IMPROVING THE GENERALIZATION OF SOUND SYMBOL KNOWLEDGE - TEACHING SPELLING TO KINDERGARTEN-CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES

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.