Phonological Awareness Treatment Effects for Children from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Abstract

This study investigated whether phonological awareness intervention is effective for children at risk when administered in a small group setting and whether such intervention is more effective following a period of language stimulation. A group of 20 children aged between 5;05 and 7;08 who attended a school in New Zealand with a government-defined low socioeconomic status participated in the study. These children displayed poor phonological awareness and weakness in some aspect of their spoken semantic and syntactic language development prior to intervention. The participants were randomly assigned to intervention groups. Group 1 received 16 hours of phonological awareness intervention, followed by 16 hours of language intervention, whereas Group 2 received the same interventions in the reverse order.The results indicated that the phonological awareness intervention implemented was effective in rapidly accelerating the participants' phonemeblending, segmentation, and manipulation skills and significantly improved their phonetic decoding ability. Both groups made comparable gains inphonological awareness and decoding ability regardless of whether they received the intervention first or following language intervention. The results suggested that for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with delays in aspect of their spoken language development, the standard classroom curriculum provides sufficient language enrichment to allow rapid, positive responses to a direct approach to phonological awareness intervention. It is not necessary for these children to receive additional language stimulation before they can benefit from phonological awareness instruction.