Effects of Three Orthographic/Phonological Units on First-Grade Reading

Abstract

This investigation examined whether instruction at the onset—rime level (e.g., "b—at") facilitates first graders' accuracy in word reading more than instruction at the whole word-level (“bat”) or phoneme level (“b—a—t”). Forty-eight first graders were randomly assigned to phoneme, onset—rime, whole-word, or unseen control (receiving whole-language instruction in the classroom) groups and trained with individual cardboard letter sets in 15 twenty-minute sessions over a 6-week period. Groups were comparable on pretests of intellectual ability, phonemic segmentation, reading achievement, and ability to read 40 regular and 20 exception words. On the posttest of these 60 words, the phoneme and onset-rime groups were significantly more accurate than the whole-word groups, and there was a tendency for the onset—rime group to outperform the other three groups. Moreover, there was a tendency for phoneme students to be more accurate on regular words and onset—rime students to be more accurate on exception words.