The structure and development of phonological awareness : a guide for finding more effective training methods

textThis study was conducted to examine methods for optimizing phonological awareness training using its natural development as a guide. The development and structure of phonological awareness was determined through the analysis of a questionnaire, which showed that phoneme identity ability was necessary but not sufficient for phoneme segmentation ability. This finding suggested that training identity skills first could lead to more efficient training of segmentation skills. The results indicated that identity training did decrease the number of trials spent training segmentation, but the total trials spent in training for identity followed by segmentation was more than segmentation training alone. However, many of the children did not reach criterion before they reached the maximum number of trials. The presence of identity ability generally led to more efficient segmentation training, but there was inadequate evidence to support the position that segmentation instruction was facilitated by training identity first.Psycholog