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Evidence of phonological awareness levels usually comes from English-speaking children. The evidence in Spanish is scarce. The present study examined the phonological awareness of syllables, onsets-rimes, and phonemes, extending the Treiman and Zukowski (1991) results to preliterate and literate Spanish-speaking children. The sample comprised preschoolers, kindergarteners and first-graders. Children found syllables easier than onset-rime units, and onset-rime units easier than phoneme units (Experiments 1 and 2). Preliterate children found ending units easier than beginning units. However, literate children were best at initial linguistic units, particularly initial syllables. Results on the phonological awareness task and on the masked priming lexical decision task support that the phonological awareness development is sensitive to the orthographic units used by children from the time they begin to read (Experiment 3). For all children, initial continuant consonants were easier than stop consonants.

Cooperative leaming (CL) is one potential form of classroom organization, witch is becoming more increasingly used among educators. This article revise Allport^s contact theory (1954/1962) to explain why CL methods have positive effects on intergroup and interracial relationships. Slavin's (1984) model is revised in order to identify critical elements of effective instruction that become satisfy by CL methods. In addition, the most researched CL methods are described and the main findings about the CL effects and the mechanisms that explain them are described, based on the revisión and meta-analysis studies.

The implications of these findings for early reading instruction and future research are discussed.

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