The development of phonological awareness among preschoolers

The phonological awareness (PA) skills represent a major milestone in the development of reading abilities for preschool children. The purpose of this research study was to examine the developmental trajectories of preschoolers’ PA. A related purpose was to explore gender differences in PA. Participants in this study were 767 preschool children (336 males and 431 females) with 249 children in KG1 and 518 children in KG2. These children were randomly selected from a pool of 16 private preschools across the capital of Oman, Muscat. A battery of PA tasks were adapted from the Phonological Awareness Test-Second Edition (PAT-2; [Robertson, C., & Salter, W. (2007). The phonological awareness test 2 (PAT 2). Austin, TX: PRO-ED.]) and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing – Second Edition (CTOPP-2; [Wagner, R., Torgesen, J., Rashotte, C., & Pearson, N. (2012). Comprehensive test of phonological processing (2nd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.]). The PA tasks consisted of 19 subtests: rhyming discrimination, rhyming production, syllables segmentation, phoneme segmentation, isolation (firs, medial, and last sound), compound words deletion and phonemes deletion, sound matching (first and last sound), blending words, memory for digits, nonword repetition, and blending nonwords. The results of the study using multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed a significant main effect of the grade level, Wilks’ lambda [F(3,763) = 13.44, p < .001, η² = .29, gender, F(1,763) = 1.96, p < .001, η² = .06], while the interaction (grade level X gender) was not significant.