PASS: A Phonological Awareness Intervention Program for AtRisk Preschool Children

1
PASS A Phonological Awareness Intervention
Program for At-Risk Preschool Children

• Froma P. Roth, Ph.D.
• Colleen K. Worthington, M.S.
• University of Maryland
• Gary A. Troia, Ph.D.
• Michigan State University

2
Key Concepts

• Phonological awareness (PA) refers to a group of
  oral language skills that reflect explicit
  awareness of the sound structure of spoken
  language and the ability to manipulate that
  structure.
• Includes rhyming, alliteration, blending,
  counting, isolation, segmenting, deletion,
  substitution, and reversal of speech sounds,
  though the 3 major areas are rhyming, blending,
  and segmenting.
• Typically developing (TD) children between the
  ages of 3 and 4 are capable of rhyming and
  alliteration
• TD children between 4 and 6 years of age can
  count, isolate, blend, and segment speech sounds
  older children can delete, and manipulate them.

3

• Children who perform well on such PA tasks
  usually are (or become) good readers, whereas
  children who perform poorly on them struggle (or
  will struggle) with word recognition and
  spelling.
• PA performance in K is the best predictor of
  reading and spelling achievement in first and
  second grade.
• Phonemic awareness (pa), the knowledge that words
  are comprised of individual sounds and the
  ability to manipulate these sounds, is most
  directly related to literacy.
• Children who are phonemically aware can grasp the
  alphabetic principle, the concept that letters
  more or less correspond to sounds in spoken words
• Childrens early reading and spelling experiences
  further develop their phonemic awareness skills.

4

• About 20 of children do not acquire PA without
  explicit instruction, especially those
• With disabilities
• From low income households
• From homes in which English is not a native
  language,
• Explicit instruction in PA and pa is often
  beneficial for children with and without
  disabilities to promote their meta-phonological
  competence, grapho-phonemic knowledge, decoding
  ability, and spelling proficiency.

5
Examples Early Childhood Experiences That Foster
Phonological Awareness

• Reciting fingerplays and nursery rhymes
• Singing songs and chants with rhyming or
  alliterative schemes
• Joint book reading with older children and adults
• Viewing educational television programming such
  as Shining Time Station and Between the Lions
• Exposure to environmental print (e.g., street
  signs, restaurant logos)
• Interaction with various forms of print (e.g.,
  menus, recipes, shopping lists, phone books,
  viewing guides)

6
Key Principles of Instruction

• Task Dimensions to Control
• Explicitness of awareness
• Size of phonological unit (i.e., word, syllable,
  intrasyllabic, phoneme)
• Number of units
• Position of unit
• Phoneme characteristics
• Word frequency/familiarity

7

• Types of Instructional Tasks
• Matching
• Elimination/Oddity
• Judgment
• Isolation
• Simple production (task requires a response with
  a shared segment or task requires a complete
  segmentation or blending of units)
• Counting
• Compound production (two-step tasks involving
  deletion, substitution, or reversal)

8

• Instructional Tips
• Make sounds more perceptually salient through
  exaggerated pronunciation of continuants and
  iteration (i.e., bouncing) of noncontinuants
• Use manipulatives whenever possible
• Use visual cues such as pictures or indicators of
  number of units whenever possible
• Model extensively
• Provide immediate corrective feedback

9
Promoting Awareness of SoundS (PASS) Program

• 3 Independent Training Modules
• Rhyming
• Blending
• Segmentation
• All Lessons 30 Minutes and Have Same Structure
• Opening Activity (5 minutes)
• Explicit instruction (20 minutes)
• Closing Activity (5 minutes)
• All lessons are metascripted (loose scripts)

10
4 Types of PASS Lessons

• Preskill
• Regular
• Alternate
• Branching

11
Characteristics of PASS Instruction

• Sequentially ordered discrete learning objectives
• Guided practice opportunities
• Ongoing progress monitoring (probes)
• Criterion-based (suggested 80 accuracy 2 lessons)

12
PASS Stimulus Characteristics

• High frequency words (20 per lesson) are used for
  the explicit instruction portion of each lesson
• Balanced for phonetic diversity (a stimulus set
  is used for only one objective in any given
  module)

13
PASS Scaffolding Procedures

• Picture stimuli named by or for child(ren)
• Extensive modeling of task demands
• Exaggerated articulation of key sound properties
  and iteration
• Visual cues and manipulatives
• Immediate feedback and error correction

14
Research on PASS

• In clinical setting
• In school setting
• With children with SLI
• With at-risk preschool children
• With ELL children (in progress)
• 1 - on -1 instruction
• Small group instruction in RTI model (Tier 2
  support)

15
Research on PASS

• Study 1 Rhyming Module
• (Roth, Troia, Worthington, Dow, 2002)
• 8 preschoolers with S and/or L impairment
• Single-case experimental design to evaluate
  effects
• Establish stable (in level and trend)
  pre-treatment baseline performance using multiple
  probes of rhyming, blending, and segmentation
• Implement treatment phase and monitor progress
• Determine post-treatment performance gains using
  multiple probes of rhyming, blending, and
  segmentation
• Average pre-treatment baseline score range
  0-53
• Average post-treatment score range
  77-100
• (no overlap with pre-treatment scores)
• No notable gains in blending and segmentation
  (which means rhyming gains were due to treatment
  and not general maturation or other factors)

16
STUDY 2 BLENDING

• 11 preschoolers with S and/or L impairment
• All had previously participated in PASS rhyming
  module
• Single-case experimental design to evaluate
  effects
• Average pre-treatment baseline score 3
  correct
• Average post-treatment score 52
  correct (ES 2.87)
• phonemes preserved (1 or more phonemes)
• Proportion of pretest probe 32
• Proportion of posttest probe 89
• Post hoc analyses word frequency and lexical
  neighborhood density affected performance
• Children correctly blended more HF words than LF
  words but
• They correctly blended more words from LD
  neighborhoods than HD neighborhoods

17
Study 3 RTI (Roth, et al., 2009)

• Rhyming Module
• 3- 4-year-old at risk children
• Tier 2 (PASS) 15-22 children
• Pull-out services by SLP 2x/week

18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21
(No Transcript)
22
Closing Remarks

• Spontaneous transfer between skills cannot be
  assumed
• Phonemic awareness training must be coupled with
  instruction in the alphabetic principle to have
  the most impact on literacy (either sequentially
  or concurrently)
• Phoneme preservation scoring appears to be more
  sensitive to growth
• In some cases, up to 30 of children in treatment
  samples who receive intensive instruction in
  phonological awareness do not make substantial
  gains

23
Contact Information

• Froma Roth
• froth_at_hesp.umd.edu
• Colleen Worthington
• cworth_at_hesp.umd.edu
• Gary Troia
• gtroia_at_msu.edu