Effects of an Extensive Program for Stimulating Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

A training program consisting of metalinguistic games and exercises was developed with the aim of stimulating preschool children to discover and attend to the phonological structure of language. The program was evaluated in a longitudinal study in which 235 Danish preschool children in intact classes had daily training sessions over a period of 8 months. The children received no reading instruction prior to or during training. Pre- and posttest measures were also taken from a comparison group of 155 children. The program had no significant effect on functional linguistic skills, such as comprehension of oral instructions, or vocabulary. It did not affect the informal learning of letter names. But it did affect metalinguistic skills: Small but significant effects were observed on rhyming tasks and on tasks involving word and syllable manipulation. And on tasks requiring phoneme segmentation, the effect was dramatic. Apparently, phonemic awareness can be developed among preschool children outside the context of the acquisition of an alphabetic writing system. However, explicit instruction seems to be required. It was also demonstrated that preschool training in phonological awareness can have a facilitating effect on subsequent reading and spelling acquisition. The positive effect persisted until Grade 2.