Spoken language is inchoate and indistinct. To the fluent listener all (usually) seems clear enough but physical analysis of spoken language shows it to be amazingly messy and gappy. Word boundaries disappear, along with much else; sounds slur into each other or vanish altogether. Listeners obviously have, in fact, to work quite hard to make sense of it all, extrapolating from the minimal sounds offered and mindful of the context in which the speech is probably immersed. Given this phenomenal fuzziness of spoken language it is not surprising that those who do not read or write well, or often, also have poor phonological segmentation skills, nor that the latter improve rapidly with targetted tuition, nor that such improvements support subsequent spelling performance. There is a certain circularity here: learning literacy (in English) causes phonological awareness, something only rather good spellers have.

However, the evidence does not indicate that a ‘deficit’ in phonological awareness skills is causative of poor literacy skills, merely that it tends to co-exist with them (see chapter three and Castles & Coltheart 2004). Poor phonological awareness does predict literacy performance but this, of course, is not the same as proof of causation, and there are also other skills which predict literacy performance, most obviously letter awareness.

The skill of letter awareness is very much less pursued in the research world but is also powerfully correlated with later reading success (Barlow-Brown and Connelly 2002, Blaiklock 2004, Gallagher et al 2000). ‘A causal relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability has not directly been established … performance on phonological tasks may tap into letter-based, rather than purely phonemic, representations’ (Whitney and Cornelissen 2005 p. 274). And: ‘The National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis … found … that phonemic awareness instruction using letters helped children learn to read and write, but that phonemic awareness instruction without letters did not help children to learn to read and write’ (Besser et al 2004 p. 17). And: ‘We propose that preliterate phonological encodings do not include a level of representation corresponding to phonemes … Rather, reading acquisition itself creates a phonemic representation, via linkages of graphemes to groups of phonetic features … the phonemic encoding depends on a linkage to orthography’ (Whitney and Cornelissen 2005 p. 289). And general linguistic ability itself, as you would absolutely expect, correlates with reading ability in a similar manner to letter and phonological awareness (Nation and Snowling 2004).

And this rather obvious theoretical observation is supported by research. The brain is plastic, even in adulthood (Gilman & Newman 1996, Springer & Deutsch 1997). It is changed, physically and procedurally, as a result of learning this, rather than that (Gaser & Schlaug 2003, a whole issue of the International Journal of Psychology vol. 39 (2004), Maguire et al 2000, Schlaug 2001). Castro-Caldas et al (1998), for example, found that, at the very least, ‘… certain aspects of the ability to deal with phonetic units of speech are not acquired spontaneously but are a result of learning to read.’ and that ‘… learning the written form of language interacts with the function of oral language … learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organisation of the adult human brain.’ (both quotes ibid. p. 1053) How could it be otherwise? (And see chapter three and Adams 1990 p. 69.)

To summarise an argument more fully rehearsed in chapter three and which reverberates around the literacy world: It has not been shown that phonological awareness actually causes literacy skills; that ‘the core deficit’ in ‘dyslexia’ really is a deficit in phonological awareness. This awareness may simply (and probably does) correlate very closely with other influences, one immediately obvious candidate being letter awareness. When letter awareness is examined it is found to be at least as good a predictor of reading skill as is phonological awareness. The positive effect of letter awareness on reading skill would fit well with the obvious fact that text is a visual signal and must, at least initially, be appreciated visually rather than phonologically. Text is implacably silent. We do not ‘hear’ it – we see it. It must be managed visually, at least to begin with. How could it be otherwise?