In an earlier study (Tangel & Blachman, 1992), low-income, inner-city children who received 11 weeks of instruction in kindergarten in phoneme awareness produced invented spellings at the end of kindergarten that were rated developmentally superior to those of control children. The purpose of this study was to investigate the invented and standard spelling of these same children in February and May of first grade. During first grade, the treatment children participated in a reading program that continued to emphasize phoneme awareness and the alphabetic code. In February of first grade and May of first grade (the end of the second year of the study), treatment children significantly outperformed the control children on measures of invented and standard spelling. A reliable scoring system had been created to evaluate the invented spelling of the kindergarten children (Tangel & Blachman, 1992). For this study, the scoring system was expanded to evaluate later developing spelling patterns. As with the original scale, the expanded scale was found to be highly reliable using either correlation or percent of agreement. In addition, a reliable scoring system was developed to rate the developmental sophistication of responses (e.g., allowing partial credit for phonetically correct responses) on a measure of standard spelling.
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