Facilitating phonological awareness in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is evidence that awareness of phonology emerges in early childhood (Chaney, 1992), being exhibited by preschool and pre‐literate children, although rapid development can be seen in school age children. Most previous metaphonological facilitation studies have focused on school age children (Cunningham, 1990; Lie, 1991) while few others have studied young pre‐schoolers (Byrne & Fielding‐Barnsley, 1991). The present study investigated the effects of a short‐term facilitation programme aimed at increasing the phonological awareness of preschool, pre‐literate children between 3 1/2–4 1/2 years of age. Forty‐eight subjects were assessed both before and after a four‐week intervention phase on measures of metasyntactic ability, auditory memory, auditory discrimination and four measures of metaphonological ability. Following the pre‐intervention assessments subjects were allocated to one of three groups (groups A, B and C) each containing 16 subjects and matched for age, gender, social background and linguistic ability. Group A received a programme specifically designed to facilitate metaphonological abilities in eight half‐hour sessions. The first control group (Group B) received the same amount of input with a programme targeting semantics instead. Group C, the second control group, received no intervention.No statistically significant difference was found amongst groups A, B and C for any of the pre‐intervention assessment measures (p>0.0). The increase in mean combined metaphonological score from pre‐ to post‐intervention testing for Group A was significantly greater than for either Group B (p=0.0016) or Group C (p=0.0015), whereas the two control groups did not differ significantly from one another (p=0.6917). No significant difference was found amongst the three groups for any other measures (p>0.1).The results indicate that the metaphonological intervention programme significantly influenced the metaphonological abilities of 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children, whereas the control conditions had no such effect. It is suggested that a metaphonological intervention programme would benefit preschool, pre‐literate children in their preparation for school and their pursuit of reading readiness. Preschool children have disparate levels of metaphonological ability having had different metaphonological experiences. Not all children are equally ready to develop literacy skills when they start school. Children with poor phonological awareness, especially those with delayed or disordered language, are thought to be at risk of future reading difficulties (Schuele & Van Kleck, 1987) and would particularly benefit from preschool metaphonological intervention.