Include phoneme awareness instruction in kindergarten beginning reading programs to improve early literacy outcomes¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 8 claims (4 for, 3 mixed, 1 against) · 7 studies (3 quant-synthesis, 3 associational, 1 causal), q2–q4 · 2 of 7 report an effect size · 7 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article's stated implication is that "Implications for improving beginning reading instruction" follow from the finding that phoneme awareness training improved kindergarten children's phoneme segmentation, letter knowledge, reading, and invented spelling. The implementable action is adding structured phonological/phoneme awareness instruction to the kindergarten curriculum, delivered by the classroom's own teachers and teaching assistants.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Sustained instruction (an 11-week program in this study) delivered by trained classroom staff

Constraints¶

• Demonstrated with low-income, inner-city kindergarten populations; one of three reading measures did not show the advantage

Target Learners¶

• Kindergarten children beginning reading instruction

Target Learning Goals¶

• Phoneme segmentation and early word reading and spelling

Claims¶

• An 11-week teacher-delivered phonological awareness intervention significantly improves kindergarten children's phoneme segmentation, letter knowledge, reading, and invented spelling [+W]
• Before intervention, treatment and control kindergartners did not differ on age, demographics, vocabulary, phoneme segmentation, letter knowledge, or reading [~W]
• Phonemic Awareness Training Improves Reading [+M]
• Four of six standards-meeting studies showed statistically significant positive effects and two showed substantively important positive effects on phonological processing [+W]
• Phonological Awareness Training has positive effects on phonological processing in preschool children, averaging +27 percentile points [+W]
• No individual alphabetics outcome reached statistical significance in the WWC analysis [-W]
• Phoneme awareness is a stronger predictor of reading development than rhyme awareness [~W]
• Phonemic segmentation training favored over rhyme/alliteration training on print knowledge, phonological processing, and early reading/writing (Yeh 2003), with substantively important but non-significant differences [~W]

Related Strategies¶

• Phonemic Awareness Instruction
• Phoneme Awareness Training

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Blachman, B.A., Ball, E.W., Black, R.S. & Tangel, D.M. (1994). Kindergarten teachers develop phoneme awareness in low-income, inner-city classrooms. Read Writ 6, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01027275