Children's Written Language Awareness and Its relation to Reading Acquisition

Abstract

Describes the development of an instrument which identifies what children who are just beginning first grade reading instruction know about the written language code and relates this knowledge to beginning reading achievement. A battery of seven tasks was developed to assess (a) discrimination of real writing from geometric shapes and letter-like forms; (b) segmentation of aurally presented sentences; (c) segmentation of visually presented sentences; (d) equation of oral written word lengths; (e) ability to predict from pictures; (f) completion of aural sentences with and without graphic cues and (g) competence with the metalinguistic aspect of reading. Tasks were administered to 53 first grade children and scores were analyzed by stepwise multiple regression on standardized reading test scores. Findings indicate that linguistic awareness tasks do predict reading achievement, particularly those tasks which stress the interrelationship between oral and written codes rather than those which tap characteristics specific to the writing system.