DEVELOPING PHONEME AWARENESS THROUGH ALPHABET BOOKS

Previous research suggests that children who are successful in phoneme awareness tasks also have high levels of alphabet knowledge. One conn ection between the two might be alphabet books. Such books typically i nclude both letter-name information and phonological information about initial sounds ('B is for bear'). It may be that children who are rea d alphabet books, and thus understand how B is for bear, will learn bo th letter names and be able to isolate phonemes. To examine this, we g ave three treatments to different groups of prekindergarteners. In the first group, the teacher read conventional alphabet books. In the sec ond, the teacher read books chosen to contain the letter names only, w ithout example words to demonstrate sound values. The third group, a c ontrol, read only storybooks. We found that ail groups gained in print concept and letter knowledge over the course of the study. The conven tional alphabet group made significantly greater gains in phoneme awar eness than the group that read books about letters without example wor ds, suggesting that conventional alphabet books may be one route to th e development of phoneme awareness.