Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-1982
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Major
Curriculum and Instruction
Major Professor
Lester N. Knight
Committee Members
Bethany Dumas, J. Estill Alexander, Thomas Turner
Abstract
The purpose of this research was to provide a way of looking at children's acquisition of phonics knowledge to help answer the question: Do children acquire their knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships intuitively rather than through direct instruction?
A test was given patterned after typical phonics exercises, with two subsections: one (subtest A) containing items using stimulus words which are pronounced the same by virtually all speakers of American English, and the other (subtest B) containing items using stimulus words which have varied pronunciations in the regional and social dialects of Inland Southern speech. Each item consisted of a stimulus picture and three answer choices. On subtest B, one answer choice reflected American Standard speech forms, one reflected Inland Southern speech forms, and one served as a distractor response.
The test was given to 202 second grade students in Chattanooga, Tennessee, an area characterized by Inland Southern speech patterns. The group consisted of approximately equal numbers of Blacks and whites, males and females, from urban and suburban schools.
The average mean on subtest A (18.46) was significantly higher (p < .001) than the average mean on subtest B (12.16). On subtest B, when an unexpected response was selected, the Inland Southern response (average mean 7.22) was ten times more likely to be chosen than the distractor response (average mean .68). This difference was significant at p < .001 level.
Analysis of individual test items on subtest B indicated that vowel items were more likely to elicit the Inland Southern response than were the consonant items. Answers based on Inland Southern speech were chosen most often by students who were Black, reading below grade level, and attending a Title I school. For several vowel items, however, between 50% and 90% of all students in the study chose the Inland Southern response.
The results indicated that these children are as knowledgeable about phoneme-grapheme correspondences of their own speech as they are those of American Standard, and will make choices based on their own language patterns when dialect conflicts appear in phonics exercises. This knowledge was probably learned intuitively given current phonics instructional practices which stress only American Standard speech forms. Since reading is the most likely indirect source of phonemegrapheme information, it may be that reading of connected text is the most effective way of improving phonics skill.
Recommended Citation
Bibler, Nancy A., "An investigation of the effect of dialect variation on second grade students' perception of phoneme-grapheme relationships : b a psycholinguistic perspective. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1982.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/13191