Building upon Sound Foundations

Rebecca Carmichael and Kerry Hempenstall
RMIT University

Abstract
Phonological awareness has been acknowledged as an important predictor of, and influence upon, reading progress. This study offers an independent evaluation of the Sound Foundations phonological awareness program, and investigates the differential impact of session frequency on the acquisition of phonological awareness, phoneme identity training on phonological decoding ability, and the generalisation of taught phonological awareness skills to untaught phonological awareness and decoding tasks. Participants, part-way through their first year of formal education, were assigned to either a group that received the standard Sound Foundations program, a group that received the same Sound Foundations program more frequently over a shorter period, or a comparison group that did not participate in the Sound Foundations program.
Pre-test and post-test measures employed a number of relevant reading related measures, and the data were analysed using a priori orthogonal polynomial contrasts and Cohen’s d effect sizes. A positive linear trend was found on the CTOPP Phonological Awareness Score that indicated participation in the Sound Foundations program improved phonological awareness, and greater improvements were found when the program was delivered more frequently over a shorter intervention period. Statistically signifi cant changes in the phonological decoding abilities of participants in each group were found across time, however improvements in this ability were not statistically signifi cantly different between groups. The data also indicated that taught skills generalised to some areas of phonemic awareness, and not to others.