A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Contiguous, Graphemic and Phonological Interventions on Measures of Reading and Spelling Acquisition

Although research has established that phonological awareness is a predictor of future reading skill, the effects of variant vs. contiguous presentations of grapheme-phoneme correspondences as part of a teaching program have not been examined. A variant presentation is one in which there is a mismatch between the letter and sound or sound and letter correspondences and a contiguous representation is one in which there is a consistent match between the letter and sound information. Three 10 hour interventions were designed to determine the effects of two variant and one contiguous presentation of grapho-phonological information on five measures of reading and four measures of spelling.The Contiguous intervention class significantly (p<0.05) outperformed both the Grapheme and Phoneme intervention classes in reading regular words, and spelling exception words and nonwords. This suggests that the presentation of contiguous grapho-phonological information contributes to reading and spelling outcomes more than variant presentations