In their studies on Karen Miller's students, Ganschow and Sparks found that by being taught phonological skills in one language, the students improved their phonological awareness in English also. This finding has led to a variation on the method of teaching phonology in the target language: teach the fundamentals of phonology in the student's native language before foreign language instruction begins.
That is, students are taught to recognize phonemes, to decode, or read words, efficiently and to encode, or apply the sounds to the written language. Basically, they learn what language is and how its sounds and parts function. Application of this knowledge to the language they are trying to learn is the next step.
This has proven an effective remediation as well. In fact, so strongly do Ganschow and Sparks believe this, they now recommend very strongly that such phonological skills be much more heavily stressed when children are learning to read. They feel students' reading and language skills will be much stronger, and future problems with foreign language acquisition will be headed off for many.
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