Comparative effectiveness of phonological awareness and oral language intervention for children with low emergent literacy skills

This paper reports the results of an intervention aimed to develop language and phonological awareness skills in children with low emergent literacy skills. A group of 457 children (mean age 70.6 months) from a range of SES schools was screened using measures of rhyme and alphabet knowledge in their first few weeks of formal schooling. Of the original group 27% (N =125) were selected for further testing based on their scores on these assessment items. This group was assessed on expressive and receptive language, home literacy and parents’ education levels. This cohort of 125 children was divided into 2 groups: 96 were selected for intervention based on their language assessment, 29 were selected as an at-risk control. A further 31 children who were not at-risk were selected as class controls. The remainder of the original sample of 457 (N= 301) was also included in a post test of spelling accuracy. The experimental group of 96 children was randomly assigned to receive 8 hours of either language or phonological awareness intervention. Post test results demonstrated both intervention groups made significant gains on measures of encoding (spelling) compared to the class at-risk control group with the phonological awareness group showing an advantage over the language group. Intervention targeting both language and phonological awareness skills are both effective in countering the effects of low emergent literacy skills.