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The Role of Phonological Awareness:Phonological Awareness in Alphabetic and Logographic Languages for Taiwanese Students

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2009, MA, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
Research on reading acquisition has shown that phonological awareness has a high correlation with L1 and L2 children’s learning to read in an alphabetic orthography. Conversely, other research indicated that learners from a nonalphabetic language background would have more difficulty decoding and learning new words than learners who come from an alphabetic background. These studies pointed out that the importance of EFL students’ phonological awareness affects them when learning a target language. The purpose of the study is to find out (1) if L1 intraword phonological awareness experience affects L2 phonological awareness among EFL learners with nonalphabetic L1 background; and (2) how L1 experience affects L2 phonological awareness among EFL students with nonalphabetic L1 orthographic backgrounds.Twenty-five Taiwanese students who attend Kent State University, twenty females and five males, were recruited from the undergraduate and graduate academic levels. The results of the study provide information that the EFL Taiwanese students’ L1 phonological awareness was significantly correlated to L2 phonological awareness; the findings of the study of EFL teenage learners indicated that if learners do well when manipulating Chinese Zhuyin Fuhao, their performance of English phoneme deletion and pseudo word will reach higher levels. Moreover, based on L1 backgrounds, the difficulties for Taiwanese students in learning English phonological awareness are discussed in this study; consonant clusters, consonant digraphs, in addition to rhotacized and nasal sounds, are common problems for the subjects in this study. Several implications for future research and English teaching from the findings are also presented.
Kristen Precht, PhD (Advisor)
Klaus Gommlich, PhD (Committee Member)
Karl Uhrig, PhD (Committee Member)
90 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Chen, T.-W. (2009). The Role of Phonological Awareness:Phonological Awareness in Alphabetic and Logographic Languages for Taiwanese Students [Master's thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1258184902

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chen, Tzu-Wen. The Role of Phonological Awareness:Phonological Awareness in Alphabetic and Logographic Languages for Taiwanese Students. 2009. Kent State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1258184902.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chen, Tzu-Wen. "The Role of Phonological Awareness:Phonological Awareness in Alphabetic and Logographic Languages for Taiwanese Students." Master's thesis, Kent State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1258184902

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)