Developmental Hierarchy of Arabic Phonological Awareness Skills.

Research indicates a strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success. Phonemic intervention programs clearly show the benefits of explicitly teaching phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness skills vary in nature and degree of difficulty and appear to follow a developmental progression. This study examined a developmental hierarchy of four Arabic phonological awareness tasks. The participants were 140 native Arabic speaking students from elementary grades one to three. They were administered four different phonological awareness tasks. One-way ANOVA and multiple comparisons were used to analyze the data of the study. The results revealed differences across phonological awareness tasks among different grade levels. Results of this study indicated that the four phonological awareness tasks ranged from easy to difficult in the following; rhyme, initial sound identification, syllable deletion and phoneme segmentation. Significant differences were found in two tasks, identifying the initial sound of the word in favor of grade two and syllable deletion in favor of grade three. However, there were no significant differences in the grade performances regarding the rhyme oddity task and the phoneme segmentation task. This study supports English language research in the sense that there is a hierarchical order behind phonological awareness development. This means that when phonological awareness tasks are trained, they must follow an order. Phonological awareness skills are complicated and place demand on cognitive processes and, therefore, should not be considered randomly. Considerable research in the past two decades has emphasized the importance of phonological awareness (PA) and phonics in the process of learning to read and write (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsely, 1989; Lewkowicz, 1980; National Reading Panel, 2000; Vandervelden & Siegel, 1995; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Phonological awareness (PA) refers to the ability to recognize and make use of the phonological structure underlying spoken language. A large body of research has documented the importance of phonological awareness as an excellent predictor of reading success. Correlation studies, longitudinal studies and intervention studies have not only confirmed the importance of PA in learning an alphabetic script, but also clarified it and extended it.