ABSTRACT
Boucugnani-Whitehead, L.; and others. (1996). The expanding role of school psychologists: planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating a program to prevent early reading failure. Reading and Communication Skills (CSO12778). ED406646.
Introduction
The Preventing Early Reading Failure Project of the Griffin-Spalding County School System in Griffin, GA conducted a research study during the 1994-1995 school year to examine the effectiveness of phonemic awareness and phonological recoding training of first graders.
Method
Ninety-eight first graders were chosen for this study. Each student was screened for reading problems. The treatment group and the control group were evenly matched with forty-nine students each. The treatment group received classroom reading instruction based upon an intervention model which included additional training in phonemic awareness and phonological recoding. The forty-nine students in the matched control group received traditional first grade reading instruction.
Teachers, paraprofessionals, and Teacher Cadets (high school honor students) were trained in phonemic awareness, the ability to perceive a spoken word as a sequence of individual sounds (phonemes) and phonological recoding, a meta-cognitive activity in which students spell unfamiliar words by translating the phonemes into graphemes. The examiners hoped to discover a link between phonemic awareness and phonological recoding training to increased reading achievement of children with and without reading difficulties.
The Teacher Cadets provided individual and small group training in phonemic awareness and phonological recoding four times a week for ten minute sessions.
Results
Data was collected over a twenty-four week period from mid-October until mid-April. Posttest scores revealed that while both groups started with similar word decoding skills at the beginning of the study, the treatment group made more significant gains in decoding skills. Additionally, they were also able to read more sight words than the control group and transfer these skills to their reading. Results also showed that those students who were deemed "at-risk" who received phonemic awareness and phonological recoding training demonstrated such significant gains, that they were actually over-achieving.
Discussion
The findings from this study indicate that systematic explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonological recoding can have a significant positive impact on students' reading achievement.