Immediate and Delayed Effects of Invented Writing Intervention in Preschool

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of a 10-week invented writing programme with 5-year-old preschoolers. Focus is on the children's phoneme awareness, spelling and reading.

The results show that the children in the experimental group performed better than the control group on the two post-tests. The children in the experimental group were better at spelling orthographically challenging words compared with the children in the control group. The results also show that the invented writing programme had a significant effect on the children's phoneme awareness, spelling and reading in the test carried out immediately after the end of the programme. When the children were tested six months after starting school, the effects of the programme were still present, but to a lesser extent.

The study included 105 5-year-old children from 12 preschools. The preschools were randomly assigned to two groups consisting of an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group consisting of 40 children received training in invented writing. The control group consisted of 65 children who followed the ordinary preschool programme.

The training sessions focussed on invented writing as an explorative activity both individually and in groups. The activities entailed that the children had to explore the sound-text relationship through writing. Each training session lasted around 20 minutes and sessions were held four times a week for a 10-week period. The training was conducted by the children's teachers and student teachers under the supervision of the teachers.

The children were tested in skills within phoneme awareness, spelling and reading before the programme, immediately after the programme around eight weeks prior to starting school, and again six months after starting school.

Hofslundsengen, H., Hagtvet, B. E., & Gustafsson, J. (2016). Immediate and Delayed Effects of Invented Writing Intervention in Preschool. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29(7), 1473-1495.