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

Abstract

This exploratory study compared the effectiveness of two contemporary phonic approaches (word box instruction and word sort instruction) on children's phonemic awareness, word identification, and spelling performance. Forty‐two first‐grade children who were randomly selected to participate in three conditions: word box instruction, word sort instruction, and traditional instruction. The experimental conditions lasted approximately three months and consisted of daily 20 minute phonics instruction sessions. Children were administered five posttest measures: phonemic blending, phonemic segmentation, pseudo‐word naming, word identification, and spelling. MANO VA and univariate analyses revealed that type of phonic instruction significantly discriminated 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 except spelling, and (2) word sort group over control on phonemic segmentation, word identification and spelling performance. No significant differences existed between the two experimental conditions on any measure.