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Overview
Phonological Awareness Training is a general practice aimed at enhancing young children's phonological awareness abilities. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning. Phonological awareness is a precursor to reading. Phonological Awareness Training can involve various training activities that focus on teaching children to identify, detect, delete, segment, or blend segments of spoken words (i.e., words, syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes) or that focus on teaching children to detect, identify, or produce rhyme or alliteration. Three related What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) intervention reports review two curricula for phonological awareness—DaisyQuest and Sound Foundations —and a similar practice—Phonological Awareness Training plus Letter Knowledge Training.
Research
Four studies of Phonological Awareness Training met the WWC evidence standards and two studies met the WWC evidence standards with reservations.1 Together, these six studies included more than 100 preschool children from Washington State and the Pacific Northwest and examined intervention effects on children's phonological processing. Most of the children studied were from economically disadvantaged families, and about one-fourth of the children had developmental delays. This report focuses on immediate posttest findings to determine the effectiveness of the intervention.2
Effectiveness
Phonological Awareness Training was found to have positive effects on phonological processing.
| Oral language | Print knowledge | Phonological processing | Early reading/ writing | Cognition | Math | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | na | na | Positive effects | na | na | na |
| Improvement index3 | na | na | Average: +27 percentile points Range: -27 to +50 percentile points |
na | na | na |
| na = not applicable | ||||||
2 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
3 These numbers show the average and range of improvement indices for all findings across the studies.