Developing first graders' phonemic awareness, word identification and spelling: A comparison of two contemporary phonic instructional approaches

This exploratory study compared the effectiveness of two contemporary phoni c approaches (word box instruction and word sort instruction) on children's phonemic awareness, word identification, and spelling performance. Forty-t wo first-grade children who were randomly selected to participate in three conditions: word box instruction, word sort instruction, and traditional in struction. The experimental conditions lasted approximately three months an d consisted of daily 20 minute phonics instruction sessions. Children were administered five posttest measures: phonemic blending, phonemic segmentati on, pseudo-word naming, word identification, and spelling. MANOVA and univa riate analyses revealed that type of phonic instruction significantly discr iminated among the groups on posttest measures. Post hoc analyses indicated that there were significant differences favoring (1) word box instruction group over the traditional group on performance on all posttest measures ex cept spelling, and (2) word sort group over control on phonemic segmentatio n, word identification and spelling performance. No significant differences existed between the two experimental conditions on any measure.