Re. Oconnor et Jr. Jenkins, IMPROVING THE GENERALIZATION OF SOUND SYMBOL KNOWLEDGE - TEACHING SPELLING TO KINDERGARTEN-CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES, The Journal of special education, 29(3), 1995, pp. 255-275
The purpose of this study was to test whether the application and tran
sfer of segmentation and letter knowledge to reading could be encourag
ed by teaching spelling alongside code-based reading instruction. We f
ormed five matched pairs of children with developmental delays based o
n their progress on kindergarten reading lessons in Reading Mastery I
(Engelmann & Bruner, 1988) and randomly assigned one of each pair to a
n experimental treatment of 20 ten-minute spelling lessons and one to
a reading control group that practiced reading the same words. Childre
n in the spelling treatment significantly improved their spelling and
word reading performance over the control group, but did not perform s
ignificantly better on a measure of phoneme segmentation. Our results
suggest that the children who practiced forming letter representations
of spoken words developed more complete generalizations of their curr
ent knowledge, which facilitated learning to read words.