The Effects of Advanced Phonemic Awareness Instruction in First Grade

Young students need to develop phonemic awareness, the ability to manipulate sounds in words, to learn to read. Although there is consensus about the importance of phonemic awareness instruction, there are questions about the role of teaching advanced phonemic awareness. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of teaching advanced phonemic awareness, using the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness curriculum, on first-grade students’ literacy and reading outcomes. We randomly assigned 13 schools in a midsize district to treatment and control conditions. Treatment teachers (n=26) implemented the Heggerty curriculum for 10–15 minutes per day during whole-class instruction for 35 weeks, and control teachers (n=20) continued with business-as-usual instruction. We found that advanced phonemic awareness instruction had statistically significant effects on a proximal measure of phonemic awareness but not on near-transfer measures of word reading or a far-transfer measure of oral reading fluency.