Abstract
Research on reading acquisition has shown that phonological awareness has a close relationship with L1 and L2 children’s learning to read in an alphabetic orthography. Several studies have noted that L2 learners from a non-alphabetic language background would encounter more problems in decoding the new words than those from an alphabetic background. Although much work has been done to investigate the relationship between reading and phonological awareness, comparatively little research has focused on the relationship between phonological awareness and learners from a non-alphabetic language background.The purpose of the study is to find out whether Taiwanese junior high school students from a non-alphabetic knowledge would acquire the finest level of phonological awareness naturally and to examine the role of phonological awareness in ESL reading acquisition and pronunciation accuracy. The study further explores which task of phonological awareness (phoneme blending, phoneme counting, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme deletion) and phonological memory would have a strong relationship with students’ reading abilities and pronunciation accuracy. In order to examine the differences between students with high and low phonological awareness skills on their reading and pronunciation performances, students were divided into two groups according to their phonological awareness. Thirty-four eighth grade junior high school students from an intact class in Taiwan participated in this study. All of the participants took a battery of phonological awareness tasks, nonword reading test, paragraph reading test, GEPT reading subtest, and test of pronunciation accuracy.Results of the study showed that students’ phonological awareness was closely related to their various reading performance and pronunciation accuracy. Letter sound knowledge was also associated with pronunciation accuracy and paragraph reading. Results of multiple regression analyses indicate that phonological awareness was the strongest concurrent predictor of learners’ reading and pronunciation performance than IQ scores and length of English exposure. Phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation skills seem to be more pertinent to reading and pronunciation accuracy than other phonological awareness skills used in this study. Moreover, students with more advanced phonological awareness skills performed significantly better than students with low phonological awareness skills on various language tasks. The study has shown that phonological awareness plays a vital role in junior high school students’ reading and pronunciation accuracy.