The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme awareness kindergartners: A randomized-control-trial study

The goal of the present intervention research was to test whether guided invented spelling would

facilitate entry into reading for at-risk kindergarten children. The 56 participating children had poor

phoneme awareness, and as such, were at risk of having difficulty acquiring reading skills. Children

were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: invented spelling, phoneme

segmentation, or storybook reading. All children participated in 16 small group sessions over eight

weeks. In addition, children in the three training conditions received letter-knowledge training and

worked on the same 40 stimulus words that were created from an array of 14 letters. The findings

were clear: on pretest, there were no differences between the three conditions on measures of early

literacy and vocabulary, but, after training, invented spelling children learned to read more words

than did the other children. As expected, the phoneme-segmentation and invented-spelling children

were better on phoneme awareness than were the storybook-reading children. Most interesting,

however, both the invented spelling and the phoneme-segmentation children performed similarly on

phoneme awareness suggesting that the differential effect on learning to read was not due to

phoneme awareness per se. As such, the findings support the view that invented spelling is an

exploratory process that involves the integration of phoneme and orthographic representations. With

guidance and developmentally appropriate feedback, invented spelling provides a milieu for children

to explore the relation between oral language and written symbols that can facilitate their entry in

reading.