An investigation into teaching phonemic awareness through shared reading and writing

This study examined teaching phonemic awareness by embedding sound talk wit hin meaningful literacy experiences of shared reading and writing. Small gr oups of 5 and 6-year-old children were seen three times a week for seven we eks. Four phonemic awareness tasks - first and last sound identification, s ound segmentation and deletion - were targeted in each session, with scaffo lding fitting task difficulty and individual child ability. Results showed that such naturalistic instruction lead to gains in phonemic awareness comp ared to a no-treatment control group for both the treatment group as a whol e and for a subgroup of children with lower literacy levels. Treatment-spec ific improvement was evident in three of the four phonemic awareness tasks: first sound identification, last sound identification, and sound segmentat ion. Additional observations of language and literacy benefits for this eme rgent literacy approach were also identified.