Thus, it appears that increased phoneme awareness had an impact on the
ability to read words on the Woodcock.
The means and standard deviations of the phonetically regular word
list raw scores are shown in Table IV. A Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance
(a one-way analysis of variance applied to the ranked scores) of the phonetically
regular word list scores also indicates significant differences
among the conditions, F (2, 86) = 11.97, p < .0001. Follow-up comparisons
indicate that the children in the treatment group (phoneme segmentation
training) have significantly higher ranks than both control I (language
activities group) and cofitrol group II (no intervention), and there is
no significant difference between the two control groups. These results
reflect the superior ability of the phoneme segmentation group to break
the alphabetic code. To read phonetically regular words, a child must be
aware that words can be broken into phonemes and that each phoneme
corresponds to a symbol(s) in our orthography. These data suggest that
the treatment group (phoneme segmentation training) is more able than
either control group to match the written symbols to the sound-segments
of the word.
The results of this study indicate that the methods used in the segmentation
intervention were successful in teaching kindergarten children
to segment one-, two-, and three-phoneme items as measured by the
phoneme segmentation test. Thus, we were able to demonstrate (as have
others, for example, Bradley and Bryant 1985; Fox and Routh 1984; Olofsson
and Lundberg 1983) that kindergarten children can be taught to segment
words and that this skill has an impact on some important aspects of
early reading. The increased ability in phoneme segmentation skills demonstrated
by the treatment group had a significant impact on aspects of
their early reading skills--specifically, reading phonetically regular
words and words on the Woodcock. The results also indicate that increasing
letter sound knowledge, in and of itself, is not sufficient to improve
phoneme segmentation skills, nor does it have an impact on reading as
measured by the WRMT Word Identification Subtest or the ability to read
a list of phonetically regular words. Furthermore, we were able to validate
a set of procedures that can be used with groups of kindergarten children
during a typical school day.