Evaluating Phonological Skills in Adult ESOL Learners

Part Four: Conclusions and questions

Overall test results compared to education levels: Although the overall scores on the APS do not make a startlingly clear differentiation between education levels, if we look at the scores in the “poor” category compared to literacy levels (Table 5) we can see a trend towards more lower scores as education levels get lower. (A statistical analysis was not done since the test has not yet been validated and thus scores could very likely be influenced by the validity or lack of validity of certain items.). This overall blurring of scores is as it should be. Phonological skills of this basic sort should be relatively stable and only a few tasks would be influenced by education (e.g. deletion) or language background (rhyming), which would lower scores for the less educated or for those who could did not understand rhyming. The test appears to point out at least general weaknesses quite consistently.

Instead, it is the discrepancies in education and scores of individuals that is of interest. Why do some of the highly educated participants have low scores in rhyme or syllable counting, for example? What made the difference for the Mexican laborer with almost no formal education who had nearly perfect scores? Do the low phonological awareness scores of the Nicaraguan really point to reading difficulties? These are the kinds of individual issues that need to be looked into more thoroughly.

Whether the scores related to phonological awareness correlate to reading and writing levels would remain to be examined in a study such as the longitudinal one originally intended. Certainly if the phonological awareness items on this test have any validity, only the one learner would appear to be at risk for reading problems in English.

Rather it is the weaknesses in phonological memory that seem to be more worrying. If the APS is correct, many of our adult ESOL learners cannot perceive the sounds of English well and therefore cannot retain accurate language information on which to build vocabulary and more fluent language. There are a number of possibilities for these low scores. First, of course, it is normal for adult language learners to have a harder time with sound processing (Marinova-Todd, Marshall & Snow, 2000; Talukder, 2004,). Those who began their English instruction as adults may not have had much explicit instruction in hearing the sounds of English. It is also possible that the actual items in the sentence repetition task are too long, too linguistically complex or too formal for an accurate score of learner’s skills. Nonetheless, when such a large percentage of adult ESOL learners in a study of this kind cannot even repeat a four or five word sentence accurately, we should take note.

It is surprising, given the complexity of some tasks, that few participants had difficulty understanding them. Only two participants, both with lower literacy levels, could not understand the deletion task—and one of those speaks an unwritten language as a first language. The other participant who did not understand a task was a Spanish speaker who has been in this country a long time, holds a responsible job in a grocery store and has constant interaction with English speakers. Though she understood the deletion task, indicating perhaps that she does not have a fundamental reading difficulty, she could not understand the rhyme production task. In fact, her overall scores in phonological memory were very low. This could indicate that this learner needs specific, intense intervention in phonological skills. She was recommended for this testing because she has made little progress in learning to read and get an education, despite years of trying.

Next | Table of Contents | Previous