ABSTRACT
Castle, Jillian M., Riach, Jacquelyn, and Nicholson, Tom. (1994). Getting off to a better start in reading and spelling: The effects of phonemic awareness instruction within a whole language program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 350-359.
Introduction
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of phonemic awareness instruction on the reading and spelling development of five year old students enrolled in a whole language classroom in New Zealand. The study involved two separate experiments. Experiment 1 examined the effect of phonemic awareness instruction on spelling progress while Experiment 2 studied the effect of phonemic awareness training on students' reading performance.
Experiment
1
Population
During the course of this experiment, an experimental group of fifteen (15) children received training in phonemic awareness twice a week for ten weeks. The control group, an equally matched group of fifteen (15) students were instructed in “process writing” for the same period of time. All of the participants in this study had been identified as having limited phonemic awareness proficiency. Thirteen (13) of the students involved in the study were boys. Seventeen (17) were girls. They had a mean age of 5.03 years. All students spoke English as their first language and were free of learning, visual, and mental disabilities.
Methodology
At the beginning of this study, each participant was administered a phonemic awareness pretest consisting of forty-two (42) items. The items were divided into six (6) subtests of seven (7) items each. The tests included segmentation, blending, deletion of phonemes, (initial and final) and substitution of phonemes (initial and final).
The children were also administered the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) of spelling and an experimental spelling test that included regular, irregular and pseudowords. Additionally, Clay's dictation test was used to identify how well each student could represent the sounds of those words in writing. Other tests included in this experiment were Clay's Letter Identification Test and The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), which was used to measure the intelligence of all the participants in the study.
During the course of ten (10) weeks the fifteen (15) students in the experimental group received phonemic awareness training in phoneme segmentation, phoneme substitution, phoneme deletion and rhyme. The students were taught through a variety of games. The control group spent an equal amount of time engaged in process writing activities. Both groups were spread over three schools.
Results
The children in both groups were determined to be in the average range on the PPVT-R. A one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that all students scored within the average range of intelligence.
The results of the posttests indicate that both groups showed vast improvement in the development of their phonemic awareness skills. However, it must be noted that the experimental group significantly out-performed the control group, leading the researchers to conclude that phonemic awareness training does indeed contribute to spelling achievement in young children.
Discussion
At the conclusion of this study, the experimental group significantly out-performed the control group on the WRAT spelling test and the experimental spelling tests. From these findings, it can be surmised that training in phonemic awareness has a positive effect on spelling ability. Furthermore, it contributes to a child's spelling achievement by assisting in the acquisition of knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules.
Experiment
2
Population
Fifty-one (51) students with low phonemic awareness skills were chosen to participate in Experiment 2. The seventeen children who comprised the experimental group received fifteen weeks of training in phoneme analysis and synthesis skills and additional training in letter-sound correspondence.
The remaining thirty-four (34) students made up the two control groups. One control was trained in semantic categorization using the same instructional materials as the experimental group. These students also worked on letter recognition and wrote stories. The second control group received no specialized training.
Methodology
The fifty-one participants in Experiment 2 were selected from a group of seventy-six students. The students were chosen based on their low level of phonemic awareness. Twenty-four (24) boys and twenty-seven (27) girls participated in the study. They represented five primary school in middle-low socioeconomic areas of Auckland, New Zealand. They ranged in age from 5-5.6 years old.
As in Experiment 1, the children were assigned to three groups. The groups were evenly matched using the students' verbal ability scores on the PPVT-R. Next, each of the groups was randomly assigned a condition: phonemic awareness, alternative training, or no treatment.
In addition to the PPVT-R, the students were pretested with five different instruments which included: Roper's Phonemic Awareness Assessment, The Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills, the Clay Word Reading Test, and the Clay Letter Recognition Test. Those five measures were also used as a posttest at the end of the fifteen week period.
The phonemic awareness training group and the alternative training group received instruction for twenty minutes each week during the course of a fifteen week period, for a total of five hours of training.
During their training in phonemic awareness, the experimental group was instructed in phoneme segmentation and blending skills. This training included the use of rhyme, alliteration, activities using the Elkonin technique and sound games. In addition to segmenting and blending, students were also taught to delete sounds and phoneme substitution.
The training for the alternative group focused on word meaning and
categorization. Work with letters focused on letter names rather than letter
sounds. Group story time was also
incorporated into the alternative training.
Both treatment groups were instructed by the same experimenter.
Results
The same statistical analysis procedure for Experiment 1 were applied to Experiment 2.
The results of the posttests indicated that the experimental group out-performed both the alternative training group and the control group that received no treatment. The children in the experimental group achieved higher scores on the test of phoneme awareness, reading pseudowords on the Bryant Test of Decoding Skills and on the dictation test.
Discussion
The gains made by the experimental group in phonemic awareness and the ability to use letter-sound rules suggest that a student's ability to apply letter-sound rules will be enhanced as the child is exposed to more print. Lack of training in these rules is likely to impede reading achievement. The researcher concluded training in phonemic awareness enabled students to become knowledgeable in grapheme correspondence skills as evidenced by their performance on the tests of dictation and pseudoword reading.
General
Discussion
The results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 provide concrete evidence that explicitly instructing young students in phonemic awareness plays an important role in enhancing their literacy development.