| As previous studies indicate, first grade students who have a strong knowledge of phonological awareness skills (blending and segmenting) are more likely to become proficient readers. One way to improve phonological awareness skills is by using a teaching strategy called classwide peer tutoring (CWPT). During CWPT, pairs of students work together to improve an area of weakness. The purpose of this study was to determine if a CWPT program called First Grade PALS could improve the phonological awareness of 15 first grade students with diverse abilities over the course of 11 weeks. The students were engaged in Sounds and Words routine of First Grade PALS for 15 minute sessions 3 times a week. The participants were paired together based on the results of their pretest scores. There were 3 instruments used to collect the data for this study. One source of data was pretest and posttest scores. The other 2 data sources were observational checklist and teacher's journal, which were qualitative in nature. The results of this study indicated that First Grade PALS is an effective supplemental strategy to improve phonological awareness. On average, the higher achieving students in the CWPT teams demonstrated more improvement than their lower achieving counterparts. The students were able to generalize what they learned in First Grade PALS to other content areas. |
