Abstract
This research examined the relationships among phonological awareness, vocabulary, and spelling in English among Japanese children. Phoneme isolation from words, blending phonemes into words, and phoneme deletion from words were used to assess phonological awareness in English, based on the work of Stahl and Murray (1994). The participants were 73 first- and second-grade junior high school students. While the second-grade students had better vocabulary knowledge, there were no differences in phonological awareness and spelling between the two groups. Their errors in phonological awareness were mainly mora-based, i.e., the students answered based on morae instead of phonemes. The results of hierarchical regression analysis, with vocabulary as a dependent variable, showed that grade and spelling explained more than fifty percent of the variance. Phonological awareness, especially phoneme blending, explained a significant amount of the spelling results. Phoneme-based phonological awareness rather than mora-based awareness is apparently needed for the acquisition of spelling knowledge by Japanese children, which in turn is closely related to the acquisition of vocabulary.
