The effects of explicitly teaching and promoting phonemic awareness to senior kindergarten students at a compensatory education school.

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine various effects of explicitly teaching and promoting phonemic awareness. Forty-two senior kindergarten students participated in the study. The 21 students who made up the experimental group attended school Monday to Friday during the morning part of the day, and the control group, made up of 21 senior kindergarten students, attended school during the afternoon. Sixteen of the 42 participants were second language speakers of English. The mean age was 52.4 months. A pretest of phonemic awareness was administered to all participants. After the pretest, the experimental group were explicitly taught a variety of phonemic awareness lessons over an eight-week-period while the control group only received their regular language instruction. Both groups were posttested. A One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed significant differences between group and pretest and posttest scores. One-way ANOVAs revealed no significant differences between the test scores of male and female participants, between a participant's birth quarter and their test scores, and the scores of those whose first language was English and those whose was not. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .C36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1101. Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005.