Unpacking Phonological Awareness: Comparing Treatment Outcomes for Low-skilled Kindergarten Children

A study explored the construct of phonological awareness by examining the effects of different instructional treatments on the development of generalized phonological skills, reading, and spelling. The effect of phonological instruction with kindergarten children who might be expected to have more than average difficulty learning to read in first grade was also tested. Subjects, 88 kindergarten children, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. One treatment taught only auditory blending and segmenting with limited letter-sound correspondences, and the other a more global array of phonological tasks, also with limited letter-sound correspondences. Treatment effects were compared with two control conditions: letter-sound only, or no treatment. Results suggest that both types of metaphonological instruction improved phonological abilities and transferred to reading and spelling analo