Post on 05-May-2022
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어교육 64권 2호 2009년 여름
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
Yusun Kang
(Korea University)
Kang, Yusun. (2009). The role of phonological awareness in Korean elementary
EFL learners’ word reading. English Teaching, 64(2), 29-45.
This study examined the relationship between phonological awareness in the two
languages of Korean elementary EFL learners and its predictive role in word decoding
skills in English. 113 4th grade students enrolled in a Korean public elementary school
were tested on a range of phonological awareness and emergent literacy skills measures,
including word and pseudoword reading and English vocabulary knowledge. The
findings indicate that their English phonological awareness was a significant predictor
for their word reading skills, when controlling for the effects of outside-school English-
learning factors, and that their Korean phonological awareness significantly explained
their English reading abilities over and above their English phonological awareness. The
results are discussed in terms of implications for phonological awareness training and
phonics instruction.
I. INTRODUCTION
Through constant research effort in the last two decades, it is well established by now
that both monolingual and bilingual children’s early decoding skill is an important
precursor to their later reading success and that their phonological awareness (PA) is a
crucial factor that explains early decoding skills and later reading abilities (Snow, Burns, &
Griffin, 1999). Research with bilingual children and second language (L2) learners has
demonstrated that in general, PA in one language is not only related to PA in the other
language, but is also associated with reading abilities across languages. However, since
most studies with bilinguals focused on bilingual children in second language contexts,
little is known about whether such cross-language influence of PA on L2 reading occurs
for children learning an L2 in a foreign language context, as is the case for Korean children
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30
learning English as a foreign language through formal schooling. Thus, this study aims to
examine Korean elementary EFL learners’ early reading skills and investigate whether
their PA in either language is related to their English word reading abilities. Such analyses
will provide much needed insights about early English literacy instruction for Korean EFL
learners.
II. BACKGROUND
Phonological awareness (PA) is an understanding that words are made up of different
sounds and is often reflected in one’s ability to manipulate or segment different sound
units of the words, such as syllable, phoneme and rhyme. Past research in reading
development has continuously shown that PA is a significant predictor of children’s early
reading acquisition in diverse languages (Adams, 1990; Bryant, MacLean., & Bradley,
1990; Cronin & Carver, 1998; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley,
1987; Stanovich, 1992; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 2001; Wagner et
al., 1997). For example, previous studies with English-acquiring children have shown that
lower level phonological skills such as syllable and onset- rhyme awareness are almost
prerequisites of reading development (Goswami & Mead, 1992). Also, PA turned out to be
a powerful predictor of both speed and efficiency of overall reading acquisition (Share,
Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984). In general, studies that examine the relationship
between PA and reading development in monolingual children have identified varying
levels of predictive power of PA in different phonological units on reading, and have
highlighted PA to be the strongest and the most reliable predictor of decoding ability
(Bowers, 1995; Bowers & Wolf, 1993; Mann, 1984; Wagner et al., 1994).
Studies which examined the PA skills of Korean native speaking monolingual children
have shown that body-coda units are the most basic and salient features of the Korean
language (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005; Kim, 2007; Yi, 1998; Yoon et al., 2002), a
phenomenon that is distinct from what has been observed with children acquiring other
languages. In other words, language-specific properties of PA development are identified.
More specifically, body-coda structure with consonant-vowel-consonant [CV-C], e.g.,
go-m) is a more salient subsyllabic structure than onset- rhyme (C-VC, e.g., g-om) for
Korean native speakers, while the contrary is true for English native speakers. Despite the
L1-specific sensitivity to a particular phonological unit that is not often recognized in other
languages, the facilitative role of PA for reading abilities was identified with Korean
children. For example, in relation to the word reading abilities of Korean children, Yoon
and her colleagues (2002) showed that Korean children might use an analogy of the body
unit in pseudoword reading. Similarly, Kim (2007) analyzed Korean monolingual early
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
31
readers’ PA skills in relation to their word reading skills and found that children’s
body-coda awareness is an important predictor of word decoding and spelling in learning
the Korean language. Thus the significant relationship between PA and reading skills is
present in Korean-acquiring monolingual children as well.
There has been a growing interest in the PA skills of bilingual children and L2 learners
as well (Loizou & Stuart, 2003). Such studies have shown that PA in one language is
significantly related to, and in most cases is the strongest predictor of reading abilities in
bilingual children (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999; Durgunoğlu, 2002;
Durgunoğlu, Nagy, Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Geva & Wang, 2001; Gottardo, Yan, Siegel., &
Wade-Wooley, 2001; Lindsey et al., 2003). For example, Comeau and his colleagues
(1999) investigated English-French bilingual children’s PA and reading abilities and
revealed the presence of a cross-language transfer of phonological processing skills and
reading performance. Specifically, they showed that PA skills in children’s L1 transferred
to their L2 reading, thus supporting the hypothesis that phonological processing skills
transfer across languages and across tasks. Similarly, Branum-Martin and his colleagues
(2006) showed that English and Spanish PA variables were related to each other and to
word reading, both within and across languages for Spanish-English bilingual
kindergarteners. Lafrance and Gottardo (2005) also showed that French-English bilingual
children’s PA skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading
abilities in the two languages, after controlling for the influences of children’s cognitive
ability, emergent literacy skills and language abilities.
However, these studies that provided evidence for the transfer of PA and word reading
skills in two languages have mostly compared languages that are both alphabetic, sharing
the same Roman alphabets, such as English and Spanish, and English and French. Thus,
not as much is known about the relationship between L1 and/or L2 PA and L2 reading
competence of bilinguals or L2 learners who are acquiring phonologically and
orthographically distinct two languages, such as Korean-English bilinguals or Korean
English learners. The few studies that did explore the potential effects of the degree of
similarities between the two languages that are being acquired have revealed mixed
findings: There has been a finding that Chinese PA was a significant predictor for English
reading beyond the variance accounted for by English PA for Cantonese-English bilingual
children (Gottardo, Yan, Siegel., & Wade-Wooley, 2001). On the other hand, some
researchers showed that such cross-language and cross-task transfer was observed only in
bilinguals acquiring two languages that share the same writing system (Bialystok, Luk., &
Kwan, 2005).
Although relatively less attention has been paid to the facilitative role of PA for early
reading skills in Korean-English bilinguals or Korean English learners, the few existing
studies are in agreement regarding the presence of significant relationship between PA and
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reading competence within and across the two languages (Cho & Lee, 2004; Cho &
McBride-Chang, 2005; Han & Lee, 2003; Wang et al., 2006). Cho and McBride-Chang
(2005), for example, investigated how Korean native speaking children’s phonological
processing abilities relate to their reading skills in English. They examined associations
between PA and word reading in Korean and English in a one-year longitudinal study of
second grade Korean EFL learners in Korea. They found significant correlations among
the PA measures in two languages and also showed that the most powerful predictors of
English word recognition were the ages of children in the second grade and phoneme
awareness in English. Similarly, Wang and her colleagues (2006) examined the relationship
between PA and orthographic skills in first and second grade Korean-English bilingual
children in terms of their reading ability in the two languages. In addition to the significant
correlations between L1 and L2 PA skills, they found that children’s Korean phonological
skill was a significant predictor for English reading. Furthermore, they argued for a
cross-language PA transfer across languages that are typologically very different.
However, both studies described above did not control for the influences of the Korean
participants’ overall English oral language proficiency, which may play an important role
in their phonological processing and literacy task performance as documented in other
research with English-speaking children (Chaney, 1992; Goswami, 2001; Metsala, 1999;
Metsala & Walley, 1998). In addition, as a large number of Korean students receive
English exposure or instruction outside school, relying on tutoring and private language
institutions, such factors need to be taken into consideration in order to provide an accurate
picture of the role of L1 and L2 PA in their L2 early reading abilities.
Thus, the present study attempts to understand the relationship between PA in the two
languages in Korean elementary EFL learners and investigate whether the facilitative role
of L1 and L2 PA in L2 reading skill is still present when their English proficiency and
informal English-learning experiences are accounted for.
III. METHOD
1. Participants
The participants were 113 (66 boys and 47 girls) Korean fourth graders attending a local
public elementary school in Seoul, Korea. They were recruited from four different fourth
grade classrooms, and every student in those four classrooms participated in the study, in
order to ensure representation of diverse English-learning backgrounds within the whole
student body. The fourth graders in this study had been learning English at school through
TETE (Teaching English Through English) approach from the third grade.
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
33
2. Measures
The measures administered in this study included PA tasks, word- and pseudoword
reading, oral language comprehension measured by a listening comprehension test, and
receptive vocabulary in English. Their Korean PA in four different phonological units was
also assessed in order to investigate whether L1 PA makes any contribution to their L2
reading.
1) Phonological awareness tasks
Phoneme matching task of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner
et al., 1999) and rhyme matching task of PAL-RW (Beringer, 2001) were used to assess
children’s English phoneme and rhyme awareness, respectively. For both tests, they were
asked to choose a picture among three different choices, that had the same beginning
sound as the word they heard (phoneme awareness task) and that rhymed with the word
they heard (rhyme awareness task). There were ten items in each task, and each correct
answer scored one point. The maximum possible score was thus ten for the two English PA
tasks. In assessing their Korean PA, they were tested on syllable, rhyme, body-coda, and
phoneme awareness tasks. Since standardized tests for these constructs are not yet
developed in Korean, the PA test battery developed by Kim (2009) was adapted. The
Cronbach’s alpha for these measures were all above .87. The content and format of these
tests were similar to their English counterparts, as the students were told to choose the odd
word among the three words they heard in the target phonological units. Each of the three
words in the test items were represented by pictures in order to minimize any ambiguities
and to allow them to simply point to their selected choice. Each Korean PA test contained
15 items, with each correct answer scoring one point. Therefore, the maximum possible
score a child could receive on each test was 15.
2) Vocabulary
The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tasks-III (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) was used to
test students’ receptive vocabulary in English. Students were asked to point to the correct
picture, among the four choices that corresponded to the vocabulary word given. The test
terminated when the student made five consecutive errors. Each correct item was given 1
point.
3) Word reading and Pseudoword reading
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English word- and pseudoword-reading were measured with Word Identification and
Word Attack sections of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (Woodcock, 1987).
Children were shown one word at a time and were told to read the word aloud as best they
could. The tests contained 50 items for the word reading and 40 items for the pseudoword
reading tasks, and each correct answer scored one point. The test was stopped when the
students gave incorrect responses for five consecutive words.
4) Oral language comprehension
In order to measure students’ overall comprehension of English, their scores on the
listening comprehension test that was administered school-wide was used. There were total
50 items on the test, and it was a typical listening comprehension test containing a range of
items including those that assess students’ microskills such as distinguishing different
sounds and word meanings to those that test more macro-level oral skills such as choosing
sociolinguistically and culturally appropriate responses in the given situations and
comprehending conversations in extended discourse. Each correct answer scored one
point.
3. Procedure
All testing took place in a separate classroom in the school. Students were tested
individually on the range of measures. In addition to the tests that were administered, the
students were also interviewed by trained researchers to collect information about their
English-learning backgrounds. In particular, they were asked whether they learn English
outside school, from whom and for how many hours per week, whether they learned
English outside school in the past or before entering elementary school, from whom and
for how many hours per week for how many months, whether they have been to
English-speaking countries and for how long, how many books they read in English per
week on their own, at what age they started to get constant exposure to English, and so on.
Their responses to the interview questions were used as control variables in the later
analyses.
After first observing the overall relationships among the measures, in the subsequent
regression analyses, students’ performance on the English word- and pseudo-word reading
tasks served as the dependent variables, and their PA scores on different phonological units
in the two languages acted as the main question variables, as this study was designed
specifically to explore the relationship between PA in L1 and L2 and L2 reading skills. The
other measures, including children’s English vocabulary knowledge, English oral
comprehension abilities, and other background variables such as the amount of time they
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
35
study English outside school and duration of oversea stay in an English-speaking country
served as the control variables, to examine the predictive power of PA beyond the effects
of those variables.
IV. RESULTS
As Table 1 shows, the participants in this study, on average, were studying English
outside school through tutoring or enrollment in private language institutions for about 3.5
hours per week. The standard deviation was as big as the mean, indicating a wide range
of such experiences and opportunities among the students. Similarly, the range of overseas
experiences in English-speaking countries was quite large, ranging from no experience to
four years of oversea stay. On average, students had about one-month experience abroad
where they were exposed to English, but the standard deviation which was nearly five
times bigger than the mean reflects the huge gap among the students in terms of overseas
experiences. The look at the means and standard deviations in the amount of time the
participants spend for outside-school English-learning and overseas experiences further
highlights the need to use these factors as control variables to account for the differences in
the amount of exposure to English in identifying the relationship between PA and early
reading skills in English.
TABLE 1 Means and Standard Deviations of Background and Literacy Variables
Min Max Mean SD
Duration of Oversea Stay (months) 0 48 1.23 5.60
Hours Studying English Outside School (hrs/wk) 0 14 3.52 3.19
English Listening Comprehension 27 50 44.94 4.28
English Phonological Awareness
English Rhyme Awareness 1 10 8.03 2.29
English Phoneme Awareness 0 10 8.25 2.51
Korean Phonological Awareness
Korean Syllable Awareness 1 15 13.51 3.19
Korean Body-Coda Awareness 0 15 13.43 2.84
Korean Rhyme Awareness 2 15 11.89 2.47
Korean Phoneme Awareness 0 15 12.54 3.43
English Word Reading 6 50 43.75 9.56
English Pseudoword Reading 1 40 24.27 10.51
In addition, the Korean EFL fourth grade students in this study, on average, performed
well on the range of English and Korean emergent literacy measures examined, getting
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more than 70% of the test items correct on each PA task. Although the minimum scores on
each task indicate that there were students who were not yet reading in English or have PA
in English and/or Korean, most students seemed to have quite a good grasp of oral
comprehension in English as reflected in their listening comprehension performance.
Interesting to note is that it was not only English PA students had difficulty with, as the
minimum scores of Korean PA were equally quite low, suggesting that PA is not only
related to language proficiency but to metalinguistic awareness in general (Chaney, 1992).
There was also a great variance in the students’ ability to correctly decode words. As
hypothesized, students seemed to have more difficulties with pseudoword reading task, as
they could not rely on their knowledge of sight words or memory. This corroborates
previous claims that pseudoword reading is a better and more accurate reflection of
decoding skills than word reading tasks (Oller et al., 1998). In order to examine any potential associations among the language and literacy
measures within each language and also across the two languages, correlation analysis was
conducted. As can be seen from Table 2, the duration of stay in English-speaking countries
was only significantly correlated with students’ English oral comprehension ability (r=.22,
p<.01), measured by an English listening comprehension test, and their pseudoword
reading ability (r=.22, p<.01). It did not show any significant relation with students’ PA in
either language. Likewise, the amount of time they devoted in studying English outside
school had significant relationship with English vocabulary only (r=.30, p<.001), and was
not correlated to PA in either language or English reading skills. Further, the number of
English books they read was not related to their emergent literacy skills measured in this
study and was only marginally related to their receptive vocabulary knowledge in English.
On the other hand, the size of their English vocabulary knowledge was not significantly
related to their PA, although it did reveal a significant relationship with their English word
(r=.29, p<.001) and pseudoword reading abilities (r=.45, p<.001). Thus, the more English
words students knew, the better they were at decoding English. This contradicts previous
studies that found close relationship between vocabulary knowledge and PA in
English-speaking children. In fact, most studies with English-speaking children have
shown that vocabulary knowledge is one of the strongest predictor of their PA (Goswami,
2001; Metsala, 1999; Metsala & Walley, 1998). Goswami (2001) attributed the
relationship between vocabulary and PA to lexical restructuring processes. That is, as
children pick up more and more words, they are required to distinguish similar-sounding
words and re-represent their phonological segmentations in order to differentiate them.
This lexical restructuring process further promotes children’s PA, as it requires them to
attend to smaller sound segments in words. Thus, PA is strengthened through oral
vocabulary growth. Since there has been little attention paid to the role of vocabulary
knowledge in PA development of L2 learners or bilinguals, it is difficult to explain such
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
37
TABLE 2 Correlations among Phonological Awareness and Other Emergent Literacy Measures
1 2 3 4 5 6
1. Time Spent on Studying
English (Hrs/Week)
1
2. Oversea Stay -0.03 1
3. # of English Books Read 0.18~ 0.2* 1
4. English Vocabulary 0.08 0.3*** 0.19~ 1
5. English Rhyme Awareness 0.14 0.17~ 0.11 0.22 1
6. English Phoneme Awareness 0.17~ 0.13 0.12 0.08 0.43*** 1
7. Korean Syllable Awareness 0.03 0.08 0.08 0.19 0.17~ 0.22*
8. Korean Body Awareness 0.05 0.09 0.02 0.11 0.31*** 0.32***
9. Korean Rhyme Awareness 0.01 -0.02 -0.05 0.23 0.12 0.03
10. Korean Phoneme Awareness -0.09 0 0.04 0.15 0.27*** 0.08
11. English Listening
Comprehension
0.22* 0.15 0.04 0.35*** 0.36*** 0.15
12. English Word Reading 0.3 -0.01 0.13 0.29*** 0.49*** 0.27*
13. English Pseudoword
Reading
0.22* 0.02 0.19~ 0.45*** 0.38*** 0.16
7 8 9 10 11 12
1. Time Spent on Studying
English (Hrs/Week)
2. Oversea Stay
3. # of English Books Read
4. English Vocabulary
5. English Rhyme Awareness
6. English Phoneme Awareness
7. Korean Syllable Awareness 1
8. Korean Body Awareness 0.22* 1
9. Korean Rhyme Awareness 0.32*** 0.17~ 1
10. Korean Phoneme Awareness 0.21* 0.09 0.34*** 1
11. English Listening
Comprehension
0.19~ 0.17~ 0.2~ 0.18~ 1
12. English Word Reading 0 0.25* -0.01 0.13 0.46*** 1
13. English Pseudoword
Reading
-0.03 0.19~ 0.04 0.23* 0.33*** 0.74***
~p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 *** p<.001
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absence of relationship between vocabulary knowledge and PA for the participants in this
study. However, it can well be attributed to the foreign language, as opposed to second
language, context in which the students learned English. That is, the relatively less
exposure to the target language and thus fewer opportunities to engage in lexical
restructuring process may explain such lack of facilitative relationship. More research
attention to this phenomenon is in need to provide evidence for this account.
On the whole, the result of the correlation analysis between the control variables and the
PA and reading measures revealed absence of relationship between PA and the control
variables, thus suggesting that PA is not something that is naturally acquired but needs
some explicit training (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Lundberg et al., 1988).
The students’ English PA in the two phonological units (phoneme and rhyme) were
significantly correlated with each other (r=.43, p<.001), and most of the Korean PA pairs
showed significant correlations as well. Although English PA was significantly correlated
to Korean PA, neither English phoneme nor rhyme awareness was related to Korean
rhyme awareness. More interestingly, there was no cross-language transfer for rhyme and
phoneme awareness in English and Korean. This is contradictory to previous studies
(Cisero & Royer, 1995; Branun-Martin et al., 2006; Dickinson et al., 2004; Durgunoğlu,
1998) and suggests students’ unawareness of the possibility of language transfer and
implies for the need of such training at the same time.
In order to examine whether English and Korean PA contribute to students’ English
reading abilities, higherarchical regression analyses were conducted for English word and
pseudoword reading separately. The pseudoword reading reflects students’ ability to
decode words that are novel to them, thus controlling for the effects of sight word reading
or memory effects (Oller et al., 1998). For both word and pseudoword reading, the
duration of students’ stay in English-speaking countries, amount of time they devote in
learning and studying English, the number of books they read in English, their English
vocabulary knowledge, and their listening comprehension skills in English were entered,
in order, as control variables. In both cases, the number of hours they spend for receiving
English tutoring and/or attending private English institutions contributed a significant
amount of variance after controlling for the effects of their studying-abroad experiences,
which did not contribute significantly to their reading skills. The number of English books
they read outside school did not explain additional variance in English reading skills once
their study time and oversea experience were taken into consideration, but their English
vocabulary knowledge contributed unique amount of variance, explaining as much as 6%
and 17% of additional variance for English word and pseudoword reading, respectively.
Thus, when controlling for the effects of out-of-school English-learning experiences,
students’ English vocabulary knowledge was a significant predictor for their reading skills.
Students’ oral comprehension skill in English turned out to predict a significant proportion
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
39
of variance in English word reading, even after controlling for the effects of the other
control variables, but it was not the case for pseudoword reading. The five control
variables together explained about 28% of the total variance in English word and
pseudoword reading.
TABLE 3
Regression Analysis Predicting English Word and Pseudoword Reading
Steps Variable R R2 ΔR2 ΔF
English Word Reading 1 Oversea Stay (Months) .045 .002 .002 .18
2 Hours Spent on Studying English
(Week) .283 .080 .078 7.56**
3 # of English Books Read per Week .304 .093 .012 1.19
4 English Vocabulary Knowledge .390 .152 .060 6.16*
5 English Listening Comprehension .526 .277 .124 14.78***
6 English Phonological Awareness .602 .362 .085 5.62**
7 Korean Phonological Awareness .671 .450 .088 3.21*
English Pseudoword Reading
1 Oversea Stay (Months) .039 .001 .001 .14
2 Hours Spent on Studying English
(week) .233 .054 .053 4.98*
3 # of English Books Read per Week .291 .085 .030 2.91~
4 English Vocabulary Knowledge .501 .251 .166 19.31***
5 English Listening Comprehension .532 .283 .032 3.81~
6 English Phonological Awareness .567 .321 .039 2.39~
7 Korean Phonological Awareness .633 .400 .079 2.63*
~p<.10 *p<.05 **p<.01 *** p<.001
When the effects of all of these control variables were controlled for, English PA proved
a significant predictor for English word reading, contributing as much as 9% of unique
variance, but only a marginally significant predictor for pseudoword reading. Most
importantly, the participants’ Korean PA predicted a significant amount of variance in
both English word and pseudoword reading over and above all the control variables and
English PA. In other words, the predictive power of Korean PA was over and beyond that
of English PA and other control variables. This is in line with previous studies that
revealed facilitative role of L1 PA in L2 reading for bilinguals acquiring typologically
similar two languages or L2 learners learning L2 in second language contexts (DaFontoura
& Siegel, 1995; Dickinson et al., 2004; Geva, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Schuster, 2000; Lafrance
& Gottardo, 2005; Quiroga et al., 2002). Students’ English and Korean PA, together with
the control variables, accounted for 45% and 40% of the variance in English word and
pseudoword reading, respectively.
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V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This study aimed to investigate the role of L1 and L2 phonological awareness in Korean
EFL elementary students’ English reading skills. The amount of time students received
English exposure and instruction through tutoring and private-institution experiences and
their oral language skills did turn out to be important predictors for their English reading
skills. In general, those students who went through English private tutoring tended to
perform better on English reading tasks. However, most important to note is that their
English PA contributed significantly beyond the effects of those out-of-school factors in
predicting their English reading skills and that their Korean PA was a significant predictor
over and above the effects of English PA. These findings are in accordance with previous
studies with English-speaking bilinguals which revealed cross-language contribution of L1
PA to L2 reading (Gottardo et al., 2001; Shwartz et al., 2005). The findings also strengthen
the cross-language and cross-task relationship between PA and reading competence
observed in Korean English learners (Cho & Lee, 2004; Han & Lee, 2003) by providing
strong evidence that students’ L1 and L2 PA are stronger predictors than their oral
language proficiency or amount of English-schooling. At the same time, the findings have
important implications for English literacy instruction for Korean elementary EFL learners.
It is true that a big proportion of Korean students rely on private tutoring and language
instruction outside schools to promote their English language and literacy skills these days.
This further leads to educational inequalities and a huge gap in English abilities among the
students of even same ages, which creates challenges for the teachers to provide adequate
instruction for all students. However, the findings from this study suggest that given such
huge diversities in English-learning experiences among children, good PA instructions and
training for not only English, but also Korean, will promote students’ reading success in
English, despite the differences in the amount of English exposure students get outside
school. In fact, the effectiveness of PA training on reading development has been
documented in numerous studies (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983;
Lundberg et al., 1988; Wagner & Rashotte, 1993), including those in the Korean EFL
context (Han & Cha, 2007; Park & Jeong, 2005). In particular, researchers have shown
that higher level skills including phoneme awareness can be developed by early PA
training (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Ehri, 1998).
Previous studies with bilingual children have shown that L1 PA often transfers to L2 PA
tasks, and vice versa (Branum-Martin et al., 2006; Cisero & Royer, 1995; Dickinson et al.,
2004; Durgunoğlu, 1998). Some studies, however, indicated that not all bilinguals transfer
their PA between the two languages. Bialystok, McBride-Chang and Luk (2005), for
example, showed that PA developed in response to language exposure and instruction and
that it transferred across languages only when it is fully established in their language
The Role of Phonological Awareness in Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Word Reading
41
system. Some (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1999) claim that ESL/EFL students need explicit
instruction and that PA is transferrable across languages in promoting successful L2
reading. The correlation analysis in this study revealed an absence of significant
relationship between L1 and L2 PA, even for the same phonological units in the two
languages. That is, there was no association between the participants’ phoneme awareness
in English and Korean; nor was there any relationship between their rhyme awareness in
the two languages. This suggests that their metalinguistic awareness, especially that which
requires them to attend to different sound units, is underdeveloped and not yet well
established to allow for a language transfer that can further promote their English reading
skills. At the same time, it calls for the need of explicit instruction on PA.
In order to obtain a more accurate account of Korean EFL learners’ literacy skills in
relation to their PA in the two languages, and to gain more insights into the interplay of
phonological and orthographical differences in the two languages in relation to their
reading abilities, however, a longitudinal study with a bigger sample across different ages
and grade levels is necessary. Nevertheless, this study made an important step forward in
highlighting the significance of L1 metalinguistic awareness for L2 literacy development
and the need to provide explicit PA instruction for Korean elementary EFL learners to
foster their English decoding skills that will play a crucial role in their later reading
comprehension abilities.
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Applicable levels: Elementary Key words: phonological awareness, reading (decoding), Korean EFL learners
Yusun Kang Department of English Language Education Korea University SungBuk-Ku Anam-Dong 5-ka Seoul, Korea 136-701 Tel: (02) 3290-2354 Email: jenkang@korea.ac.kr Received in March 2009 Reviewed in April 2009 Revised version received in May 2009