Is Phonemic Awareness Directly Related to Reading Achievement in Fourth Grade Students?

Abstract

This study looked at the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading achievement in fourth grade students. The study involved 26 fourth graders from the same class at a suburban school in western New York State. The question addressed was: Can phonemic awareness be used as a predictor of reading achievement with fourth grade students? The data were collected using the word recognition and passage comprehension sections of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test and the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation. The Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation was calculated to determine to what extent reading ability and phonemic awareness are related. This study doesn't point to a strong relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in fourth grade students. This finding conflicts with similar research conducted with younger students. Some possible explanations are given for this discrepancy.