Does systematic invented spelling help at-risk urban kindergarten students?

摘要

Hatcher, Hulme, and Ellis (1994) hypothesized that phonemic awareness programs would be more effective if they were linked explicitly to an early reading curriculum. This study was designed to determine whether supplementing a commercial reading and phonemic awareness curriculum with an experimental spelling program would improve the phonemic awareness, word identification, and spelling of at-risk kindergarten students. Two kindergarten teachers in an inadequately performing urban school implemented the experimental intervention while two of their colleagues served as contrasts. Results indicated that the spelling intervention produced highly significant gains in identifying sight words. Furthermore, the lowest performing experimental students made 50% greater gains than contrast counterparts on identifying lower case letters, identifying sight words, identifying CVC words, and spelling CVC words.