Brief Description:

This study is an investigation of the effects of a phonological awareness (PA) intervention alone versus a PA intervention with connections to reading practice (PAR) on the PA skills, word reading skills, and non-word reading ability of kindergarten students. The study also compared the two intervention conditions to a storybook reading contrast group (C). The participants in the study were 24 kindergarten students (13 females and 11 males) enrolled in three public kindergarten classrooms in a metropolitan Midwestern city. Participants completed pretest and posttest assessments of letter knowledge, name writing, PA skills, and reading skills.

The study is framed within emergent literacy theory, which states that reading development is a complex process that begins in early childhood and derives from social interactions, print experiences, and language exposure. While the current study did not produce significant posttest score group differences, the effect sizes for the PA and reading skills measures were moderate to large. The PAR group made significantly larger gains on the segmentation measure than the Contrast group while the PA group did not. The PAR group also made significant gains on the blending measure over the gains made by the PA group. The effect sizes on the PA skills were large. The study findings are promising evidence that the use of kindergarten children's names to make connections between PA intervention and reading practice is practically significant.

Publications:

Evidence of alphabetic knowledge in writing: Connections to letter and word identification skills in preschool and kindergarten. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24, 133–150.
Authors: Victoria J. Molfese, Jennifer L. Beswick, Jill Jacobi-Vessels, Natalie E. Armstrong, Brittany L. Culver, Jamie M. White, Melissa C. Ferguson, Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, and Dennis L. Molfese