In this article, Sofía Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro present the results of an experimental study that looks at the relationship between the development of phonological awareness and the development of writing in Spanish-speaking kindergartners. The results of this study speak to the ongoing controversy about approaches to early literacy instruction — that is, whether children's ability to segment words into phonemes (phonological awareness) is a prerequisite for learning how to read and write. These results show that phonological awareness is not an either/or phenomenon, but that it develops across levels and that this development is related to children's writing development. Vernon and Ferreiro discuss several important educational implications based on their findings: first, that children's ability to benefit from systematic phonics instruction depends on their level of writing development; and second, that encouraging children to write in kindergarten and first grade is an important way to stimulate the analysis of spoken words or other meaningful units.

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The main purposes of the research reported here were: () to examine the relationship between children's level of writing and phonological awareness and (2) to consider the physical presence of writing as an important variable in phonological awareness studies. We present the results of two different studies concerning phonological awareness in Spanish-speaking kindergarteners. Study 1 comprised a blending task (not previously reported) and two different segmentation tasks, which have previously been reported in Vernon and Ferreiro (1999) and Vernon (2002). The second study deals with a letter-identification task, which has not been discussed in previous papers, and two initial phoneme deletion tasks (Vernon, Calderon, & Castro, 2004; Vernon, 2002). Results for both studies show that in all the tasks, the children's level of writing explains most variance. The physical presence of writing is also an important variable for segmentation and deletion tasks.