Effects of phonemic awareness instruction on the encoding skills of children with severe speech impairment

Purpose: To examine the effects of phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonemic awareness instruction on the encoding abilities of three pre-reading children with severe speech impairment (SSI). Method: Using a single subject multiple baseline design across behaviours and participants, children received phoneme-grapheme awareness instruction followed by instruction in segmenting, manipulating, and encoding consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pseudowords. Results: Generalization occurred to encoding of novel CVC pseudo- and real words for two of the three participants. Conclusions: Results suggest that phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonemic awareness instruction is effective in developing encoding skills in children with SSI. Findings are consistent with those for other at-risk children.