Evaluating Phonological Skills in Adult ESOL Learners

Part One: Phonological skills, adult language learners, and testing across languages

This project was undertaken as a way to lay the groundwork for further examination of phonological skills of adult English language learners (ELLs). This report will propose that testing phonological skills of adult ELLs is important and can be done in English for the following reasons:

• Adult ELLs may struggle to learn for a wide variety of reasons, but so far, phonological skills have been largely ignored in this population.
• Phonological skills are key to literacy and language learning. Learners must have strong foundation skills to progress in language acquisition and literacy development, but these skills are not evaluated in current practices in adult ESOL settings.
• Phonological skills are known to support learning of a foreign or other language in the same way they support development of first language.
• Weaknesses in phonological skills have been shown to be strongly related to learners’ difficulties in learning foreign or other languages.
• Because core phonological awareness skills are bi-directional and normally transfer readily from one language to another, we can confidently test the core skills in a language different from the one the learner speaks.
• Supporting the development of phonological skills in non-literate adult learners improves their literacy acquisition.
• Testing in the target language is more relevant than testing in first language for several reasons:
• Because sometimes normal transfer of phonological skills does not happen, learners can have strong phonological skills in their first language and yet struggle to learn a foreign or second language.
• Elements of phonological structure in other languages differ across languages, so testing in first language may not tell us whether the learner has the skills needed for English learning, such as phoneme and rhyme awareness.
• A lack of tests of phonological skills in most of the languages of adult ELLs in the US and of trained personnel to develop or administer tests makes testing in first language impracticable.
• Testing in English will provide information for instruction to target weak phonological skills to help adult ELLs who struggle to learn in the way this process has helped younger ELLs.
• Identification of weaknesses in core skills needed for literacy and language acquisition will prevent many inappropriate referrals of ELLs for learning disabilities testing.

Here is evidence for these reasons:

Adult ELLs may struggle to learn for a wide variety of reasons, but so far, phonological skills have been largely ignored in this population.

As adult English language learners (ELLs) flood adult literacy and basic education programs and more attention is paid to moving these learners through programs as quickly and effectively as possible, the need to address the issues of those learners who struggle to learn also increases. Every program has a certain percentage of ELLs who progress far more slowly than expected and another percentage who fail to make any meaningful progress at all in acquiring English. The reasons for learning struggles among the ELLs are varied. Although some of the reasons for their learing difficulties, such as no or very low literacy or significant cultural differences, are currently being studied more widely, one of the least understood but most basic factors affecting the ELLs in adult education settings is still largely ignored. This is their need for support as adult learners of a language.

To be a successful language learner—that is, to be able to listen to, speak, read and write a language accurately and with comprehension —all the foundation phonological skills skills for literacy and language learning must be in place. The role of phonological skills in language development of children and the effects on learning of weaknesses in these skills has been quite clearly established (e.g. Shaywitz, 2003, Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004). However, how strength or weakness in these skills affects adult ELLs’ learning is less well understood. Despite the acknowledged role these skills have in literacy and language development, they are not measured in current intake and evaluation processes in adult ESOL and are only just beginning to be addressed in current instructional practices (McCollin & O’Shea, 2005).

Therefore it is important to begin to understand how we can test effectively for these skills and use the results to guide instruction so that more ELLs can be successful language learners.

Phonological skills are key to literacy and language learning. Learners must have strong foundation skills to progress in language acquisition and literacy development.

Phonological processing skills are now understood to consist of phonological awareness and phonological memory (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998).

Phonological awareness is a consciousness of the chunks and patterns of sound in language and an awareness that these chunks can be manipulated to construct and change meaning in language (Botzung, 2003). A baby’s awareness of chunks of language generally begins with the brain’s attention to sounds, intonations and rhythms of the language the baby hears most often. By nine months, the baby can distinguish that language from others by those features. Syllables, then words, become the primary chunks of meaningful sound the baby distinguishes and then begins to use to communicate orally (Kuhl, 2004). In English, rhyme is an important language feature and children’s awareness of it is actively cultivated in songs and poems (Gathercole & Willis, 1991; Lundberg, Frost & Peterson, 1988).

Because of the complexity of English, phonological awareness continues to develop even after literacy develops. In contrast, in less orthographically complex languages such as Portuguese or Italian, phonological awareness is more or less fully developed as literacy develops (Goswami, 2002). Thus children who grow up speaking English continue to learn in middle school and even high school how morphological units such as affixes and roots from different language derivations are spelled and pronounced, how spelling changes as words are lengthened or shortened, and how stress changes cause meaning changes in homographs such as refuse and refuse (Shaywitz, 2003).

Phoneme awareness, considered by some to be the cornerstone of reading, is actually a subskill of phonological awareness (Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004). Before phonemic awareness can can develop, the learner must have a strong sense of larger chunks of language. Furthermore, many languages do not use individual phonemes to build words, so children from those languages do not develop phoneme awareness as it is understood in alphabetic languages.

Weaknesses in phonological awareness are most closely associated with dyslexia in studies of phonological skills of poor readers, and difficulty in becoming fluent in the decoding process due to fundamental weaknesses in phonological awareness is now cited in definitions as the core processing weakness that is dyslexia (Shaywitz, 2003).

The other skill making up phonological processing skills is phonological memory, the short term working memory that permits the brain to hold novel sounds so they can be processed either for storage or repetition or both. Baddeley and others propose that phonological memory supports the development of vocabulary and other language structures in first language (Baddeley, et al, 1998; Hu, 2003). Young children with strong phonological memory (as measured by a task of nonsense word repetition) used and understood longer, more complex language structures than children with weaker phonological memory skills (Gathercole, Service, Hitch, Adams, & Martin, 1999). While it is actively employed as language develops during childhood, there is some evidence that phonological memory is much less used in late childhood and adulthood except when new sounds, words or structures are encountered, as, for example, in foreign language learning (Baddeley et al 1998).

Competent readers of a language generally are strong in both types of phonological skills. However, these skills can develop unevenly, as is seen in most dyslexics, who struggle with the phonological awareness but who have strong oral language skills and can often learn auditorily quite well.

Phonological skills are known to support learning of a foreign or other language in the same way they support development of first language, and weaknesses in phonological skills have been shown to be strongly related to problems in learners of foreign or other languages.

As research into dyslexia across languages has intensified, evidence has appeared that indicates that the two types of phonological skills support different aspects of foreign/other language development just as they do in first language development. The role of weak phonological skills in foreign language learning difficulties was firmly established in the 1990’s (Ganschow & Sparks, 1993, 1995; Ganschow, Sparks & Javorsky, 1998), and the specific impact of the two types of skills on various aspects of foreign language learning has been clarified more recently (Ho, Law & Ng, 2000).

As in first language, phonological awareness appears to play a significant role in acquiring reading skills in a new language, and consequently weakness in phonological awareness is associated with children’s reading difficulties in a foreign or second language(Geva & Wade-Woolley, 1997; Lindsey, Manis & Bailey, 2003).

Just as phonological awareness plays an identical role in first and other language learning, so phonological memory supports development of vocabulary and oral language skills in the acquisition of a new language as it does in the first language. Children with stronger phonological memory learned words in a foreign language more readily (Hu, 2003), and Ellis (1996) demonstrated that foreign language learners with weak phonological memory skills had more difficulty learning strings of language such as idioms than those with stronger phonological memory skills (Ellis and Schmidt, 1997).

And again as in first language, one of the most important findings about phonological skills and foreign or other language learning is that these skills can develop independently of each other in the new language. This means a language learner can develop oral fluency in the new language yet be unable to learn to read or vice versa—can read but cannot comprehend the spoken language nor converse in it (Ganschow & Sparks, 1995).

Thus identifying phonological skills of an adult English Language Learner (ELL) can reveal learning barriers and provide information for instruction that can strengthen skills and lead to better learning.

Supporting the development of phonological skills in non-literate adult learners improves their literacy acquisition.

A great many low or non-literate learners have arrived in adult education and literacy programs in the US. Meeting both their literacy and English acquisition needs has proven exceptionally challenging for many adult educators. Very recent studies on adults with low or no literacy becoming literate in their native languages have confirmed the need to focus on the phonological skills to enhance literacy acquisition. Spanish-speaking adults learning to read in Spanish were found to have limited phonological skills and were aided by direct instruction in these skills as part of the literacy instruction (Jimenez & Venegas, 2004).

Similarly, low or nonliterate adolescents and adults in literacy programs in Burkino Faso, West Africa, were better able to progress in their literacy learning when basic phonological awareness was strengthened as part of the process. (Royer et al. 2004).

Evaluating the phonological skills of the low-literate and non-literate ELLs will clearly enhance both literacy acquisition and English learning.

Because core phonological awareness skills are bi-directional and normally transfer readily from one language to another, we can confidently test these skills in a language different from the one the learner speaks.

Durgonoğlu and colleagues established in 1997 that phonological awareness, and hence literacy skills, were highly transferable from language to language. This means that regardless of the language, literate learners have the phonological awareness of sound chunks in language and the changes that come of manipulating them. As evidence of cross-language transfer of phonological skills increases (e.g.Gottardo, Yan, & Siegel, 2001; Lindsey et al, 2004), there is recognition that there is some normal “negative transfer”—where the rules of the first language are applied to the second—but in time, most learners will apply general principles of language and understand the rules of the new language (Geva & Yahghoub-Zadeh, 2000). However, this transfer of skills happens to the extent that learners have developed literacy in another language.

Not only are phonological processing skills and literacy skills transferable, but they are now known to be bi-directional—that is, they will transfer from the language spoken to the language being learned and vice-versa (Gottardo et al, 2001;Lindsey et al, 2004). This bi-directionality was also observed by Ganschow and Sparks when they noted that students whose phonological processing skills improved as they received explicit instruction in them in Spanish also improved in their English phonological processing skills (1995).

When literacy skills do not transfer, there is clear indication of language learning difficulties. In Ganschow and Sparks’ study of high school Spanish students (1995), the learners in question were generally quite competent in their native language. Yet they could not transfer their literacy skills easily to a new language. Ganschow and Sparks determined that subtle but important weaknesses in phonological processing skills were at the heart of these learners’ foreign language learning difficulties, though these weaknesses did not overtly impact the students’ English skills. (Ganschow, Sparks & Javorsky, 1998).

This is an important concept for those trying to determine what is causing learning difficulties for learners in more advanced English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) settings. Often learners are believed not to be trying hard enough, not to be using English sufficiently, or to have a learning disability when in fact, there may be a weakness in core phonological skills having an impact on learning. If a learner’s literacy level is known to be high, and that learner struggles with any of the transferable skills in English, then evaluating the learner’s phonological skills very likely will reveal the weakness that is causing the difficulty in learning.

As we have seen, the bi-directionality of these skills makes testing ELLs in English entirely plausible.

Testing in the target language is more relevant than testing in first language because sometimes normal transfer of phonological skills does not happen, learners can have strong phonological skills in their first language and yet struggle to learn a foreign or second language.

Ganschow and Sparks’ studies in the early 1990s demonstrate that weaknesses in phonological processing skills lay at the heart of most of the problems of the high school and college foreign language learners they were studying. Their research was also some of the first research to focus on older language learners and their particular language learning needs. Besides locating the cause of language learning difficulties, their research confirmed that it was possible for a learner to have adequate to strong phonological skills in his or her first language and still have significant difficulty in learning another language because of very subtle weaknesses in phonological processing skills in the first language. In fact, so subtle are these weaknesses in some languages with regular orthographies, locating the weakness in first language may require highly specialized testing and experienced evaluators (Ijalba & Obler, 2005).

This is important because many who have considered the issues of learning problems in English Language Learners recommend that the learners who struggle in English be tested in their first language. We can see, however, that it might be deceptive to find that a learner has strong skills in his or her first language. Finding out what the weaknesses in phonological skills are in relation to the new language rather than to the first language could save time and much frustration for both learner and teacher.

Testing in English makes sense because a lack of tests of phonological skills in most of the languages of adult ELLs in the US and of trained personnel makes testing in first language impracticable.

Yet another reason to test in English is that testing adult ELLs in the US in their first language poses myriad other problems besides deceptive results. Many of these learners speak languages in which such testing has not been developed, and few trained persons are available who speak the dozens of languages represented in adult education and who could develop and do such testing.

Yet another problem is that testing phonological skills in other languages, for many reasons cited above, could not involve a direct translation of a test or even an adaptation, since languages have different phonological structures.

What is important to remember in cross language testing, however, is that the core skills are not language specific, and, as many studies have shown about the bi-directionality of such skills, it is possible to test them in one language to determine which core skills are indeed in place for learning another language.

Testing in first language may not tell us whether the learner has the skills needed for English learning such as phoneme and rhyme awareness since some elements of phonological structure differ across languages.

Competence in first language phonological skills can be deceptive in other ways too. Many key phonological structures are particular to each language. For alphabetic languages use individual phonemes to build words, but other languages do not. For example, Japanese does not have phonemes per se, but rather syllables. Testing a Japanese student in Japanese will not reveal whether that student has the necessary phoneme awareness to manage English literacy successfully. Chinese is another example. Though association of phonologically similar parts of words is seen as a necessary skill for reading well in Chinese (Ho et al, 2000), Chinese words are not broken down into phonemes or syllables in the way English is. Chinese learners of English must learn the concept of individual phonemes that are the building blocks of English words to spell and read successfully in English.

Rhyme is also a different linguistic structure from language to language. Though Spanish words can rhyme, the elements of rhyme—onset and rime –are not the same in Spanish as in English and rhyme is not used as a way to establish patterns and for spelling and decoding aids as it is in English. Even in Japanese, where syllables frequently rhyme, rhyme is not used linguistically the way it is in English (Leong, 1999).

For all of the above reasons then, testing in target language (for ELLs, English) is preferable to testing in first language.

Testing phonological skills will provide information for targeting weak skills in instruction to help adult ELLs who struggle to learn in the way this process has helped younger ELLs.

Further indicating the need to measure and address phonological skill strengths and weaknesses are studies that indicate that direct instruction in the weak phonological skills of young children reduces the incidence of reading problems significantly (Lundberg et al,1988; Maridaki-Kassotaki, 2002).

Just as direct instruction in phonological skills helped monolingual children become better readers, (Maridaki-Kassotaki, 2002; Shaywitz, 2003), Lesaux and Siegel report that young ELLs who received direct instruction developed phonological awareness skills—and consequently reading skills--equal to or better than those of their English-speaking peers (2003).

We have also seen that adult learners striving for literacy in other languages were helped in their efforts by direct instruction in phonological skills. (Jimenez & Venegas, 2004; Royer, et a, 2004).

Thus evidence is significant that it is necessary to identify weaknesses and strengths in those skills so that such help can be delivered.

Identification of weaknesses in core skills needed for literacy and language acquisition will prevent many inappropriate referrals of ELLs for learning disabilities testing.

Finally, it is important to be testing for strengths and weaknesses in skills that clearly impact language learning deeply so that ELLS who struggle to learn are not inappropriately referred for testing for learning disabilities. Teachers and others concerned about ELLs who have difficulty learning often conclude that the difficulties are the results of learning disabilities and attempt to have the adult ELLs referred for testing to determine if this is so. The current methods of testing for learning disabilities are fraught with difficulties for ELLs. Testing tools, expectations of testing, even the concept of learning disabilities are culturally and linguistically biased (Schwarz, 2005).

If we can focus on the core issues of language learning and find barriers to learning through culturally and linguistically friendly ways of testing, then learners can be spared from going through the referral process, which can be very harmful (Schwarz, 2005), and they and their teachers can get information that can help with English and literacy acquisition immediately.

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