Phonological Awareness of Novel Phonemes and English-Language Reading Comprehension in EFL University Students

Abstract

[EN] This study examines the relationship between phonological awareness of English-language phonemes not found in EFL students’ native language and their reading comprehension. Participants included 51 native speakers of Arabic who were all EFL learners. Participants were enrolled in an English-medium university following an American curriculum. Participants’ phonological awareness of three sounds was tested. The phoneme /f/, which is found in both English and Arabic, served as the baseline, whereas the test phonemes were /p/ and /ʊ/, which are not found in Arabic. Participants were then tested on a passage from the reading comprehension portion of the TOEFL exam. Higher scores on the reading comprehension task were positively correlated only with scores of awareness of the phoneme /p/. This finding indicates that explicit training in phonological awareness of novel consonant sounds may aid reading comprehension in EFL learners who are native speakers of Arabic.