JCPSLP Vol 18 no 2 July 2016

Survey The survey, previously validated in a study by Carroll et al. (2012), consisted of a range of questions testing phonological and morphological awareness. For the current report, students’ responses to four questions addressing phonological awareness (at syllable and sound/phoneme level) were analysed. The full questions are provided in the Appendix. The survey was given to the students at the start of the tutorial and no further instructions were provided. In contrast to the procedure used by Carroll et al. (2012), students were provided with multiple choice options (as During their first semester of study, Bachelor of Primary Education students typically spend one 2-hour tutorial out of 12 focusing on phonics and one 2-hour tutorial on phonological awareness and teaching phonics (Hill, 2012, chapters 6, 10 and 11, respectively) in a course focusing on early years literacy. In the Master of Speech Pathology program, first-year students attend a 3-hour workshop that focuses on phonological awareness ( including development, assessment, and intervention) during their first semester of study. In addition, the concept of phonological awareness is addressed in a problem-based learning case (in week 8) about a school-age girl with language-learning difficulties, who demonstrates poor phonological awareness skills. Results Student responses from paper copies of the survey were entered into Survey Monkey® by independent research assistants. Responses were downloaded from Survey Monkey into Excel and exported into SPSS (PASW, 2012). First, we wanted to determine the level of performance at the start of the year as well as the percentage of students who showed mastery of skills (i.e., performance of at least 80% correct on each skill) at Time 1. As shown in Tables 1 and 2, although students generally performed well on the syllable identification task (mean scores of 9.1–9.6 out of 10), a high percentage (43% to 88%) of the students struggled with tasks requiring the identification of the number of sounds in words (i.e., phoneme awareness). To determine if there were significant differences in performance between the Time 1 and Time 2 scores, independent samples t-tests were used. The samples were considered independent as we did not gather data to match Time 1 to Time 2 responses. As shown in Table 1, students studying speech pathology showed significantly better performance on two measures: identifying the number of sounds in a word (Question 2), t(55) = –2.485, p < .001 and identifying the second sound in a word (Question 3), t(55) = –2.218, p = .031. No other significant differences ( p < .05) in performance were found in either group of students. Finally, we wanted to determine the percentage of students who showed mastery of skills at Time 2. As shown in Table 2, there seemed to be a noticeable increase in performance at Time 2 in the speech pathology students when asked to identify the number of sounds in a word. Discussion The results from this study showed that, at the outset of their respective training courses, cohorts of teacher education and speech pathology students demonstrated adequate levels of performance on tasks measuring identification of syllables in words and identifying the final sounds in words, with at least 73% of students opposed to open answer questions). Regular class instruction

research showed that speech pathologists performed much better than teachers or early childhood educators, variability in performance was observed, with some speech pathologists showing unacceptably poor levels of phonological awareness. Considering that previous research has demonstrated the education professionals’ relatively poor performance on phonological awareness tasks in particular, it is not surprising that research into the phonological awareness skills of pre-service teacher education students shows similar results (Carroll et al., 2012; Fielding-Barnsley, 2010; Purvis, McNeill, & Everatt, 2015). Overall, results suggest very low levels of phonological awareness at the phoneme (i.e., sound) level in pre-service teacher education students. Moreover, a recent study by Carroll and colleagues (2012) showed that although Bachelor of Education students in New Zealand improved their phonological awareness performance over the three years of study, their level of phonological awareness at the end of their 3-year degree course was still poor (e.g., mean score of 3.2/10 on the phoneme counting subtest. Research into the phonological awareness skills of speech pathology students is more limited. One fairly recent study of the phonemic awareness skills of speech pathology students was conducted by Robinson, Mahurin, and Justus (2011). A total of 43 undergraduate students in communication disorders completed subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999), during the first two days of class associated with a course in phonetics. Although these researchers did not report the range in scores, mean performance on the Segmenting Words subtest (requiring the student to segment words into phonemes) was 8.26 (standard score) with a SD of 2.70 indicating that a considerable percentage of the students obtained below average (i.e., SS ≤ 7) on a test of phoneme segmentation. The current study aims to address the important issue of adequately preparing our next generation of literacy professionals by investigating the phonological awareness skills of Australian Bachelor of Education and graduate- entry Master of Speech Pathology students at Griffith University. We aimed to (a) determine initial levels of performance at the start of the year, (b) evaluate whether these skills improved following exposure to their regular university courses during their first semester of study, and (c) determine what percentage of students would show mastery of skills at the end of the year. Method Ethics permission was obtained from Griffith University (EDN/16/14/HREC). Participants Students enrolled in English Education 1: Reading and Writing in the Early Years (across three campuses) and Communication and Swallowing Disorders 1 were invited to participate if they attended the tutorial during which the surveys were administered. Out of a total of approximately 450 Bachelor of Education students, 111 completed the survey at Time 1 and 68 at Time 2. A total of 30 (out of 35) Master of Speech Pathology students completed the survey at Time 1; at Time 2, there were 27 responses. Data collection Students were asked to complete a written survey (approx. 7–12 minutes) during class-time. There were two data collection points: (a) at the start of semester 1 (weeks 1 or 2) and (b) towards the end of the semester (weeks 12 or 13).

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 2 2016

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