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This article was downloaded by: [The Aga Khan University]On: 27 October 2014, At: 09:03Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
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Sixth Grade Pupils' PhonologicalProcessing and SchoolAchievement in a Second andthe Native LanguageKaisa Lumme & Juhani E. LehtoPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Kaisa Lumme & Juhani E. Lehto (2002) Sixth Grade Pupils'Phonological Processing and School Achievement in a Second and the NativeLanguage, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 46:2, 207-217, DOI:10.1080/00313830220142209
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Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research,Vol. 46, No. 2, 2002
Sixth Grade Pupils’ PhonologicalProcessing and School Achievementin a Second and the NativeLanguageKAISA LUMME & JUHANI E. LEHTODepartment of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, FIN-40351 Jyvaskyla, Finland
ABSTRACT Phonological processing was studied in relation to academic achievement in thenative and a second language in a total of 66 12–13-year-old pupils at the end of their sixthschool year. Phonological ability was assessed using a pseudoword spelling and an auditorydiscrimination task, which were assumed to probe two domains of phonological processing:verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness. School report marks and the scores theyobtained in the Finnish national test of English were used as indicators of the pupils’ academicachievement. Of the two phonological tasks, the pseudoword spelling was strongly related tosuccess in both Finnish and English. The correlation coef� cients remained statisticallysigni� cant after the pupils’ performances in other school subjects had been controlled for. Ingeneral, the results are in agreement with � ndings obtained in previous studies. The educationalimplications of the present results are discussed.
Key words: phonological awareness; verbal short-term memory; second language; nativelanguage
PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING AND LEARNING
The term ‘phonological processing’ refers to three categories of abilities: phono-logical awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access and verbal short-termmemory (McBride-Chang, 1995). Phonological awareness is commonly measuredusing tasks in which a participant is required to categorize or split phonologicalmaterial (see for example Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Perin, 1983; Campbell &Butterworth, 1985). Phonological recoding in lexical access, on the other hand,comprises processes that are required when a non-phonological stimulus, e.g. apicture or a written word, is converted into a phonological output.
The third component in phonological processing is verbal short-term memory(STM). It comprises the temporary retaining and rehearsal of phonological material
ISSN 0031-3831 print; ISSN 1430-1170 online/02/020207-11 Ó 2002 Scandinavian Journal of Educational ResearchDOI: 10.1080/00313830220142209
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208 K. Lumme & J. E. Lehto
(Baddeley, 1986). It is traditionally measured using the digit span task, as in theWechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler, 1974). More recently, askingthe participant to repeat a nonsense word has been used to test verbal STM capacity(Gathercole et al., 1994). Of these three domains of phonological processing, thepresent study examines phonological awareness and verbal STM.
There is an ample body of evidence suggesting that phonological processes havea major role in academic achievement. Several studies have demonstrated thatphonological awareness in pre-school aged children predicts later acquisition ofreading skills (see for example Lundberg et al., 1980; Bradley & Bryant, 1983;Nation & Hulme, 1997).
As summarized in a recent extensive review by Baddeley et al. (1998), verbalSTM is the principal tool required for language learning. It is crucial in learningnative language vocabulary during childhood (Gathercole et al., 1992, 1997; Gather-cole & Baddeley, 1993) and in the acquisition of second language words at school(Service, 1992; Service & Kohonen, 1995; Cheung, 1996). In line with this litera-ture, Lehto (1995) demonstrated that among Finnish 9th graders second languagesuccess correlated with verbal STM, even after general working memory had beencontrolled for.
Although McBride-Chang (1995) made a theoretical distinction betweenphonological awareness and verbal STM, in empirical studies these domains ofphonological processing appear to be less independent. In fact, Mann & Liberman(1984) suggested that both domains re� ect general phonological processing skills.Gathercole et al. (1991) found evidence for this suggestion; but they furtherdemonstrated that in 4–5-year-old children phonological awareness was morespeci� cally associated with reading attainment, while verbal STM was morespeci� cally related to native language vocabulary.
In this study we employed two tasks: Wepman’s auditory discrimination task(Wepman, 1958, 1960) and a pseudoword spelling task (Lehtola & Lehto, 2000),which, we argue, both require the two aspects of phonological processing, phono-logical awareness and verbal STM. We were interested to see how these abilitiesmight be related to school achievement at the end of the sixth school year. Based onprevious literature we expected that phonological processing would be related tolanguage-related school subjects: to Finnish, the native language, and particularly toEnglish, the second language.
METHOD
Participants and General Procedure
The participants were tested at the end of the 6th grade in 1998. In the Finnishcomprehensive school the � rst six school years comprise the primary level, which isfollowed by the 3 year secondary level. A total of 66 children (33 girls and 33 boys)participated in the study. They were 12–13 years old and native speakers of Finnish.They attended primary schools of a medium sized town in southeastern Finland.
By the end of the 6th grade the pupils had studied 4 years of English, the
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Phonological Processing 209
knowledge of which was a main focus in this investigation. The children were testedin their regular teaching groups during school hours. Academic achievement wasassessed using the marks awarded in school reports in May 1998. In addition toschool report marks, the national test of English was used as a tool to assess Englishskills. This test is constructed every year by a national teacher organization in orderto help in the evaluation of 6th graders’ performance in English.
Pseudoword Spelling
The pseudoword spelling task was taken from the study of Lehtola & Lehto (2000).The participant heard 30 tape-recorded pseudowords and he or she was asked towrite them down. Only one listening was permitted. After each pseudoword hadbeen heard once, the tape was stopped to allow enough time for writing. Thepseudowords were nonsense words, which followed the Finnish phonological systemand obeyed its phonotactic restrictions. The � rst 10 pseudowords were two syllablewords, each of the next 10 had three syllables and the last 10 pseudowords hadfour syllables each. The length of the pseudowords varied from 4 to 13 letters.The number of correctly spelt pseudowords (max. 30) comprised the measure ofperformance.
Carrying out the task successfully requires at least verbal STM (keeping thepseudoword activated), phonological awareness (awareness of phonemes in thepseudoword) and phoneme–grapheme knowledge (how to convert the heardphonemes into a written form).
Auditory Discrimination Task
Wepman (1958) constructed this task, which is sometimes used as a measure ofauditory discrimination skills in the native language (English) (see for exampleWepman, 1960; Nober, 1973). The participant heard either a similar pair (e.g.jail/jail) or dissimilar pair (e.g. gear/beer) of English words. In the present studythere were 10 similar and 30 dissimilar pairs. A native speaker of English read aloudthe word pairs, which were tape-recorded. Each pair was played once in theclassroom and the children were asked to indicate on their answer sheets whetherthe words in the pair were similar or dissimilar. The maximum score was 40.
The auditory discrimination task requires the child to distinguish Englishphonemes (phonological awareness). It also can be considered to tax verbal STMcapacity, because the participant has to retain both words of the pair and comparetheir phonological content (cf. McBride-Chang, 1995).
National Test of English
In 1998, the national test for 6th graders included � ve sub-tests regularly carried outin schools. In listening the pupil heard a short story from a tape-recording. On theanswer sheet, 10 questions in Finnish tested understanding of the story and theparticipants were asked to write answers in Finnish. This sub-test produced a
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210 K. Lumme & J. E. Lehto
maximum of 12 points. The vocabulary and grammar sub-test consisted of incom-plete English sentences (words and grammatical structures missing) and theircomplete Finnish translations. The children were asked to � ll in the missing parts ofthe English text. This sub-test maximally yielded 14 points. In the text comprehensionpart, the pupil translated into Finnish a few underlined sentences, which wereincluded in a short passage. Six points could be achieved.
Writing a story comprised a series of four pictures. Three of them wereaccompanied by a number of key words in Finnish. The fourth one was suppliedwith instructions (e.g. to use the past tense). The children were asked to produce awritten story in English. The maximum score was 22 points. Writing questions in thepast tense required the child to translate at least three questions given in Finnish. Thetask maximally yielded six points. For the present purposes the last two sub-tests,writing a story and writing questions in the past tense, were combined to form awritten use of English variable with a maximum of 28 points. The maximum totalscore of the national test of English was 60.
For a sub-sample of 45 pupils an additional test of the oral use of English wasconducted. The oral part of the national test is not usually administered in schools.For the present research purposes this part was taken from the 1994 national test(Huttunen & Kukkonen, 1995). The 1994 oral test included a situation in which thepupil was assumed to be on a � ight to London and having a conversation with aco-passenger (an English teacher). The task maximally produced 5 points, whichwere not included in the total score of the national English test.
School Achievement
School report marks in four school subjects were chosen as measures of schoolachievement. Knowledge of the Finnish language was assessed on the basis ofwritten and oral presentations. ‘Finnish’ as a school subject includes evidence of aknowledge of the grammar and literature. The other school subjects were English,mathematics and history.
Grading in the Finnish school system is expressed in marks ranging from 4 to10; 4 represents a failed performance in a particular school subject, whereas themarks 9 and 10 can be regarded as indicating excellence.
RESULTS
Descriptive statistics for all measures are given in Table I. A slight ceiling effect wasfound for English text comprehension. Otherwise no � oor or ceiling effects wereobserved. We tested whether gender differences could be found in the variableslisted in Table I. The girls performed better than the boys in Finnish [t(64) 5 2.97,P , 0.01]. The boys, on the other hand, scored somewhat higher in mathematics[t(64) 5 2.61, P , 0.05]. Otherwise, no gender differences were found.
Correlations between phonological processing and school achievement areshown in Table II. Pseudoword spelling performance correlated statisticallysigni� cantly with all other variables except auditory discrimination and listening
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Phonological Processing 211
TABLE I. Descriptive statistics for phonological processing and schoolachievement
Mean SD
Phonological processingPseudoword spelling (max. 30) 19.36 3.77Auditory discrimination (max. 40, n 5 65) 35.37 1.91
National test of EnglishTotal (max. 60) 43.83 10.68Listening (max. 12) 9.77 1.98Vocabulary and grammar (max. 14) 10.46 2.54Text comprehension (max. 6) 4.95 1.22Written use (max. 28) 18.64 5.96Oral use (max 10, n 5 45) 3.39 0.80
School report marksEnglish (range 4–10) 8.08 1.09Finnish (range 4–10) 7.83 0.92Mathematics (range 4–10) 7.88 1.18History (range 4–10) 7.65 1.14
n 5 66, unless otherwise shown.
skills in English. The low non-signi� cant correlation coef� cient between pseudo-word spelling and auditory discrimination suggests that these tasks shared little incommon in our sample. The auditory discrimination score (the third column inTable II) correlated positively with the other variables except mathematics. How-ever, only in English did the correlation of this score with the pupils’ school marksreach statistical signi� cance.
Somewhat surprisingly, the pseudoword spelling task correlated signi� cantlywith mathematics (r 5 0.41, P , 0.001), suggesting that the solely verbalpseudoword task may be involved even in predominantly non-verbal school achieve-ment, in mathematics. Therefore, we partialed out the common variance betweenmathematics and pseudoword spelling performance. The second column (1P) inTable II shows the partial correlations between pseudoword spelling and othermeasures. The correlations were lower than those shown in column 1, but nonethe-less most of them were statistically signi� cant, suggesting that the pseudowordspelling test was able to explain mathematics-independent variance in English andFinnish. Interestingly, controlling mathematics had no effect on the relationshipbetween pseudoword spelling and the oral use of English.
In general, the intercorrelations between the national English test and schoolachievement were positive and highly signi� cant. However, there were twoexceptions: mathematics showed non-signi� cant correlations with English listeningskills (r 5 0.21) and the oral use of English (r 5 0.09). This � nding suggests thatmathematical skills share only a very small portion of common variance with boththe ability to understand and the ability to produce spoken English.
Phonological processing ability, as expressed in terms of pseudoword spelling,was strongly related to teacher-rated competence in Finnish and English when
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212 K. Lumme & J. E. Lehto
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Phonological Processing 213
mathematical skills were controlled for (Table II). Therefore, the effects of bothhistory and mathematics were further partialed out simultaneously. When this wasdone, pseudoword spelling still correlated signi� cantly with Finnish and English(rs 5 0.39 and 0.38, Ps , 0.001, respectively). Thus, the relationship betweenpseudoword spelling performance and language skills appears to be independent ofsuccess in other school subjects, such as mathematics and history.
The correlation coef� cients shown in Table II were calculated separately forboys and girls. Many of the boys’ correlations were higher than those for the wholesample. In general, relations between pseudoword spelling and other measures werelower for the girls than for the boys. Notably low non-signi� cant correlations wereobserved between girls’ pseudoword spelling and listening (r 5 0.05), as well asbetween pseudoword spelling and the oral use of English (r 5 0.25). Nevertheless,mathematics and pseudoword spelling were strongly related in the girls (r 5 0.56,P , 0.01). Therefore, controlling for the effect of mathematics, as had been done incolumn 1P (Table II), caused a substantial drop in the magnitude of correlationcoef� cients.
To investigate the role of phonological processing in more detail we carried outa series of hierarchical regression analyses. Mathematics, pseudoword spelling andauditory discrimination explained Finnish [F(3,61) 5 13.11, P , .001, r2 5 39%],English [F(3,61) 5 11.53, P , 0.001, r2 5 36%] and the total score in the Englishtest [F(3,61) 5 9.41, P , 0.001, r2 5 32%]. Hence, as a whole the three indepen-dent variables signi� cantly explained performance in English and Finnish.
Table III provides detailed information about regression coef� cients. Math-ematics explained 23% of the variance in Finnish. Entering pseudoword spellingincreased the explained variance by 14% but auditory discrimination was unable toincrease the explained variance statistically signi� cantly, as indicated by the non-signi� cant b coef� cient. English performance (school report marks) was explainedsigni� cantly by all three independent variables: mathematics (17%), pseudowordspelling (an additional 14%) and auditory discrimination (an additional 5%), hencethe three variables accounted for a total of 36% of the variance of the Englishperformance. The total score of the national English test showed a different pattern.Mathematics explained 22% of the total variance but, as indicated by the non-signi� cant b coef� cients, neither pseudoword spelling nor auditory discriminationadded anything to the amount of variance explained.
DISCUSSION
The present study was undertaken with a view to examining the role of phonologicalprocessing in school achievement, with a particular focus on the second language,English, and the native language, Finnish. Employing two tasks designed to testphonological awareness and verbal STM, we demonstrated a fairly strong relation-ship between language competencies and phonological processing. Perhaps due tothe multifaceted nature of pseudoword spelling, this task, compared with theauditory discrimination task, exhibited much stronger connections with indicatorsof academic achievement. Unlike most previous studies, this study investigated
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214 K. Lumme & J. E. Lehto
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Phonological Processing 215
phonological processing in relation to both native language and second languageachievement within the same design.
Phonological processing in early childhood is known to predict later acquisitionof basic reading skills (Lundberg et al., 1980; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Gathercole& Baddeley, 1993; Nation & Hulme, 1997; Passenger et al., 2000; for counter-evidence see Layton et al., 1998). Our results suggest that phonological skills havea major role in literacy and native language skills even after the phase of learning toread, namely at the end of the sixth school year. To the best of our knowledge, noprevious study has addressed this issue.
The present � ndings are in agreement with earlier research that has providedevidence suggesting that phonological processing, and particularly verbal STM, isclosely related to foreign language learning (Service, 1992; Service & Kohonen,1995; Cheung, 1996; Downey & Snyder, 2000). Service (1992) found that amongFinnish primary school pupils verbal STM, measured before second languageinstruction, strongly predicted later success in second language skills. In particular,learning new words is assumed to be dependent on verbal STM capacity (Service &Kohonen, 1995; Cheung, 1996; for a review see Baddeley et al., 1998). The nationaltest of English did not include a pure measure of vocabulary knowledge, but didhave a vocabulary and grammar sub-test, which correlated strongly withpseudoword spelling. Pseudoword spelling also correlated with the written use ofEnglish, a sub-test requiring the control of vocabulary. These relationships were ofconsiderable strength even when boys and girls were treated as separate samples.
The relationships between school marks in Finnish/English and pseudowordspelling were highly signi� cant and remained signi� cant when the effect of achieve-ment in other school subjects was controlled for. In regression analyses, pseudowordspelling signi� cantly predicted teacher-assessed English and Finnish after math-ematics was entered into the equation. In the third step, auditory discriminationfurther accounted for English, but not Finnish. In contrast, the phonologicalprocessing tasks were not able to account for the score in the national test of Englishafter mathematics had been entered into the regression analysis. These � ndingssuggest that during the school year teachers tend to evaluate pupils’ performances inEnglish and Finnish using criteria which also tap phonological skills.
Despite rather straightforward results, our investigation has some limitations.First, our sample of pupils was rather small. In the future, larger numbers ofparticipants may be necessary. Extensive samples might reveal gender-speci� c rela-tions between phonological processing and language skills. Second, the psycho-metric abilities of our measures are poorly known; many of the tests might need tobe developed further. Nevertheless, as reported in the present study, they appearedto work satisfactory.
The present study was not primarily targeted at having an in� uence on educa-tional practice. Some speculations can, however, be put forward. First, phonologicalprocessing was strongly related to native language skill several years after theacquisition of basic reading ability. Training programmes targeted at improvingphonological awareness have proved to bene� t the acquisition of basic reading skillsduring the � rst school years (see for example Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Passenger, et
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216 K. Lumme & J. E. Lehto
al., 2000). Hence, it remains an open question, whether training in phonologicalskills would improve literacy and native language skills after the elementary schoolyears.
Second, we con� rmed Service’s (1992) � ndings concerning second languagelearning and phonological processing. Service (1990) has recommended that atleast the pupils who are at risk of impaired second language learning would bene� tfrom the explicit teaching of English grapheme–phoneme correspondence rulesembedded in age-appropriate instruction techniques. We believe that paying moreattention to grapheme–phoneme rules might improve most beginning learners’English skills during the 2nd or 3rd grade in Finnish comprehensive schools.Materials and methods (e.g. phonics) that are used to teach reading in English-speaking countries might help in instructing these grapheme–phoneme rules.
Third, with regard to phonological processing, teachers appeared to be moresensitive in evaluating English than was the national test of English. The nationaltest, with its scoring instructions, appears, however, to be useful in providing Englishteachers with general criteria for performance (cf. Huttunen & Kukkonen, 1995).Moreover, if the full test version is administered, the teachers also obtain someinformation about how their pupils use English orally. Indeed, we suppose that oralcommunication skills should be more extensively taught in Finnish schools. Ourdata, although based on a small number of children, suggest that, unlike othersecond language skills, the oral use of English is unrelated to mathematics. Perhapssecond language teachers could make use of this � nding; using oral communicationin the classroom might enhance language learning in academically less successfulpupils. Previous research suggesting that poor language learners bene� t from foster-ing oral communication skills (Kristiansen, 1992) supports our conclusion.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank Professor Emerita Anna-Liisa Leino, the teachers and the pupilsof the Primary Schools of Tyysterniemi, Lauritsala and Voisalmi. Ms CatherineCamille read the tape-recorded items of the Wepman test. Asko Tolvanen and AriMakiaho gave valuable advice on statistical matters. This article has been writtenwhile Juhani E. Lehto was working on the project (44858) ‘Human Developmentand Its Risk Factors’, � nanced by the Academy of Finland (Finnish Centre ofExcellence Programme, 2000–2005). The University of Helsinki has provided� nancial support.
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