Graduate Program

School Psychology

Degree Name

Specialist in School Psychology

Semester of Degree Completion

2008

Thesis Director

Ronan Bernas

Thesis Committee Member

Assege HaileMariam

Thesis Committee Member

Christine McCormick

Abstract

Phonological awareness has received considerable recognition in the past few decades as a strong predictor of reading. Phonological awareness is the understanding that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. A wealth of studies has supported the predictive power of phonological awareness on reading achievement. However, research has been conflicted as to the best method to improve phonological awareness. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether or not two different phonological awareness techniques utilizing rhyme and alliteration were useful in the acquisition of phonological awareness in at - risk children attending a Head Start program. Neither the rhyming nor the alliteration condition resulted in statistically significant phonological awareness for the participants as measured by the Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDI) scores.

However, there were some encouraging trends as evidenced by the improvement or increase in phonological awareness skills based on the pre and post test IGDI scores. Specifically, the mean scores of the intervention groups increased much more than the mean score of the control group: The group mean difference from pre-to-posttest was + 2. 00 for Rhyming and + 3. 34 for Alliteration, compared to -.16 and +.16, respectively for the control group.

An in depth discussion comparing rhyming and alliteration instruction to phoneme segmentation and blending makes sense of results of the study. Possible limitations and ideas for future research are also presented.

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