EVALUATION OF A PROGRAM TO TEACH PHONEMIC AWARENESS TO YOUNG-CHILDREN - A 2-YEAR AND 3-YEAR FOLLOW-UP AND A NEW PRESCHOOL TRIAL

This article reports a follow-up study of children in Grades 1 and 2 who had been instructed in phonemic awareness in preschool. Compared to a control condition, the trained children were superior in nonword reading 2 and 3 years later and in reading comprehension at 3 years. Control children furnished a disproportionate number of readers dependent on sight word reading. The superiority of the experimental condition did not extend to measures of automaticity in reading. W. A. Hoover and P. B. Gough's (1990) ''simple view'' of reading (Reading Comprehension = Listening Comprehension X Decoding) was supported. In a supplementary experiment, preschool children were trained with the program by their regular teachers and showed greater progress in aspects of phonemic awareness than the control condition from the main experiment However, they did not gain as much as those in the more intensely trained experimental condition.