Writing in kindergarten teaches phonological awareness and spelling

This study tested the effects of using writing with invented spelling as a new training model for teaching phonological awareness and spelling in kindergarten. Unlike other studies which have used invented spelling to evaluate children's understanding of the phonetic structure of words, the purpose of this study was to use invented spelling as the method of training.; The intervention was implemented with two cohorts of kindergarteners in successive years. There were 33 children from an urban public school in the first cohort and 32 in the second. Children from other classes in the same school served as a comparison group. The guiding question for the study was: Do the children receiving the writing intervention make more gains in phonological awareness and spelling than those in a comparison classroom? Training was provided by the classroom teacher and the aide as part of the regular literacy curriculum. The children in the comparison kindergarten also wrote regularly but were required to use conventional spelling.; Two types of analysis were performed. Analysis of variance were used to seek group differences in levels of phonological awareness, letter identification, and spelling. In addition, the spelling displayed in writing samples collected over the course of the intervention from children who differed in spelling ability at post-test was analyzed quantitatively.; Children in the Intervention Group made significantly greater gains on five out of seven sub-tests: Letter Identification, Matching Rhyme, Blending Sounds, Segmenting Sounds, and Spelling. These results suggest that the attention to sounds in words required for invented spelling, along with direct teaching of letter names and spelling of high frequency words, provided children with access to greater phonemic segmentation skill. This skill enables children to perform tasks of rhyming, blending and segmenting.; Analysis of spelling suggested that children who produced the most writing, including both invented and conventionally spelled words, also became the best spellers.