ORAL LANGUAGE DEFINED/DESSCRIBED: Oral language is defined as “the complex system that relates

sounds to meanings, made up of three components: phonological awareness, semantics, and syntax”
(Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998, p. 105). Phonological awareness is considered the strongest oral language
predictor for reading success and includes the understanding of combining the smallest units of sound
or phonemes. For instance, children learn the /m/ is the first spoken sound they hear in monkey long
before they understand that the sound is represented by the printed letter /m/. Although children are
not typically aware of their knowledge of these rules, their ability to understand and articulate words in
their native language is an accurate representation of their understanding. The semantic component of
oral language refers to a child’s knowledge of morphemes, or the smallest units of sound that carry
meaning and can be combined to form words and sentences. For example, “dog” + “s” includes two
morphemes that make up “dogs” and means more than one dog. The semantics of any language are
often printed in dictionaries. Knowledge of semantic rules are essential in understanding not just the
words comprising a language, but what meanings and words are important to speakers of the language.
The syntax component of oral language involves the ability to combine morphemes into words and
make sentences. Children develop the ability to combine two or more morphemes such as “more
cookie” using their knowledge about the syntactic component of our language and how the words are
combined to convey meaning. The rules of syntax become more and more complex throughout a child’s
development. Children typically move from combining two or three morphemes to adding proper
inflections and suffixes to words. For instance, adding “ing” to “eat” forms “eating” and represents the
present tense of the word “eat”. Eventually a child’s knowledge of syntax will be used to articulate
statements, questions, and commands. All three components of language work together as children
develop the skills necessary to learn to read. Some experts in the language field argue a fourth
component should be included in the definition of oral language skills pragmatics, which represent the
understanding of language use. A child’s understanding of pragmatic rules is a large part of their
communicative competence or ability to speak in different situations appropriately. For example,
children learn they speak more formally when they are in school than when they are at home. Learning
pragmatic rules is particularly important as children acquire reading skills and recognize book language,
which is text written in books in formal rather than spoken language. This pragmatic component of
language continues to be important as children move into adulthood since people sometimes are judged
based on what they say and when and how the words are said. Oral language development is
considered a key indicator of a child’s reading ability. The development of oral language for most
children is a natural process, heavily influenced by home literacy and preschool experiences. Most
children are able to learn the rules of our language over time with little or no formal instruction.
Because most humans are born with the ability to speak and hear, humans have a natural ability to learn
the rules of their language used within their environment. Children do not typically learn oral language
skills simply by imitating what is heard around them. Young children progressively work through the
linguistic rules of their language on their own. This language development is evident when children use
forms such as, “I brush my teeths” or “Her is tall.” Eventually children learn the conventional use of
“teeth” and “she” as they sort out the syntax rules of their language for themselves. Development of
these language rules emerge as children practice and hear correct spoken language in books or everyday
situations. PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND EARLY READING: A documented relationship between
phonological awareness and early reading has existed since the early 1970’s. Phonological awareness is
defined as “an awareness of sounds in spoken (not written) words that is revealed by such abilities as
rhyming, matching initial consonants, and counting the number of phonemes in spoken words” (Stahl &
Murray, 1994, p. 221). Measures of phonological awareness assess early achievement in reading more
accurately than age, scores on IQ test, or socioeconomic status (eg., Gough, Juel, & Griffith, 1992; Share,
Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Successful training in phonological
awareness has led to marked differences in achievement during a child’s acquisition of reading (Ball &
Blachman, 1991). When phonological awareness is an independent variable in studies and the
dependent variable is progress in learning to read a clear distinction must be made. Early elementary
students provided with specific training in phonological awareness typically score higher on both PA
tasks and reading accuracy during Nyman 12 kindergarten and first grade. Links between specific PA
training and progress in reading comprehension have only been casually established beyond first grade.
Tasks measuring phonological awareness in young children have been administered in numerous
studies. These PA tasks include identifying and supplying rhymes (Does cat rhyme with mat? and Give
me a word that rhymes with man?), initial sound identification (Does pail begin with /p/?), isolation of
phonemes (What is the first sound you hear in cup?), phoneme blending (What word does /m-a-p/
make?), and phoneme deletion and substitution (Say fish without the /f/?, Change the /f/ in fish to
/w/.). These assessments of phonological awareness progressively increase in difficulty from one to the
next. Identification and supplying of rhyming words is much easier for most children than adding or
deleting phonemes from words that are supplied. The question becomes: How much phonological
awareness is needed for children to learn to read? For decades researchers recognized the ability for a
child to identify the spoken sounds in language as essential for them to blend individual letters into
speech sounds and words. Children with the inability to identify individual sounds in spoken words and
segment these sounds are likely to struggle with beginning reading tasks (Fischer, & Carter, 1974;
Liberman, Shankweiler, Savin, 1972; Stanovich, 1986). A study conducted by Stahl and Murray (1994)
involved 52 kindergarten children and 61 first graders from a small city in the southeastern United
States. Boys and girls in the study were equally represented from middle and upper-middle class homes.
Four tasks to assess phonological awareness were administered to all of the students including Nyman
13 blending, segmentation, phoneme isolation, and deletion. Students instructional reading level was
then determined using a commercially published reading inventory. The reading test contained sight
word lists and leveled reading passages. Leveled sight word lists were used to determine which leveled
passage would be appropriate to begin leveled reading. Scores for words read correctly from each
passage were calculated to identify each child’s instructional reading level. Each passage read with 95%
accuracy was determined adequate. A spelling measure was also administered to each student to
measure the child’s emerging knowledge of words (Tangel & Blachman, 1992). The spelling assessment
included five words (lap, sick, elephant, pretty, train) orally dictated to each participant with an example
sentence. Students were asked to spell each word to the best of their knowledge even though they may
not know how to spell the word exactly. This assessment was scored using a seven-point scale with (0)
representing letters randomly strung together to (3 or 4) for more accurate invented spellings and (6)
for correct conventional spellings. Isolation of phonemes, the easiest of the four PA tasks, appeared to
have a direct correlation with children who were unable to pass the pre-primer word list on the reading
assessment. Of children who scored below four on the phoneme isolation assessment, ninety-percent
were not capable of passing the pre-primer word list for beginning reading. This finding represents the
connection between poorly developed phonological awareness and the inability to begin reading.
Phoneme manipulation and deletion, the most difficult of the PA tasks administered, appeared to be the
strongest predictor of reading ability once a limited level of letter recognition was established. Results
from this non-experimental study certainly represent the direct Nyman 14 relationship between
phonological awareness and reading ability for K-1 children. This study includes data that demonstrates
the effect oral language, particularly phonological awareness has on only reading accuracy (the ability to
read words correctly) not reading comprehension.

Review

Another skill which has consistently featured as a predictor of later academic performance is
oral language, defined as the individual use of the codes of a system formed of a limited
number of minimum units, which are recombined according to predetermined rules.
Language can be separated into different components, such as semantic, syntactic,
phonological, morphemic and pragmatic (Sternberg, 2008) and develops at an accelerated rate
during the preschool age, there being reports of significant differences between school years
for vocabulary and phonological awareness (Capovilla & Capovilla, 1997; Ferracini, 2005; Ferracini, Capovilla,
Dias, & Capovilla, 2006 Maluf & Barrera, 1997)
; . There is also evidence that different aspects of oral
language, including vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid naming skills predict
performance in written language (Aaron, Joshi, & Quatroche, 2008; Capovilla & Dias, 2008b; Cardoso-Martins,
2008 Cardoso-Martins & Pennington, 2001 Maluf & Barrera, 1997 Seabra & Dias, 2012a Zorzi, 2009)
; ; ; ; . Alterations in
oral language can importantly affect children’s social and cognitive development. As a
result, its evaluation at early ages is being increasingly emphasized in the literature.