The Connection Between Syntactic Awareness and Reading: Evidence from Portuguese-speaking Children Taught by a Phonic Method

Abstract

Most studies that have investigated the connection between syntactic awareness and reading acquisition involved English-speaking subjects and have not considered the influence of the teaching method. These studies have consistently reported strong connections between performance in syntactic awareness tasks and measures of decoding. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the connection between syntactic awareness and reading acquisition in a group of 48 Brazilian children who were taught to read by a phonic method. The children were given syntactic awareness and phonological awareness tasks before they began to read and were evaluated in contextual facilitation, decoding skills, and reading comprehension during their first year of reading instruction. The results suggest that although the connection between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation is an essential one, the link between syntactic awareness and the development of decoding skills is sensitive to how often children are encouraged to use contextual strategies in learning to read. Children learning a regular orthography through explicit teaching of letter-sound correspondences can make considerable progress in decoding which is not dependent on syntactic awareness.

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