Phonological awareness and adult beginning readers

This study examined adult beginning readers' phonological awareness and (i) reading level measured by oral reading of connected text, (ii) decoding strategies, and (iii) teacher ratings of progress. The 33 participants were students from literacy programmes at two community colleges. All subjects were volunteers, spoke fluent English and were not literate in another language.;The results showed that students with low phonological awareness did not use grapheme-phoneme correspondence based strategies successfully. Multiple regression analysis indicated that skill with onset-rime accounted for a significant amount of the variance in choosing a "sounding out" decoding strategy; phoneme blending and rhyme judgement skill and letter sound knowledge each accounted for significant variance in success with sounding out. A relation between reading level and phonological awareness was not established most likely because of compensatory decoding strategies. The teacher ratings of progress suggested a relation between low phonological awareness and poor progress.