UC Riverside

This study examined the effects of a phonological awareness intervention for at-risk kindergarten and first grade students. The intervention consisted of five phonological awareness activities and one vocabulary activity and occurred three times per week for 30 minutes. The researcher evaluated the kindergarten students' phonemic awareness screening data and first grade students' phonics screening data using an ANCOVA design, using fall phonemic awareness scores as the covariate. For kindergarten students, there was not a significant effect on phonemic awareness or alphabetic principle skills. For first grade students, there was not a significant effect on phonics skills, but there was a significant effect on oral reading fluency skills. The average rates of improvement between the kindergarten intervention and control groups were not significantly different for a measure of phonemic awareness. However, the average rates of improvement between the first grade intervention and control groups were significantly different for phonics. These results suggest that this intervention can be effective in increasing the reading fluency skills of first graders.