Enhancing early literacy skills of pre-kindergarteners with histories of expressive phonological impairments: A preliminary study

Seven boys who had received intervention for highly unintelligible speech were tested for metaphonological awareness skills and alphabetic knowledge at the beginning of the summer prior to their entering kindergarten. Five of these boys participated in 12 small-group [2-hour] sessions that incorporated lessons from a comprehensive multisensory early literacy program. Two of the seven boys were not able to participate in the sessions because of summer activity conflicts. Post-treatment scores were compared with pre-treatment scores for each of the boys and for the two groups. Results indicated that the children in the treatment group made substantially greater gains on tasks measuring metaphonological awareness skills and alphabetic principle knowledge during the 6-weeks period than the boys who did not receive services.