The Relationshop between Phonological Awareness and Reading Ability: Study into Adult Self-Rating on Reading and Performance on Phonological Awareness Tasks

摘要

The study was aimed at examining into the relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability. The subjects were 137 Japanese adults (current faculty members and students), who rated themselves on their reading abilities and worked on phonological awareness tasks (two types of tasks requiring dictation of nonsense syllables). The results were as follows1) Performance levels on phonological awareness tasks showed normal distribution from low to high scores.2) Of the total number of subjects, 42 (31%) assessed themselves as "good" at reading during elementary school, 74 (54%) assessed themselves as "average" and 21 (15%) rated themselves as "slightly poor."3) Of the three groups classified into "good" "average" and "slightly poor" in self-rating of their reading abilities while in elementary school, significant difference was found in terms of performance in the phonological awareness tasks. The average scores in ordinal dictation test were 5.1 (SD±2.5) for the "good" group,4.1 (SD±2.0) for the "average" group and 2.6 (SD±1.9) for the "slightly poor" group. Difference could not be found between adult self-rating of reading with performance in phonological awareness tasks.4) Of the two phonological awareness tasks, ordinal dictation test was found to be more strongly related to "poor" reading ability during elementary school than reversal dictation test.