The phonemic awareness knowledge and skills of first-grade teachers: a sound investment?

This study investigated the phonemic awareness knowledge and skills of 108 first-grade teachers and whether teaching of these skills, understanding of the important role phonemic awareness plays in reading acquisition, teaching experience, or the number of reading courses taken impacts reading achievement. Many studies have been conducted on understanding the role phonemic awareness plays in learning to read (e.g., Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994; Weiner, 1994; Adams, 1990). This study included some of these characteristics but considered an additional component: the teacher’s own phonemic awareness. Could the teachers’ own phonemic awareness skill be a factor that improves predictability of student reading success? The study was divided into two parts. The first part involved first-grade teachers individually completing a survey. This questionnaire requested information in a multiple choice format on background information, including teaching experience, degrees, rating of their university experience, number of reading courses taken and philosophical orientation in reading. Probing the teachers’ own phonemic awareness ability as well as their understanding of phonemic awareness was done through teachers identifying, locating, and counting sounds in words in a multiple choice format, and indicating the level of agreement to various statements about learning to read and phonemic awareness using a Likert scale. Open-ended questions involved the participants in defining phonemic awareness, providing examples of appropriate activities, as well as providing the orthographic spellings of first-grade students’ common transitional spelling of words. The second part of the study compared the teachers’ responses to their students’ reading scores. Sixty-three of the surveyed 108 teachers returned their students’ scores as measured on the District Reading Assessment, resulting in 1037 student scores. Beginning and end of year scores were compared to ascertain student gains. When a multiple regression analysis was applied to the teacher data and the students’ mean gains, no correlation was found between the teachers’ knowledge and understanding of the importance of phonemic awareness or when the teacher’s own phonemic awareness was considered. The lack of statistical significance in the findings suggests that experience, coursework, phonemic awareness knowledge or skill do not correlate with student reading gains.Curriculum and Instructio