JCPSLP Vol 18 no 2 July 2016

Table 1. Student performance (in number of items correct) at Time 1 and Time 2 with means (standard deviations) and ranges reported

Speech pathology Time 1

Education Time 1

Time 2

Time 2

Question

n

111

68

30

27

1

No. of syllables (max 10) No. of sounds (max 10)

9.1 (1.4) 1–10 2.6 (3.0) 0–10 1.7 (.94) 0–4 3.8 (1.3) 0–5

9.5 (.92) 6–10 2.0 (2.6) 0–10 1.8 (.90) 0–4 3.9 (1.31) 0–5

9.6 (.67) 8–10 5.4 (2.9) 0–10 2.8 (.86)* 1–4 4.0 (.89) 1–5

9.3 (1.0) 7–10 7.9 (2.1)* 3–10 3.3 (.81)* 1–4 4.3 (.71) 3–5

2

3

2nd sound in word (max 5) Last sound in word (max 5)

4

Note: * indicates the students showed significantly better performance ( p < .05) at Time 2.

Table 2. Percentage of students obtaining scores of 80% or higher

Education Time 1

Speech pathology Time 1

Time 2

Time 2

Question

1

No. of syllables

91.9%

92.6%

100%

92.6%

2

No. of sounds

11.7%

10.3%

26.7%

63%

3

2nd sound in word

1.9%

3%

20%

44.4%

4

Last sound in word

73.9%

72.1%

76.7%

85.2%

were found for the speech pathology students. Significantly better performance at Time 2 was seen on two tasks: (a) identifying the numbers of sounds in a word, and (b) identifying the second sound in the word. Although we did not set out to compare the phonological awareness skills across student cohorts, the difference in progress made by the two cohorts following one semester of university studies is striking. The most likely explanation is that the semester 1 tutorials related to phonetic transcription helped improve the speech pathology students’ phonological awareness skills at phoneme level (see Robinson et al., 2011). Regardless, as shown in Table 2, the percentage of speech pathology students obtaining at least 80% correct on these two tasks was still low (63% and 44%, respectively). One possible explanation may be that the students need more time to consolidate their skills and re-testing the students on a yearly basis may help confirm if this hypothesis is true, Taken together, more explicit teaching of phonological awareness in both degree courses seems warranted. Limitations It is not clear if the results reflect the performance of the full Bachelor of Primary Education cohort. Future research should investigate ways of ensuring a higher percentage of students complete the survey (or self-quiz – see suggestions below). It is also not clear if the use of verbal instructions as opposed to written instructions would have influenced the results. Recommendations and future directions Based on the findings from this preliminary study, a change in the current course work is recommended to ensure an improvement in students’ phonological awareness skills. Although there is limited evidence regarding the optimal model for teaching phonological awareness (see Carroll,

demonstrating > 80% correct on these tasks. However, lower levels of performance were found in both cohorts of students when asked to identify sounds in words (total number of sounds and second sound in a word). These results indicate that students’ previous education had not been successful in promoting phonological awareness at sound-level (i.e., phonemic awareness). Of note, 85% of the education students had just completed year 12 of high school, whereas the Master of Speech Pathology students had all completed a bachelor degree. The performance of the education students is surprisingly similar to that found by Carroll et al. (2012). Carroll and colleagues measured the performance of 153 first-year New Zealand Bachelor of Teaching and Learning students and reported a mean score of 2.03 (SD 2.08) on the total number of sounds task. In the current study, performance of the education cohort measured 2.6 (SD 3.0). Taken together, these findings indicate that regardless of the education system (or country), phonological awareness at the phoneme level in university students is low (at least at the outset of their training course) and will need to be developed as part of their degree courses, particularly when the teaching of reading is emphasised in curriculum and policy (see also Fielding-Barnsley, 2010). In response to our second research question, which posed whether exposure to their regular course work during their first semester of study would enhance students’ performance in phonological awareness, we found no significant difference between education students’ phonological awareness skills at Time 1 and Time 2. This is concerning as results from Carroll et al.’s (2012) study showed that third-year Bachelor of Teaching and Learning students did not show significantly better performance than their first-year peers. Different results

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 2 2016

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology