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A school-based phonological awareness intervention for struggling readers in early French immersion

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Abstract

The current intervention study investigated the sustained effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the reading development of 16 children in French immersion who were identified as at-risk readers based on grade 1 English measures. The intervention program provided children from three cohorts with supplemental reading in small groups on a withdrawal basis. Children in the experimental group (n = 5) received English phonological awareness training in combination with letter-sound correspondence instruction twice per week for 18 consecutive weeks, while those in the control condition (n = 7) engaged in English vocabulary-building activities. Significant gains were made after the training and maintained for 2 years on both French phonological awareness and French word reading skills for the experimental group. Results suggest that a phonologically based intervention in English can effectively address phonological awareness deficits and facilitate reading acquisition for French immersion children who may be at-risk for later reading difficulties.

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Notes

  1. In order for children to be classified as English-speaking monolingual, parents had to indicate that English was spoken in the home environment 50 % of the time or more.

  2. Partial eta squared, ηρ², was used to report the effect size of significant ANOVA results (values greater than .50 = large). Similarly, Cohen’s d was used to compare effect sizes of t tests (values greater than .80 = large).

  3. Due to the small group size, equivalent non-parametric tests were calculated for each analysis. Mann–Whitney’s U, Kruskal–Wallis, Friedman, and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests confirmed our parametric results. .

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in this manuscript was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Insight Grant to the third author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Nancy Wise, Nadia D’Angelo & Xi Chen

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  1. Nancy Wise
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  2. Nadia D’Angelo
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  3. Xi Chen
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Correspondence to Xi Chen.

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Wise, N., D’Angelo, N. & Chen, X. A school-based phonological awareness intervention for struggling readers in early French immersion. Read Writ 29, 183–205 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9585-9

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