Phonological awareness in kindergarten: a field study in Luxembourgish schools

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of a phonological awareness training program in the specific context of the Luxembourgish educational system. The intervention was run by the kindergarten teachers in their classes with minimal external supervision. Forty-one classes of the area around Luxembourg City participated in the study. One hundred and fifty children from 20 kindergarten classes were part of the training group and 157 children from 21 classes formed the control group. At the end of kindergarten, clear training effects were observed for all phonological awareness tasks, except for the highly demanding phoneme deletion task. After 6 months of reading and writing instruction in first grade, no training effects were found in a pseudoword spelling task for the entire training group. Only at-risk children, which had the lowest performance on preschool phonological awareness measures, showed significant training effects. We conclude that early phonological awareness training may be profitably incorporated in kindergarten classroom activities, particularly for at-risk pupils, even when the language characteristics and teaching methods already concur in facilitating the understanding of the alphabetic principle.Résumé L'objectif de la présente étude était d'évaluer l'effet d'un entraînement de la conscience phonologique dans le contexte particulier du système scolaire luxembourgeois. L'intervention a été menée par les enseignants préscolaires, dans leurs classes, et avec une supervision externe minimale. Quarante et une classes situées dans les communes adjacentes à la ville de Luxembourg ont participé. Cent cinquante enfants (20 classes) formaient le groupe d'entraînement et 157 enfants (21 classes) le groupe contrôle. A la fin de l'année des effets d'entraînements clairs ont été Eur

Effects of an Early Literacy Intervention for Linguistically Diverse Children: A Quasi-Experimental Study

“…Thus, early interventions might show larger effects in such study populations. Our results also contrast with those of an earlier study from Luxembourg that did not find transfer effects of a phonological awareness intervention in Luxembourgish to spelling in German with a random sample of linguistically diverse children ( Bodé and Content, 2011 ). Notably, that study used the same HLL training program as Pfost et al (2019) but did not include activities to foster letter-sound knowledge.…”

“…Program development was guided by the Simple View of Reading theoretical framework ( Gough and Tunmer, 1986 ) and based on previous longitudinal and intervention studies suggesting a causal link between phonological awareness and letter-knowledge as prerequisites for reading and spelling across orthographies ( Melby-Lervåg et al, 2012 ). The LALA program differs from previous intervention studies from Germany and Luxembourg, which have almost exclusively focused on exploring the effectiveness of the German training program HLL (e.g., Schneider et al, 1997 , 2000 ; Plume and Schneider, 2004 ; Bodé and Content, 2011 ; Pfost et al, 2019 ) that was originally developed within a monolingual orientation ( Lundberg et al, 1988 ). Of particular relevance to this study is that in linguistically diverse students a “traditional” phonics-based instructional approach often may require adaptations, and phonological awareness and letter-knowledge should be taught within a broad language curriculum ( Stuart, 1999 , 2004 ).…”

“…It also provides converging evidence that it is possible to nest an early literacy intervention that relies on teacher-led learning methods within a play-based and holistic approach to learning context. Previous studies have shown that kindergarten teachers can be reluctant to implement structured phoneme analyses activities and to formally teach letter sounds ( Schneider et al, 2000 ; Yeh, 2003 ; Bodé and Content, 2011 ). This was not the case in our study, which is encouraging.…”

“…While some positive effects have been reported in early literacy intervention studies from Germany, most have explored the same training program (i.e., HLL) that starts with more general listening and language games on phrase and word level, before moving on to phonological awareness activities on syllable, onset-rime and finally phoneme level that may be supplemented with letter-knowledge training. Studies have shown that teachers are likely to omit the crucial phoneme-level activities of the HLL intervention because they either run out of time or are unfamiliar with the structured exercises at the phoneme-level and encounter difficulties when introducing those in their classrooms ( Schneider et al, 1997 ; Bodé and Content, 2011 ).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only one study has explored the effects of a phonological awareness training in Luxembourgish on the development of literacy skill in German. In their study, Bodé and Content (2011) administered a Luxembourgish adapted version of the phonological awareness training (without letter-knowledge instruction) used in studies from Germany (HLL, Schneider et al, 1997 ) to linguistically diverse children in Luxembourg. For a random sample of kindergarten children, intervention effects were found on a number of phonological awareness tasks in Luxembourgish, but gains did not generalize to letter-knowledge and spelling in German in Grade 1.…”