Teaching phonological awareness to young children with learning disabilities.
This study examined the feasibility of teaching phonological manipulation skills to preschool children with disabilities. Forty-seven children, 4-6 years old, enrolled in a special education preschool, were randomly assigned to receive training in one of three categories of phonological tasks (rhyming, blending, and segmenting) or a control group. Results indicated that children were able to make significant progress in each experimental category, but that they demonstrated little or no generalization either within a category (e.g., from one type of blending task to another type of blending task) or between categories (e.g., from blending to segmenting). Although the children's level of cognitive development significantly predicted some learning outcomes, it did not appear to limit the learning of phonological tasks.
O'Connor
R E
RE
College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
Jenkins
J R
JR
Leicester
N
N
Slocum
T A
TA
D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D002658:Developmental Disabilities / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D007859:Learning Disabilities / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013663:Teaching