A small-to-large unit progression in metaphonological awareness and reading?

The paper reports a series of studies of reading and metaphonological proce ssing by children in their second year in primary school (aged 6 years). An earlier study had established that, in the first year of learning, perform ance was characterized by a small-unit approach in which graphemes and phon emes were emphasized. In the second year, reading became more sensitive to the frequencies of rime structures in the lexicon. Capacity to generate wor d analogies for nonwords also showed increasing commitment to rime-based re sponses, and this trend was strongly linked to reading age. The present res ults suggest that a small- unit approach to reading is augmented by a large -unit approach as development proceeds. This trend was reflected in perform ance on a test of explicit phonological awareness. When asked to report the segment of sound shared by two spoken words, Primary 1 children were poor in reporting shared rimes but relatively adept in reporting shared phonemes . During Primary 2 there was an improvement in ability to report shared rim es, and this trend was also related to reading age. These results are discu ssed in relation to the influence of instruction and the nature of the orth ography in determining the course of reading development.