Students with English as second language (ESL) are typically behind monolingual peers in reading comprehension even when phonemic awareness skills, phonics and word recognition are at grade level. The lack of syntactic awareness is one of the reasons cited in multiple studies (August & Shanahan, 2010; Da Fountoura & Siegel, 1995; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003; Lesaux et al., 2006; Chong, 2009).
This study investigated the effects of a six week intervention designed to increase syntactic awareness, including meta-awareness of key structures of English for young ESL students in the upper elementary grades. Twenty typically developing ESL students in the fourth and fifth grade participated in an intervention program that consisted of 35-minute training in syntactic awareness (SA) or phonemic awareness (PA) for three times per week. The ability to produce embedded and conjoined structures, including changes in both oral language and reading, were examined.
Results revealed significant gains in sentence combining skills for the syntactic awareness group after six weeks of treatment. Both groups increased their performance scores for the dependent measures word ordering, word reading in context, and comprehension. Levels of second language proficiency, specifically listening proficiency, had a significant influence on gain scores for measures of oral and written syntax, as well as reading. The results suggested that the time spent on higher level language was not at the expense of word recognition skills, consistent with an interactive model of reading that suggests that an interaction between higher level language (i.e., top-down) and decoding print (i.e., bottom-up) occurs to result in word recognition (Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989).
Future studies are needed to further evaluate the effect of syntactic awareness training for English as second-language learners.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-05272012-174438 |
| Date | 31 May 2012 |
| Creators | Tausch, Christina |
| Contributors | Pierce, Sarah, Norris, Janet, Hoffman, Paul, Jin, Tao |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-05272012-174438/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0136 seconds