The Relationship between Alphabetical Knowledge and Phonological Awareness among Elementary School Children Mitsue ALLEN-TAMAI Chiba University Abstract This study investigates the effect of teaching the alphabet and raising phonological awareness to develop an effective literacy program for Japanese elementary school children learning English. This reports a part of a three-year longitudinal study on 130 Japanese elementary school children who received special training in alphabet letters and phonological awareness for two years during their 5 th and 6 th grades. These participants were administered tests to measure alphabetical knowledge of upper case letters and to measure phonological awareness twice during this period. Regarding the effect of alphabet and phonological training, there were statistically significant differences between pre and post tests in both kinds of tests, which assured knowledge gain of alphabetical letters and improvement of phonological awareness. Additionally, the following three things were found: 1) writing knowledge of alphabet letters predicted word orthographic knowledge, 2) alphabetical knowledge predicted development of their phonemic awareness and 3) the participants were found to use their mora knowledge, the Japanese basic phonological unit, when segmenting English words. Although this study only examined one group of children, which makes it difficult to generalize to the whole population, these findings indicate that alphabet teaching would benefit children in developing future reading ability. Keywords Literacy Development, Vocabulary Development, Phonological Awareness, Elementary School Children
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