A study of the benefits of the intervention program for the systematic training of pro-reading skills in preschool children
Abstract
This study investigates the benefits of a short-term, relatively intensively implemented intervention programme aimed at enhancing the development of pre-reading skills (specifically phoneme awareness and letter knowledge) in the last year of kindergarten before the first year of elementary school. Sixty-nine children from four kindergartens were randomly assigned to three groups: pre-reading intervention group (resp. phoneme awareness and letter knowledge intervention), graphomotor skills intervention group, and no-training group.
Intervention programs were implemented as a 10-week training program in the frequency of 3 training lessons per week. The impact of each training condition for the development of phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and reading skills was assessed.
After the training we found a mild effect from the pre-reading intervention program for the development of word reading and whole word reading tasks (moderate values of Cohen's d), however the increase in word reading skills does not prove to be significantly better if compared to both control groups results.