Acquisition of Letter Naming Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, and Spelling Knowledge of Kindergarten Children at Risk for Learning to Read

Abstract

This study measures letter naming, phonological awareness, and spelling knowledge in 2,100 kindergarten students attending 63 schools within a large, urban school district. Students were assessed across December, February, and May of the kindergarten year. Results found that, by May, 71.8% of students had attained full letter naming knowledge. Phonological awareness emerged more slowly with 48% of students able to reliably segment and blend phonemes in words. Spelling development, a measure of phonics knowledge, found that, by May, 71.8% of students were in the partial-alphabetic phase. A series of regression analyses revealed that by the end of kindergarten both letter naming and phonological awareness were significant predictors of spelling knowledge (b = .332 and .518 for LK and PA, resp.), explaining 52.7% of the variance.