing
knowledge of free-standing words to recognize them enclosed within a word context.
Since the participants may have been introduced to morphologically simple words such
as ‘teach’ or ‘work’ in their previous reading experience, they would rapidly map these
newly captured orthographic forms with the predated lexical representations.
The study further evinced that the administration of morphological awareness
training among children with specific language deficits allowed learners to see patterns
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for syllables or pattern conventions in print. This suggests that the aforementioned
learners may have been able to detect boundaries between syllables due to highly
occurring letter sequences found in words. Thus, in activities, the children were able to
identify the regular past tense form of the verb “– ed”, progressive form of the verb “–
ing”, derived agentive nominal “–er” and commonly occurring affixes (e.g., “un-”, “dis-”,
“re-”, “multi-”, “–ful”, and “–less”). There was even a specific one-on-one intervention
session wherein students were recorded to have been able to identify boundaries that
exist in the words “dishonor” and “dishwasher.” However, in the actual morphological
awareness tasks, all children provided incorrect answers, such as responding “sayed”,
for the past tense form of the word “said”. This indicates that children with specific
language deficits may also struggle in producing appropriate past tense forms of
irregular verbs when they share common and specific phonological features that are
characteristic of other potentially existing inflectional suffix. In this case, the verb “say”
shared phonological features with other verbs “pay” and “stay” in that they have similar
rhyme patterns. It is surmised that the presence of these related features would lead to
the incorrect spoken output due to the over-generalization of the morphological rule.
Hence, the answer provided would sound like “paid” or “stayed”. This over-
generalization error could be due to weaknesses in the cognitive mechanisms
responsible for analyzing semantic and syntactic properties of words (e.g. the inability to
inhibit a response based on a rule frequently occurring within a task) or to lack of links
between different morphological forms of the same word (e.g. the link between say and
said is fuzzy in some way) or even to an exposure to specific instances of words within
different semantic/morphological contexts (e.g. a lack of exposure to the relationship

327
between say and said across a range of discourses). However, such errors strengthen
the claim that morphological and phonological processing are intimately related in the
production of inflected words in the English language.
It is noteworthy to add that the outcome of administering two consecutive
intervention approaches among the participants resulted in higher gains not only in
phonological and word meaning measures, but most especially to morphological and
text comprehension measures. Thus, the findings seem to suggest that explicit
instruction regarding the interface between phonological and morphological awareness
may ultimately increase improvements in these skill areas. A possible explanation would
be that bound morphemes are characterized by phonological variations: i.e., a
morphemic form (such as making a noun into a plural) can vary in its phonological form
between words, which can also mean variations in its written form. For instance, people
produce the plural of the word “glass” with ‘es’ (glasses), but produce the plural form of
“bat” with ‘s’ (bats). In another example, the plural of some words ending with a final ‘f’
(such as “wolf”) would end with ‘ves’ (wolves). Variations focusing on morphophonologic
features of words are likewise shown by various pronunciations of the past tense ‘ed’
morpheme. Individuals produce a voiceless /t/ in cases where the root verb ends with a
voiceless phoneme (e.g., slashed, talked, glanced), but employ a voiced /d/ when the
root verb ends with a voiced phoneme (e.g., swayed, hurried, chewed). Hence,
incorporating a focus on systematic patterns found in morphophonological groupings
may prove beneficial for maximizing treatment gains in children encountering specific
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language deficits, which can be exploited in the future to improve current intervention
methods.
The gains in morphological awareness scores, especially from the Filipino
bilingual language weak cohort, may likewise be influenced not only by age, but also by
the manifestation of similar word formation rules learnt when studying the linguistic
features of the Filipino language as a special subject in school. Tagalog, much like the
English language, involves critical awareness in inflection, derivation and lexical
compounding rules. Numerous adjectives in Tagalog are formed with the addition of
“ma” to a root word. For instance in the word “matalino” (ma+talino), “ma” is added to
the root word “talino” (talented) which results to a new word meaning ‘clever’. Other
examples of the significance of morphemic knowledge would be in inflections such as in
the word “uminom” (drank) which resulted from a combination of “um” (an infix for a
perfected aspect) and “inom” to drink. Derivations and compounding are also pervasive
in the language. An example of derivation in Tagalog would be found in the word
“libingan” (cemetery), which is comprised of the verb “libing” (bury) + “an” (indicates a
location associated with the root word). On the other hand, examples of lexical
compounding are evident in words such as “abot-tanaw” (near or within seeing
distance) and “anak-araw” (albino). The former is made by combining the words “abot”
(reach or grasp) and “tanaw” (sight), while the latter is formed by merging “anak” (child)
and “araw” (sun) into one whole word.

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Implications
Advancing classroom teaching and reading practices
The findings in the study present significant implications for interventions
targeting specific language weaknesses. Children presenting with such language
deficits appear to display grammatical shortcomings or error patterns suggesting a lack
of appreciation of the distribution of morphophonological forms found in the English
language. The current data suggest that a more focused/explicit intervention approach
to evaluating variations in morphophonological forms would be useful for children
presenting with language deficits. In particular, shifting attention to how verb and
nominal changes influence morphophonological groupings may be worthwhile. This may
entail outlining treatment guidelines that directly emphasize morphophonological
configurations in the English language. An example would be giving exercises focusing
on phonologically similar (i.e., the words have the same rime both in the stem and the
inflected forms) irregular verbs and grouping them based on a common underlying set
of patterns, such as in the words creep-crept, keep-kept and weep-wept that could be
bound within a context of a certain intervention procedure. This may positively impact
past tense production among children with language deficits. Another arrangement that
may be implemented would be presenting target verbs which possess similar
phonological features (same rime patterns used to depict present tense form), but
undergo irregular inflectional change (e.g. brake-broke, make-made, awake-awoke and
forsake – forsook) to indicate the past tense form. Equipping students with awareness
regarding word transformations may enhance word identification performance. Target
words with low frequency manifesting sequences in the English language or those that
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vary past tense transformation depending on context (e.g. dive – dived/dove, hang –
hung/hanged) would require being introduced to learners via immense exposure in
differing contexts before an individual presenting with specific language weakness could
fully grasp its suitable use.
The treatment approaches were all based on teacher-child interactions, which
aimed to foster development of pertinent reading skills through a specialized form of
instruction that entailed scaffolding metalinguistic awareness activities explicitly. These
included, but were not limited to: singing nursery rhymes, pointing out rhyming words
(e.g. “Conner has a tag in his bag! Let’s listen. Tag and bag are words that rhyme!”),
drawing students’ attention to alliterative texts in books (e.g. Big Bad Bubble by Adam
Rubin and Daniel Salmieri), supporting attentional skills (e.g., “Alexis has a picture
pinned on her shirt. Let’s see her find a person with a different picture but the name of
that object in the picture rhymes with hers.”), introducing the alphabet and how letters
are formed together with their sounds, blending syllables into words or letters of the
alphabet with their corresponding sounds, distinguishing sound components (e.g., “How
many sounds can you hear in the word bats?”), sorting objects by their beginning
sounds and then by their ending sounds, analyzing parts of a word via affix recognition,
finding root words, emphasizing the past tense -ed as they sing the song “Little Fish,
little fish” and building compound words using tape words with pictures onto blocks
(basketball, treehouse, jellyfish, seahorse, etc.). Successful implementation of the said
treatment approaches then requires not only explicit understanding of phonological and
morphological theories, but also the effective and efficient transference of these
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metalinguistic skills among students; in order to prevent any confusion in the acquisition
of these fundamental skills in reading.
In addition, more specialized training for teachers is imperative, as it can impact
the delivery of quality intervention services among children with language deficiencies.
In the provision of early mediation, a good deal of knowledge involving the critical
components of language and a firm grasp surrounding the factors and processes
leading to successful reading are vital to ensure that important areas are assessed and
appropriate forms of instruction are provided. Teachers now become front liners of
language and literacy in providing alternative means of educational support, as they
intercede in helping students the moment they demonstrate signs of learning difficulties.
The practice of implementing an early intervention inside the classroom is also a pro-
active stance in resolving the dilemma of waiting for children to experience sufficient
failure; in order to qualify for state-funded special education services support.
Highlighting the role of bilingualism in literacy difficulties
Metalinguistic awareness skills (phonological and morphological awareness)
acquired in one language may influence the linguistic features acquired by a child in
another. Commonalities between languages may support the development of the
recognition of a language construct. Delineating similarities in phonological properties
and morphological transformations across two languages may also heighten both
phonological sensitivity and morphological production in each of the languages. Thus,
children exhibiting deficits in language and reading skills in English may be supported
by strengthening their overall bilingual experience.

332
In the case of the children investigated in this doctoral thesis, the Spanish,
Samoan and Tagalog speakers may have additional opportunities in enhancing their
literacy performance because these languages have both phonological similarities with
English (voiced and voiceless labial /p/, /b/ and /d/, fricatives /f/ and /s/, approximant /l/,
and nasals /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/), and share similar mapping symbols with the English
language (Duncan, 2018, Marinova-Todd & Hall, 2013; Montanari, 2011; Westerveld,
2013). Such commonalities should help promote linguistic repertoire by becoming
sensitive to the relationships between the novel words in the target language and the
existing words in their other language. Using these commonalities as an appropriate
pedagogical strategy should increase the students’ deeper understanding of the
relationship between a language and its written form.
With regard to responsiveness to morphemic knowledge, children’s awareness of
cross-language suffix correspondence may act as a bridge upon which they can carry
morphological knowledge in one language to support word processing and hence
reading comprehension in another. This was evidenced by a study by Hipfner-Boucher,
Lam, Chen, and Deacon (2015) which demonstrated that even as early as grade 1,
children were capable of matching suffixes in morphologically complex French words
with English translations (such as “–ity” / “ité”). Such findings were also observed by
Hancin-Bhatt and Nagy (1994) as Spanish-English bilingual primary students were able
to determine common meaning between suffixes “- ous” in English and “- oso” in
Spanish. A statistically-significant correlation was also shown between the children’s

333
understanding of Spanish-English suffix relations and their ability to explain
morphologically complex words in English.
The identification of cross-language suffix correspondences may allow children to
use morphological awareness knowledge developed in one language to support
understanding of syntactic structures in another language (Tyler & Nagy, 1990).
Grasping how syntactic structures work would then lead to comprehending whole texts
(see Deacon & Kieffer, 2018). In short, morphemes convey significant information about
word class, which eventually brings insight into the syntax of single words and whole
sentences. For example, derivational suffixes often distinguish parts of speech (e.g. The
agentive “– er” word formulation rule changes a verb into a noun: teach – teacher). The
suffix word formation could explicitly be taught among Filipino children, as productivity in
Tagalog is as prevalent as in English (e.g. adding the morpheme “an” to the verb “kain”,
which means ‘to eat’, in order to produce a new word “kainan” which means gathering).
Children can then generalize this knowledge to produce novel derivations in Tagalog
and transfer this awareness to support morphological processing in a new language.
Expanding knowledge about theories of reading through current findings
Deepening our understanding on how children approach literacy is crucial in
order for educators to develop and carry out effective literacy instruction within the
classrooms. The investigation conducted in this thesis extends present understanding
related to various theories of learning to read.

334
The Simple View of Reading
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), presented in the first
chapter, espouses the idea that central to the reading process is the comprehension of
meaning in printed texts. This requires the interplay of two components: word
recognition and linguistic comprehension. The simple view of reading acts as a
framework for classifying reading deficits (Carson et al., 2013). This view of reading
offers a means to discriminate weaknesses in reading based on word identification
(spoken language impairment), language comprehension (e.g. specific comprehension
deficits) or a combination of weaknesses in both components (e.g. mixed reading
disability).
Research discussed in this study emphasize the significance of developing
phonological and morphological skills as a way to support word recognition. Explicitly
educating children regarding the underlying principles behind phonological and
morphological aspects of word decoding at the onset of literacy may enhance the way
they decipher printed words on the page. A familiarity with the sound and morphemic
structures of words should give the learner a range of decoding strategies than can
enhance reading accuracy.
The Dual Foundation Theory of Reading
The Dual Foundation Theory of Reading proposed by Seymour (1990) advocates
the idea that orthographic development is viewed as mutually dependent on an
alphabetic processor (alphabetic decoding mechanism) and a logographic processor
(sight word identification process). These two specific processors can emerge in
335
parallel, but when combined, they offer a foundation for the orthographic
processor/framework (internal mechanism for checking legitimate spellings and building
around established linguistic structures such as appropriate word models and letter-
sound correspondences). The influence of the two information processing systems (i.e.,
alphabetic and logographic) may be unidirectional or bidirectional. The highest stage
attainable is the morphographic literacy level. In this level, syllable-sized components
may be merged to create multisyllabic words.
The Dual Foundation Theory explains that letter-sound acquisition is fundamental
to languages with alphabetic orthographies (Phase 0). Such acquisition may not be
impacted by language differences, but can be influenced by educational variables such
as teaching method or age of learning letter-sound correspondence, socio-economic
status (SES) and language learning deficits. The next phase (Phase 1), the foundation
literacy stage, involves both simple decoding (alphabetic process) and sight-word
recognition (logographic process) or simply either one of the aforementioned processes.
The foundation literacy stage may vary across languages. Languages with simple
syllable structures (e.g., Bahasa Indonesia, Te Reo Maori, Spanish) may develop their
alphabetic system processing faster; while languages with complex syllabic structure
(e.g., German, Danish, Norwegian) may have slower establishment of the same
processing system. It is likewise formed more slowly in languages with deep
orthographies (e.g., English, French) than those with shallow orthographies (Italian,
Finnish). On the other hand, the acquisition of sight word processing is slower in
orthographies that go beyond the threshold level of depth or complexity. Seymour

336
hypothesized that languages with deep orthographies prompt the emergence of a dual
foundation that comprises of unique logographic (sight word) and alphabetic (decoding)
processes. A still slower form of acquisition may be experienced by children presenting
with language learning deficits, while individual performance variability may occur
among typically-developing learners. Orthographic literacy, Phase 2, may also vary
between languages. Languages with simple syllabic structure may experience more
rapid formulation of an internal model of the spellings of all conceivable monosyllables
than those classified as complex syllable languages. Further delay may happen in
relation to the degree of violation to the one letter-one sound principle. Morphographic
literacy (Phase 3), the final stage, emphasizes the use of spelling in indicating lexical
identity and recognizing morphological function.
The findings reported in this research focus on the relevance of establishing
phonological and morphological skills within the Dual Foundation Theory. The difficulties
for beginning readers in English are likewise explicable within this scheme. It appears
that the challenges arise for students learning English at each specific phase of the
reading process. At first (Phase 0), immaturity due to untimely school entry may hinder
the attainment of fluency in processing grapheme-phoneme relationship. In the next
phase (Phase 1), slower learning further results and is affected by the overall
complexity of the orthographic and phonological environment. The acquisition of sight
words may be delayed due to the presence of numerous words in the language that
breach the one letter to one sound principle. Rudimentary decoding may also be
negatively impacted by the complicated syllabic structure of the language. Then in

337
Phase 2, the establishment of an internal model of the spellings in the language may be
delayed by the presence of various monosyllables with inconsistent rime spellings.
Additional complications arise in Phase 3 for English language readers because the
said language has a complex and ambiguous syllable structure. This leads to a more
time-consuming process for the internalized word forms to be processed and analyzed
based on lexical and morphological features.
The investigation conducted in this thesis indicate that children with specific
language weaknesses may benefit from instruction of reading via an alphabetic process
of letter-sound decoding and/or a logographic process of learning (acquiring concepts of
meaningful units in words through sight vocabularies). The knowledge provided by the
alphabetic learning of letter-sound associations enable the reader with a method that
can be employed to pronounce and decipher unknown words he/she may encounter.
On the other hand, the logographic process of sight-word recognition may likewise
permit unlocking of meaning, especially with words that that do not conform to phonetic
rules. With constant exposure to print, they begin to identify words in print rapidly
through familiarity with its orthographic form
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
The benefits derived from the implementation of early classroom intervention, as
documented throughout the experiments in this thesis must be interpreted within the
confines of the study’s limitations. One such limitation, which is similar across the four
studies is the small number of invited participants. An increase in the total number of
participants would offer more certainty to generalize the results. Further investigations
338
across different country or educational systems would also help determine to which
contexts the findings can be generalized. Studies with larger samples may also be able
to control for the schedule (time and day) of implementing the different types of
interventions: for example, delivering the treatment approaches at the same time, during
specific weekdays for all the intervention groups. Controlling for the schedule of
intervention may eliminate a presentation pattern or sequence by session or time of day
that may potentially influence the effect of the intervention (e.g. children may be active
and participative in the morning and lethargic in the afternoon after a full day of
activities). The participants may even receive two intervention training within the day –
one in the morning and one in the afternoon to control for order effects, when delivering
the treatment. And longitudinal studies across several years of education would
increase our understanding regarding the trajectory of reading and spelling acquisition
among children with specific language weaknesses, particularly following classroom
phonological awareness, morphological awareness or even orthographic awareness
instruction.
With regard to the assessment measures, tasks measuring various types of
morphological awareness, such as syntactic, relational and judgment awareness, may
prove just as informative. Besides inclusion of inflectional and derivational morphemic
knowledge tests, succeeding research may evaluate compounding knowledge among
children to add more depth in understanding morphological awareness development. It
may also be more meaningful to create morphological awareness performance tasks
which involve the use of pseudo-words that would necessitate children to utilize
339
productive rules to make appropriate derivations of novel words. For example, learners
could be asked to build words by combining smaller parts: “ang” + “kesh” to form
“angkesh” or “beki” + “londi” to create “bekilondi”. Children may also be given activities
that oblige them to decompose apparent suffixes in pseudowords (e.g. “keps” parsed
into “kep” + “s” or “chipanger” into “chipang” + “er”). Longitudinal studies may similarly
reveal understanding of morphemic rules governing a language, as relations might vary
across languages and their corresponding orthographies. In English, for instance,
affixes and grammatical tense are crucial markers of morphological awareness. On the
other hand, in Chinese, affixes and grammatical markers are relatively uncommon.
Meanwhile, in Hebrew and Arabic, knowledge pertaining to word derivations and
inflections are critical; given that many derivations of nouns and verbs serving as base
words undergo various morphological changes (McBride, 2016).
On the other hand, in terms of understanding profoundly the perception of sound
structures in language, further evaluating the role of phonology and how it is utilized
suitably by typically-developing older school age children versus atypically-developing
peers who have received more than five years of intervention may prove beneficial. This
may present opportunities to determine the role of phonology in aiding lexical access as
reading skill increases. A possible research may entail tracking eye fixations on correct
target words embedded together with homophones and orthographic controls (i.e., a
word that contains similar letter strings to that of the target word) during silent reading.
Participants would be required to read short sentences (e.g. The forest ranger protected
the fawn/faun/fain against poachers); in order to measure and compare reading times
340
on the correct word, homophone and orthographic control. It would help clarify whether
shared phonology with target words would facilitate delayed or immediate lexical
identification, which can give additional evidence for a pre-lexical role of phonology.
It is also significant to conduct future replication studies, but with the inclusion of
a no-treatment control group. The addition of a control group might be beneficial to rule
out the possible influence of other treatment factors that participants receive during the
period of training. The observer effect may be minimized by treating intervention and
control group the same in every conceivable means. Another strategy to be adopted
within this future research would be to ensure that participants and researchers are not
aware of certain information that would taint the results, much like the one observed in
the current investigation. A long-term approach would likewise be applied, extending the
timeline of the study to three years (Year 1 to Year 3) to ensure that any change efforts
will be sustained over a period time.
Succeeding investigations may compare the type of bilingual exposure
experience by children (i.e., early exposed bilinguals and later exposed bilinguals) to
ascertain the effects of such contexts on intervention results. Studying children’s time of
exposure to two languages would allow an examination of the developmental growth as
suggested in research by Hernandez et al. (2005) who identified differences between
early and late bilinguals in terms of L2 learning. Their data suggested that the second
language seems to develop a reliance on the first language skills for late bilinguals but
not for early bilinguals. Furthermore, given their findings for greater evidence of
neuroplasticity for early bilinguals, it is possible that late bilinguals need to employ more
341
controlled use of metacognitive strategies to support second language learning.
Practice of such metacognitive strategies may lead to advantages in executive functions
for late bilinguals; though further research is required to determine clearly the
relationship between language development and executive function.
A particularly worthwhile avenue to research would be understanding the process
of deriving meaning, gaining comprehension and expanding knowledge based on the
development of morphological awareness by designing instructional strategies that
combine two languages. This method may facilitate more rapid growth of morphological
awareness as learners can relate word formation rules in the language in which they are
more proficient in to another language that may be less familiar. Past studies have
demonstrated that cross-linguistic influence can promote morphological knowledge
development (see Candry, Deconick, Eckymans, 2017; Ke & Xia, 2015; Pasquarella et
al., 2011); and that cross-linguistic interactions at the morphological level can occur
between typologically-distinct languages (Ke & Xia, 2015; Pasquarella et al., 2011).
Lyster et al. (2013) investigated the advancement of derivational morphology by
alternatively teaching it in French and English. Their findings indicated that learners
taught in this strategy performed better than children in a control group on measures of
French morphological awareness. Further research examining whether teaching
derivational morphology (affixing and compounding) via cross-linguistic strategies can
positively impact a learner’s morphological awareness would be very interesting.
Another particularly interesting inquiry that may be conducted would be the
adaptation of the phonological and morphological awareness training resources, to

342
include the study of Chavacano – a Spanish-based creole in the Philippines. It would be
fascinating to discover distinct differences in morphological awareness features
between Chavacano and Spanish. There are 600, 000 speakers of the dialect and a
comparative study of cross-language transfer which contrasts Chavacano speakers
from Zamboanga city in the Philippines and speakers of the Zamboanga dialect of
Chavacano in Sempornah, Malaysia would be worthwhile to investigate. The research
may be significant in evaluating whether transfer of phonological skills would indeed be
possible, given the evidence that acquiring phonological awareness skills is universal
among alphabetic languages.
Furthermore, in New Zealand, it might be useful to replicate the findings of the
current study to larger groups of students that include Maori and Pasifika primary 1
children. These two groups have been referred to as the country’s two at-risk
populations (Carroll, 2016). For example, studies have reported that the disparity
between Maori and New Zealand European (Pakeha) students increases over the
primary years of schooling (Crooks & Caygill, 1999, see also the recent data from
Schluter, 2018). Given the critical role played by foundational literacy skills in ensuring
educational and life opportunities of individuals, such documented underachievement
have concerned researchers, educators and government officials since the 1990s
(Wilkinson, Freebody, & Elkins, 2000). Since the investigations discussed in this thesis
offer the potential to raise achievement of vulnerable learners, administering such
treatment approaches may strengthen learning during the foundation years of young
Maori and Pasifika.

343
Conclusions
A constant challenge plaguing the field of education is to identify mechanisms
that would ensure successful acquisition of reading skills among children presenting
with persistent reading difficulties. Several initiatives have been undertaken such as the
provision of remedial teaching or implementation of small-group tutorials for those
considered to be the highly ‘struggling’ segment of the school population. However,
translating evidence-based research as a form of support to regular classroom
instruction is pivotal in bringing immediate and lasting systematic change that is
necessary to elevate literacy achievement, for learners faced with literacy deficits.
Methods investigated in this particular thesis highlight the effectiveness of
integrating metalinguistic awareness intervention training programs focusing on
phonological and morphological awareness development among early readers in an
educational setting. In order to realize this, the research reported in this study
demonstrated that phonological and morphological awareness training can be merged
within pre-existing classroom reading programs through short-term implementation,
targeting broad phonemic and morphemic units taught less than two hours per week for
ten weeks. These intervention programs ensure that children possess the requisite skills
to cope with academic demands of beginning reading instruction. Hence, the
implementation of the aforementioned instructional training may support the existing
literacy curriculum, as it offers extended opportunities for children with specific language
weaknesses and results to equitable practices by giving each child access to
fundamental mechanisms that ultimately lead to autonomous learning and genuine
literacy success.
344
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Appendix
Appendix A. Ethics Approval
395
Appendix B. Background Questionnaire

396
Appendix C. Information Sheet for Research Participants

397
Appendix D. Consent Form for Research Participants

398
Appendix E. Information Sheet for Parents

399
400
Appendix F. Consent Form for Parents

401
Appendix G. Information Sheet for Teachers

402
403
Appendix H. Consent Form for Teachers

404
Appendix I. Information Sheet for School Administrators

405
406
List of Figures
Figure 1 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance .................................. 146

Figure 2.2 Rhyme Awareness Task Performance ....................................................... 147
Figure 2.3 Alliteration Awareness Task Performance.................................................. 148
Figure 2.4 Phoneme Isolation Task ............................................................................. 149
Figure 2.5 Phoneme Segmentation Task Performance............................................... 150
Figure 2.6 Letter-Sound Knowledge Task Performance.............................................. 151
Figure 2.7 Morphological Awareness Inflection Task Performance ............................. 152
Figure 2.8 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Awareness .............................. 153
Figure 2.9 Antonym Production Task Performance ..................................................... 154
Figure 2.10 Synonym Production Task Performance .................................................. 155
Figure 2.11 Word Analogy Task Performance ............................................................ 156
Figure 2.12 Text Comprehension Task Performance .................................................. 157
Figure 2.13 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance ............................. 161
Figure 2.14 Rhyme Awareness Task Performance ..................................................... 162
Figure 2.15 Alliteration Awareness Task Performance................................................ 163
Figure 2.16 Phoneme Isolation Awareness Task Performance ................................... 164
Figure 2.17 Phoneme Segmentation Awareness Task Performance .......................... 165
Figure 2.18 Letter-Sound Knowledge Task Performance............................................ 166
Figure 2.19 Morphological Awareness Inflection Task Performance ........................... 167
Figure 2.20 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Performance ......................... 168
Figure 2.21 Antonym Production Task Performance ................................................... 169
Figure 3.1 Syllable Awareness Task Performance ...................................................... 224
Figure 3.4 Phoneme Isolation Task Performance ....................................................... 227
Figure 3.6 Letter-Sound Knowledge Task Performance.............................................. 229
Figure 3.8 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Performance ........................... 231
Figure 3.13 Syllable Segmentation Awareness Task Performance ............................. 239
Figure 3.14 Rhyme Awareness Task Performance ..................................................... 240
407
Figure 3.15 Alliteration Awareness Task Performance................................................ 241

Figure 3.16 Phoneme Isolation Task Performance ..................................................... 242
Figure 3.17 Phoneme Segmentation Task Performance............................................. 243
Figure 3.18 Letter-Sound Knowledge Task Performance............................................ 244
Figure 3.19 Morphological Awareness Inflection Task Performance ........................... 245
Figure 3.20 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Performance ......................... 246
Figure 3.21 Antonym Production Task Performance ................................................... 247
Figure 4.1 Syllable Awareness Task Performance ...................................................... 269
Figure 4.4 Phoneme Isolation Task Performance ....................................................... 272
Figure 4.6 Letter-Sound Task Performance ................................................................ 274
Figure 4.8 Morphological Awareness Derivation Task Performance ........................... 276
Figure 5.1 Effects of Intervention on Syllable Awareness by Country ......................... 300
Figure 5.2 Effect of Intervention on Rhyme Awareness by Country ............................ 301
Figure 5.3 Effect of Intervention on Alliteration Awareness by Country ....................... 302
Figure 5.4 Effect of Intervention on Phoneme Isolation by Country ............................ 303
Figure 5.5 Effect of Intervention on Phoneme Segmentation by Country .................... 304
Figure 5.6 Effect of Intervention on Letter-Sound Knowledge by Country ................... 305
Figure 5.7 Effect of Intervention on Morphological Awareness - Inflections by Country
.................................................................................................................................... 306
Figure 5.8 Effect of Intervention on Morphological Awareness - Derivations by Country
.................................................................................................................................... 307
Figure 5.9 Effect of Intervention on Antonym Production by Country .......................... 308
Figure 5.10 Effect of Intervention on Synonym Production by Country ....................... 309
Figure 5.11 Effect of Intervention on Word Analogy by Country .................................. 310
Figure 5.12 Effect of Intervention on Text Comprehension by Country ....................... 311
408
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Sample Phonological Awareness Intervention Group Lesson Plan ............. 120
Table 2.2 Outline of Session Schedule for Morphological Awareness Training .......... 123
Table 2.3 Demographic Composition of Phonological (PA1MA2) and Morphological
(MA1PA2) groups in comparison to primary school students aged 5-6 enrolled in the
Canterbury and Chatham Islands Region Academic Year 2017 ................................. 129
Table 2.4 School-entry performance on language and non-verbal intelligence measures
based on treatment group ........................................................................................... 135
based on language group............................................................................................ 136
each of the study measures at the first and second assessment points...................... 144
of the study measures at the first and second assessment points .............................. 145
each of the study measures at the first and third assessment points .......................... 159
of the study measures at the first and third assessment points ................................... 160
based on treatment group ........................................................................................... 210
based on language ability ............................................................................................ 211
Table 3.3 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group with
specific language weaknesses on each of the study measures at the first and second
assessment points....................................................................................................... 222
Table 3.4 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Typically-developing
bilinguals on each of the study measures at the first and second assessment points . 223
Table 3.5 . Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Bilingual group with
specific language weaknesses on each of the study measures at the first and third
assessment points....................................................................................................... 237
Table 3.6 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Typically-developing
bilinguals on each of the study measures at the first and third assessment points ..... 238
Table 4.1 Means, with standard deviations in brackets, for the Monolingual group and
Bilingual group on each of the study measures at the first and fourth assessment points
.................................................................................................................................... 268
Table 5.1 Means and Standard Deviations of Pre-test, Mid-test and Post-test Scores of
Year 1 Bilingual Weak Learners on Tasks, by Intervention ......................................... 296
Table 5.2 Means and Standard Deviations of Baseline, Midline and Endline Test Scores
of Year 1 Bilingual Weak Learners on Tasks, by Intervention ..................................... 297
409
Table 5.3 Effects of Interventions among Year 1 Bilingual Language Weak Learners on
Tasks........................................................................................................................... 298
Table 5.4 Effects of Interventions among Year 1 Bilingual Language Weak Learners on
Tasks........................................................................................................................... 299

Chang, Joel Alvar (Ginj) - Final PHD Thesis

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i

BENEFITS OF LITERACY INTERVENTIONS

WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE WEAKNESSES

Joel Ginj Chang

A thesis submitted for the degree of

of Canterbury Human Ethics Committee.

Joel Ginj Chang 28 November 2019

provider, comforter, healer, friend

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

vehicular accident, crowdfunding, falling out with friends, massive earthquake,

depression, mass shooting, sense of loss, homesickness, theft, poverty and

asking anything in return.

dedicated to my New Zealand friends and to my partner who inspire me daily. My

heartfelt appreciation is also extended to my secondary supervisor Bridgid McNeill and

tirelessly motivated me to keep writing, despite of my numerous personal setbacks.

My PhD journey concludes with a deeper sense of understanding to Gibran’s

closer to realizing our truth and purpose.

evolving into highly linguistically-diverse environments have the potential to pose a

as immersion in languages learned does not guarantee linguistic proficiency. Hence,

to develop responsive educational programs that accommodate successful bilingualism

learning deficits can be placed at a greater disadvantage in educational contexts,

might be valuable to reduce difficulties experienced by such populations of early

The thesis studies assessed two treatment approaches: one focused on

phonological awareness and a second targeted morphological skills. Both approaches

year of primary school. Improvements in language processing (phonological,

morphological and vocabulary), word identification, and sentence comprehension in two

backgrounds in New Zealand who showed evidence of weaknesses in the English

the sample comprised 16 typically-developing bilingual and 15 English language weak

participants were screened using standardized language assessments and measures of

non-verbal intelligence, basic reading skills (comprehending words and sentences),

language skills (including vocabulary), phonological and morphological awareness

levels. All children showed no evidence of sensory, behavioural or neurological

Primary Test of Non-verbal Intelligence. Students with language weaknesses were

completed the morphological intervention first.

Results indicated that specific gains in phonological processing were observed

intervention, whereas in the Philippines, the morphological intervention showed specific

phonological and morphological awareness intervention among school-aged children

may be an effective approach to support the language and reading development of

or bilingual/second language background.

Presentations with published abstracts

Phonological Awareness, Phoneme Awareness and Phonics ................................ 54

Implementation of a Morphological Awareness Intervention ................................. 121

Alliteration awareness task ................................................................................... 163

Data Analyses of the Philippine Cohort .................................................................... 217

Limitations and Future Directions ............................................................................. 256

The Present Study ................................................................................................... 290

List of Figures .......................................................................................................... 406

Chapter 1 Literature Review

At the heart of every society’s guaranteed existence is its capability to preserve

that carry meaning is inaccessible to people. Hence, educational institutions were

maintained and well-established.

Since the acquisition of such competency is a developmental process, impacted

by differing contexts (e.g. home beliefs, community ideologies, educational institutions

specific skills, as well as knowledge, must be integrated, nurtured and advanced in

attaining academic success in every aspect of the school curriculum, as it remains an

phonological knowledge) critical in unlocking the meaning of words and comprehending

and meaning may be supported by a literacy-rich environment and engaging activities

Apart from obtaining outstanding literacy instructional practices, reduction of

inequality in literacy achievement between vulnerable readers coming from