Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Education Specialties (Ph.D.)

Department

Education Specialties

First Advisor

Clare Waterman

Second Advisor

Ekaterina Midgette

Abstract

Two methods of instruction for blending and segmenting eight vowel-consonant words were compared to examine whether instruction that referenced printed words was beneficial during the initial stages of phonemic awareness instruction. Preschool children included in the study (N = 30, M = 4.4 years) could not fully segment any of the words and did not know the sounds of more than four of the nine included letters (M = 1.0 letter sound). Children were randomly assigned to either instruction that mapped the segmented and blended sounds in spoken words to the letters in printed words or similar oral-only instruction that mapped the sounds to generic symbols. Letters in printed words were referenced but not manipulated during the instruction with printed words. Children participated in three sessions of individual instruction that focused on demonstrating the reversibility of blending and segmenting the sounds in the taught words. The vowel-consonant words up, at, it, us, if, off, on, and in were taught because vowel-consonant words have been identified as the easiest to blend and segment. The combined groups blended 79% of the taught words and segmented 59% of the sounds in the taught words. Four regression analyses were used to compare the groups’ posttest scores for blending and segmenting the taught and untaught words. After controlling for age and pretest letter names, letter sounds, and phonemic awareness, children taught with printed words segmented more sounds in the taught words, but no significant differences were identified for the other three outcomes. Independent-sample t tests also indicated that instruction with printed words was more effective than oral-only instruction for the subgroup of children who neither segmented any sounds nor produced any letter sounds at pretest for the outcome of segmenting taught words (Cohen’s d = 1.6). In addition, children taught with printed words learned an average of 2.53 letter–sound correspondences during 40.5 minutes of phonemic awareness instruction. These results suggest that when phonemic awareness instruction with letters is conceptualized as referencing the letters in printed vowel-consonant words, this integration is beneficial at the earliest stages of instruction for children with low letter–sound knowledge and phonemic awareness skills.

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