Phonemic awareness and beginning reading and writing. (Connecting Classroom Practice and Research).

--Kamii & Manning

Using English-speaking American children, this study replicates parts of Vernon and Ferreiro's literacy study with Spanish-speaking children. Sixty-eight kindergartners from six classrooms received holistic reading and writing instruction as part of the kindergarten curriculum, including daily journal writing, demonstration writing, and shared reading. Phonemic awareness and phonics instruction were not taught in isolation. Researchers interviewed each child twice, on two consecutive days. A writing task was given on the first day, and two phonemic-segmentation tasks were given on the second day. During the writing task, children were asked to repeat word pairs ("ham" and "hamster," "butter" and "butterfly," "key" and "monkey," "gum" and "bubblegum"). The child was then asked to write down and read back the pairs, pointing to the letters written. Criteria used to group the responses into six categories were based on previous research, modified for English speakers. For the second interview, two oral segmentation tasks were given. Responses were video- and audiotaped. The first task used six pictures (a sofa, money, coffee, a taco, a tepee, a lady); the children were asked to segment each word in a guessing game. In order for the interviewer to guess what the picture was, children were asked to segment the word and provide "small bits" at a time. The second task consisted of the written-word assignment. Results indicate a strong relationship between a child's level of writing and his/her level of oral segmentation. The authors distinguish between the knowledge children construct about the nature of a writing system and their skills, such as visual and auditory discrimination, short-term visual memory, and phonological segmentation. While many researchers emphasize reading over writing, the authors advise shifting the focus of attention to children's writing.