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Assessing Phonemic Awareness Using Children's Writing:
What does "BoBiBlokhed" tell us?
There is a wide body of research to support the view that children with low levels of phonemic awareness
on entering school are more likely to be poorer readers and spellers than those with high levels (Adams,
1990; Bradley & Bryant, 1983, 1985; Frith, 1985; Mann, 1993; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). Because
academic success is largely dependent upon reading, teachers need a quick and accurate way to identify
potential problems as early as possible.
Current phonemic awareness tests are relatively lengthy and time-consuming because they need to be
individually administered. The Astronaut Invented Spelling Test (AIST), however, is a group-administered,
single-page assessment device designed to measure children's phonemic awareness and letter-sound
knowledge from their written language. It is a game -like activity that children perceive as fun, and which
incorporates familiar tasks used in classrooms every day.
This paper provides an overview of the rationale behind, and development of, the AIST, including
administration and scoring guidelines. The AIST is presented as a very useful tool for teachers of children
in the first three years of schooling, for special educators, and for speech and language therapists.
Introduction
Research over the past two decades has consistently shown that children with poor
phonemic awareness on entering school are more likely to be poorer readers and spellers
than those with high levels (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983, 1985;
Castle, 1999; Juel, Griffith & Gough, 1986; Frith, 1985, Lundberg, Frost & Peterson,
1988; Majsterek & Ellenwood, 1995; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). Phonemic
awareness involves an understanding of the fac t that words are made up of a series of
separate sounds (phonemes). Without this awareness, there can be no ability to attach the
corresponding letters to individual sounds, and thus the mystery of reading cannot be
solved.
The impact of poor phonemic skills increases exponentially over time, significantly
affecting future reading and academic success (Adams, 1990; Torgeson, 1998). Stanovich
(1986) highlighted the consequences of early reading failure. He portrayed the child with
poor phonological awareness and spelling-to-sound knowledge as having fewer positive
experiences in reading-related activities, fewer opportunities for language and cognitive
growth and less practice in developing fluency and comprehension skills which
ultimately results in negative attitudes towards reading across all domains.
Because the future academic success of students is dependent on reading, teachers need
to identify any area of weakness quickly and accurately in the early stages of their
reading development so that intervention measures can be implemented. To do this,
reliable screening tools are needed. Because of the close relationship between phonemic
skills and reading development, and because there is also clear evidence that phonemic
skills can be taught (see Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998 for an extensive review), early
assessment of these critical skills should be a standard part of early literacy teaching.
Only then can teachers be proactive in supporting young children who may be at risk of
long-term reading difficulties.
Current assessment of phonemic awareness
There are several phonemic assessment instruments available that are used to gain
detailed knowledge of students' phonemic skills. Lindamood and Lindamood's (1979)
Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC), Muter, Hulme and Snowling's (1997)
Phonological Abilities Test (PAT), the Whipp (1991) phonemic awareness instrument
and Neilson's (1999) Sutherland Phonological Awareness Test (SPAT) are all currently
used to determine individual children's phonemic development. Some of these tests also
include some assessment of letter-sound knowledge. They do, however, all share one
important characteristic that make them impractical for a busy classroom teacher: they
must all be individually administered, with each test taking at least 15 minutes, and in
some cases, considerably longer. This is because phonological assessments usually ask
children to respond to words in some way – to syllabify words, to provide a rhyming
word, to identify an initial sound, to segment a word, and so on. As these responses are
spoken, they must be assessed individually. This factor alone means that few teachers are
able to systematically assess the phonemic skills of all their students. There is a need for
a class-wide test that quickly and easily screens children for phonological weaknesses, so
that individual testing may be confined to those who require a more refined assessment of
their strengths and areas of need.
Using invented spelling to assess phonemic awareness
The time-consuming administration of individual tests when pre- and post-testing
children undergoing class phonemic training programs led Neilson (2003) to develop an
invented spelling task to assess phonemic awareness. This had the overwhelming
advantage of being group-administered, and completed within 10 minutes. Thus the
Astronaut Invented Spelling Test (AIST) was developed. This article will present a
description and critical discussion of the AIST.
In order to provide a sound theoretical basis for the use of invented spelling for this
purpose, some discussion of the relationship between phonemic skills and invented
spelling is provided. This is best explained in the context of an overall model of the
development of spelling skills.
Ehri (1989), Ehri and Wilce (1986) and Bourassa and Treiman (2001) have produced a
large body of research relating to phonemic awareness and the development of spelling
and reading. The following outline of the stages of spelling development is drawn
broadly from their work, as summarised by Neilson (2003).
Pre-phonetic Stage
Children's early attempts at writing often involve a type of proto-writing, using
letters or letter-like forms. Although the children may be using letters, and are
aware of the communicative purpose of writing, they are not yet aware of the fact
that words are made up of separate sounds. Thus when they write, they are not
consciously relating the letters they write to the individual sounds in the words.
Semi-phonetic Stage
Once children are aware of the fact that words are made up of separate sounds, the
nature of their experimentation with writing changes. Children's strategy at this
stage of spelling development involves attending to the sounds in words as well as
they can, and using whatever alphabetic knowledge the y may have to represent
those sounds. They are not yet, however, analysing the words in full phonemic
detail and are not yet able to draw on the full repertoire of letter-sound
correspondences. Their spelling attempts reflect this partial knowledge, often
representing only the most salient sounds such as the first and possibly the last.
They may also use whole letter names to represent sounds in their spelling, as in
LAD for 'lady' and BNRNA for 'banana'.
Phonetic Stage
As children refine their analysis of the speech stream, they progress to a more
fully phonetic stage of spelling, usually working systematically through the
sounds in words as they try to spell them. Their attempts are usually quite
decipherable, although problems remain with the more difficult phonemic tasks,
such as identifying the separate consonants in consonant blends. Thus WET is a
common representation of 'went' for children in this stage.
Orthographic Stage
This is a complex stage, involving the development and incorporation of many
skills. Children move beyond the strategy of sounding out words letter by letter as
they attempt to write them. They are no longer reliant only on phonetic strategies
to spell words: they have a range of additional strategies to use. Their familiarity
with common letter patterns increases and they incorporate spelling conventions
such as the "bossy E" rule. They are also able to use their knowledge of syntax to
help them spell, thus their knowledge of the –ED ending for the past tense allows
them to spell many words correctly, even if the sound of the word is pronounced
as a /d/ as in 'hugged'; as a /t/ as in 'picked' or as '–ed' as in 'wanted'.
It is clear from this model of spelling development that phonemic awareness becomes a
critical component of spelling as soon as children move beyond the pre-phonetic stage.
Indeed, children's progress through the semi-phonetic and phonetic stages only occurs as
they become better at analysing the sounds in the speech stream, and relating those
sounds to particular letters. Invented spelling thus allows children's phonological
awareness to be inferred from their written responses. The link between phonemic skills
and spelling is clear.
Before proceeding with a discussion of the Astronaut Invented Spelling Test, it is
important to mention here the children for whom the AIST is appropriate. Clearly
children who are the pre-phonetic stage would not be suitable candidates for the test.
Children with no knowledge of the alphabet could not make any attempt at spelling tasks.
The AIST is designed for those children who are at the semi-phonetic and phonetic
stages, usually children in Kindergarten, Year 1 or Year 2. Once children move into the
orthographic stage, by which time they have integrated all the different forms of
knowledge that assist spelling development, a conventional spelling test would be more
appropriate.
The Astronaut Invented Spelling Test (AIST)
Overview
The AIST is a game-like activity that involves four lost astronauts. The children are
asked to write a nametag for each astronaut according to clues given by the person
administering the test, usually the class teacher. For example, the students are asked to
find a fat little astronaut with a sad face and a star on his helmet. They are told his name
twice, in this case Tubby Twinkle, and asked to write his name on the tag attached to the
matching picture. In order to complete the AIST successfully, children must know how to
segment a word into its constituent parts and how phonemes correspond to graphemes.
Additional skills needed to complete the AIST include isolation, segmentation and
blending of phonemes, short-term memory skills and some knowledge of orthographic
rules. At the completion of the test, a scoring system is used to determine if the student is
having difficulty in the area of phonemic awareness.
Components
1. The "Astronaut Sheet" handed to each child (see Appendix 1)
This is the individual test sheet and contains line drawings of four different cartoonlike astronauts, each with a name tag attached to his sleeve.
2. The score sheet (see Appendix 2)
This is a grid on which the student's responses are recorded. Points or partial points are
awarded for letter choices that are considered reasonable. Guidelines which cover
plausible alternatives are provided. Students are awarded bonus points if they are also
able to use conventional spelling patterns such as /bb/. Subscores for the child's attempts
at single consonants, consonant blends, vowels and an orthographic bonus are recorded
belo w the scoring grid. This provides a quick indicator of each student's individual
strengths and areas of need.
3. A summary page
This sheet allows for identifying information on the child as well as the total score,
sub-scores of the different phoneme types and orthographic skills, and any qualitative
information the administrator may wish to add.
Issues of test design
Choice of astronaut names
When deciding upon the stimulus material (that is, the astronauts' names), and
remembering that the point of the exercise is to assess phonemic skills, several issues
had to be considered.
If the chosen words were too familiar, some of the target group may know the words as
sight words, and would not need to decipher the spelling on the basis of sounding out the
word. In this case, an orthographically correct word would not provide that window into
the child's phonemic awareness that was being sought.
The easiest way to resolve this issue would have been to make the stimulus words
nonsense words: the astronauts could have been named anything. It is the experience of
many teachers and speech pathologists, however, that very young children find the
concept of nonsense words very difficult: indeed many have only just come to terms
with the notion of real words. Being asked to work with nonsense words in a group
context would be confusing, and this would add another confounding element to the
task.
A further issue is that relatively long sequences of sounds, at least several syllables, are
required to assess phone mic tracking skills, and if these are presented as nonsense
words, the words become too long for the young child to remember. It is one thing to
remember a nonsense word and repeat it back immediately but another thing entirely to
hold the nonsense word in memory long enough to segment its sounds and write them
down.
Another alternative would have been to use unfamiliar or uncommon real words in the
hope that no child has learnt it by rote. Unfortunately, if the words are too unfamiliar,
they function essentially as nonsense words, and would be just as difficult to remember.
The AIST addresses this issue by using real words, but deliberately seeking words that
would be familiar to young children from their daily language experiences or from
children's songs, rather than by having met them in print. By presenting the words as
names for the astronauts, they were made meaningful for the children, and therefore
easier to remember. Each astronaut has both a first and a second name, thus providing
sequences of sounds up to four syllables long.
Assessing a variety of relevant skills
In developing the names for the astronauts (Bobby Blockhead, Tubby Twinkle, Fred Fixit
and Smiley Sam ), a deliberate effort was made to include a range of phonological and
orthograp hic aspects to provide as much diagnostic information as possible. For example,
in the final selection:
~ all the short vowels sounds are represented;
~ two long vowel sounds are represented;
~ the four astronauts' names include several different consonant blends which allows
exploration of the degree to which children can segment the more difficult phonemes in
the speech stream;
~ the orthographic features x, bb, final y, ey, ck, ea, and le are included which allows for
identification of those children who have begun to incorporate orthographic knowledge
into their spelling;
~ some names, such as 'Sam', are common, and may well have been encountered as real
names; some are a little more complex but phonemically quite easy to spell ('Fred').
These easier it ems make the task more accessible to very young children; and
~ one name, 'Twinkle' is quite complex both phonemically and orthographically. Most
children would have sung it many times in their lives but are very unlikely to have
encountered it in print.
The final development of the names was a result of collaboration between speech
pathologists, academics, and teachers.
Using a written task
Assessing phonological awareness using a written task adds another confounding factor:
the child must be able to choose the correct letter to represent the sound and to write it
down in a recognisable fashion. Both experience in the field and research evidence
(Byrne, 1998), however, attest to the fact that children who can identify the sounds also
tend to be able to remember the alphabet letters.
Administration
Regular teachers, special education teachers, educational psychologists and speechlanguage pathologists can successfully administer the AIST. It does not require specific
training - a careful reading of the administration guidelines will suffice.
The AIST takes about ten minutes to administer to a class, and less time if assessing an
individual. The instructor introduces the activity by telling the students that four
astronauts went for a walk and got lost. Luckily they have name tags attached so if they
write the names on each one, the astronauts might be found again. The administrator then
dictates the name of each astronaut, adding some clues so the children can find the
appropriate astronaut. For example, "Look carefully and you will see an astronaut with a
hammer in his hand. His name is Fred Fixit." Each child then writes an astronaut's name
on the relevant tag. Children may receive assistance in locating the correct astronaut if
necessary and the name may be repeated as often as necessary. Children who finish
quickly or those who find the task very difficult, can colour the special part of each
astronaut (i.e. Fred Fixit's hammer, Bobby Blockhead's big square helmet, the star on
Tubby Twinkle's helmet and Smiley Sam's hair) while they are waiting.
Applications
The AIST has been successfully used to assess the phonemic skills of children in the first
three years of school (that is, Kindergarten from about May, Year 1 and Year 2 in New
South Wales, Australia). The test becomes quite easy for the majority of students beyond
the third year of formal schooling and it is not useful for detecting those students with
difficulties in the higher levels of phonemic awareness. It does not provide as detailed
infor mation as an individually administered assessment – its purpose is to broadly screen
children to identify those who may need a more refined assessment. The recommendation
would be to administer an individual test to any child who scores poorly on the AIST.
The AIST does not assess higher-level spelling skills; if that is the focus of the
assessment, a conventional spelling test, such as the South Australian Spelling Test
(Westwood, 1999) should be used.
Scoring
On the scoring grid, each of the astronaut's names is presented, syllable by syllable. Each
student's attempt is scored by circling the relevant letters that the student has written (see
Appendix 2). No score is recorded if other letters, or no letters, appear to represent each
phoneme. Phonemes are only credited if recorded in the correct order. If out of order,
only the first phoneme is credited. Voicing errors, for example writing /t/ for /d/ are given
half points. Common vowel confusions are also credited with half points. All the possible
acceptable variations (based on the responses of over two hundred children assessed to
date) are recorded on the scoring sheet to facilitate scoring.
Orthographic bonus points are scored to acknowledge use of the orthographic units of x,
bb, final y, ey, ck, ea, and le.
Once examiners are familiar with the scoring system, scoring of each child's responses
takes less than five minutes.
Interpretation
The scoring system allows for both qualitative and quantitative interpretation. The sounds
in the astronauts' names have been grouped into three "phoneme-types", indicating
progressive difficulty. The sub-scores may be used as part of a criterion-referenced
assessment of each child's phonemic development. They provide specific information
about each student's strengths and weaknesses.
The AIST also allows teachers to identify those children who have difficulty tracking the
sequence of sounds. These children will keep going back to what they have already
written, doing so very unsystematically, and losing their place in the sequence of sounds
as they try to write them down. Their efforts will often include a large proportion of
repeated extraneous letters. This pattern may also indicate difficulties with sustained
attention, thus the AIST has useful additional dia gnostic potential.
The total score can be used to compare a student with his or her peers, to compare groups
of children with each other or to compare one child's performance on successive testing
occasions. The scores are particularly useful to rank students within a class. This
information can be used to form groups based on common need and to identify those
children most in need of support.
Standardised normative data
Although data have been collected on over 200 students to date, the range of students has
not been broad enough to develop useful norms. Percentile ranks on one group is
available, and it is hoped that future follow-up studies may provide a wide enough
sample to provide meaningful norms. Currently, the most useful application of the data is
to compare individual performances within select cohorts, and thus identify students who
are significantly behind their peers.
Data collected thus far strongly suggest that children achieve their greatest burst of
development within their first year of schooling. This highlights the need to maximise
this "window of opportunity", to identify as early as possible those students who are not
developing these crucial skills at the same rate as their peers, and so intervene quickly
with targeted phonemic development programs.
Reliability
In the only reliability study conducted thus far, Bryant (2002) administered the test to 99
children in the first two years of school, scored the responses and then submitted her data
to the test developer for blind re-scoring. The percentage of agreement on individual
scoring was 92%, with disagreements decreasing in direct proportion to the legibility of
the child's handwriting. On several items there were disagreements regarding which word
a letter should be assigned to, and these changed the scores for consonants as opposed to
consonant blends, without making a difference to the Total Score.
Validity
In three separate studies (Bryant, 2002; and Neilson, 2003), children completed the AIST
in a whole class setting immediately before a standardised phonological awareness test
that has been in wide use in Australia for several years. The correlations in these three
studies were .83, .81 and .89. These consistently high correlations in three different
samples suggest that the Astronaut Invented Spelling Test can confidently be used as an
initial whole-class phonemic awareness screening test.
Conclusion
While the AIST could have benefited from the inclusion of at least one female astronaut
to inspire all those little girls who reach for the sky, it does provide a systematic and
replicable way of documenting the spelling skills of children who are in the semiphonetic and phonetic stages of spelling development. It incorporates classroom practices
with which teachers and children are familiar, such as "having a go" at spelling unknown
words. It encourages young children to take risks in their writing, and to listen carefully
to the sequence of sounds in words. Naming four little lost astronauts has also proved
popular with the young children with whom the instrument has been piloted – it is
regarded as a "fun" activity. Thus the Astronaut Invented Spelling Test has exciting
potential to assist teachers of young children in one of their most important
responsibilities – the identification of children at risk of reading difficulties and the
opportunity to help them avoid the lifelong consequences of such difficulties.
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