Phonological awareness instruction: A program training design for low-income children Kattia Muñoz*, M. Francisca Valenzuela, Pelusa Orellana Universidad de los Andes, Santiago, Chile ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 14 February 2016 Received in revised form 1 February 2017 Accepted 6 February 2017 Available online xxx Keywords: Phonological awareness Intervention strategies Coaching Teachers’ practices ABSTRACT This study describes the implementation of a program to enhance phonological awareness in Kindergarten Chilean students from a low-income background. The intervention included a special professional development course designed for teachers, to help them reflect and modify their practices, where classroom observations and feedback on instruction became a fundamental basis of the intervention. Children were assessed before and after the interventions, and results were compared with those of a control group. Results reflected how teachers’ practices are a fundamental key to understanding children outcomes, and that immediate feedback is fundamental for instructional change that favors learning. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Lack of adequate development of literacy skills is one of the main concerns of education worldwide (Lundenberg, Larman, & Strid, 2012). The demand for more sophisticated reading comprehension skills is fundamental in a society that becomes more dependent on information processing. Among reading sub processes, phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills for conventional literacy. Phonological awareness develops essentially during the preschool years (Phillips, Clancy-Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008), and it contributes to the decoding process. It is therefore essential that it should be mostly developed in early childhood, through practice and training (Lundenberg et al., 2012). Although this is a crucial skill, according to Phillips et al. (2008), many early childhood educators lack of a robust preparation in this area; and therefore cannot provide good quality support to develop it among young children in a timely manner. Early childhood education has been identified as a period of great importance to work on phonological tasks ([69_TD$DIFF]Molfase et al., 2006), emphasizing that it requires encouraging the development of skills that will allow children to be better prepared to face more complex literacy demands such as decoding, vocabulary processing, and comprehension. Evidence has demonstrated that children entering Kindergarten, who are capable of segmenting words into phonemes or sounds, which constitute the basis of phonological awareness, show greater amounts of progress in reading development in the first years of schooling than those who do not (Villalón, 2008). On the other hand, children with insufficient experience hearing and manipulating sounds in words lag behind on reading comprehension ability well into the middle and high school years (Melby-Lervag, Lyser, & Hulme, 2012). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: kmunoz@uandes.cl (K. Muñoz). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.02.003 0883-0355/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. International Journal of Educational Research xxx (2016) xxx–xxx G Model JIJER 1222 No. of Pages 12 Please cite this article in press as: K. Muñoz, et al., Phonological awareness instruction: A program training design for low- income children, International Journal of Educational Research (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.02.003 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures