Phonological awareness training with articulation promotes early reading development

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of Fonomix, a Swedish intervention aimed at phonological ability and articulation, on children's phonological awareness and reading skills in Swedish preschool class. The research questions are: (1) What effects did the intervention have on letter and sound knowledge as well as word decoding (limited to the letter-sound combinations included in the intervention programme)? (2) What transfer effects did the intervention have on phonological awareness and word decoding when all sound and letters were included? (3) What were the effects for children at risk of reading difficulties compared with children who followed the normal reading development?

Based on their pre-reading skills, the children in both the experiment group and the comparison group were divided into sub-groups: children at risk of reading difficulties and children with normal reading development. The results showed greater progress measured by tests of children in the experiment group; both for children at risk of reading difficulties and for children with normal reading development, than the comparison group. These positive results applied both to the sounds and words included in the intervention and to new sounds and words not included in the intervention. According to the authors, this finding indicates that the effects of the intervention are transferable; i.e. training Fonomix's specific letter and sound combinations also helps decode other letters and sounds. At the follow-up test six months after the intervention was completed, the authors found that the effects of the intervention had been maintained, and the experiment group's development was more pronounced than that of the comparison group.

The effects of the Fonomix method on children in Swedish preschool class were explored through a longitudinal intervention study, in which a total of 69 children from two schools participated, divided into an experiment group of 39 children and a comparison group of 30 children.
The Fonomix intervention consisted of phonological training with focus on articulation. The training material contained eight letter-sound combinations with associated articulation. The articulation was illustrated with pictures of mouths and supplemented by exercises in front of a mirror. The intervention lasted around 45 hours spread throughout the school year. The comparison group followed material called Trulle based on rhyming, sentences, words, syllables and sounds. The group also used material designed by their own teachers, where the children played with the language through "listening games", for example. The comparison group spent a total of around 45 hours on their training, corresponding to the time spent on the Fonomix intervention by the experiment group. In order to test the effects of the intervention, the children's pre-reading skills were tested individually before the intervention started, mid-term, immediately after the end of the intervention and a follow-up six months after the intervention was completed.

Fälth, L., Gustafson, S., & Svensson, I. (2017). Phonological awareness training with articulation promotes early reading development. Education, 137(3), 261-276.