A school-based phonological awareness intervention for struggling readers in early French immersion Nancy Wise 1 • Nadia D’Angelo 1 • Xi Chen 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract The current intervention study investigated the sustained effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the reading development of 16 children in French immersion who were identified as at-risk readers based on grade 1 English measures. The intervention program provided children from three cohorts with supplemental reading in small groups on a withdrawal basis. Children in the experimental group (n = 5) received English phonological awareness training in combination with letter-sound correspondence instruction twice per week for 18 consecutive weeks, while those in the control condition (n = 7) engaged in English vocabulary-building activities. Significant gains were made after the training and maintained for 2 years on both French phonological awareness and French word reading skills for the experimental group. Results suggest that a phonologically based intervention in English can effectively address phonological awareness def- icits and facilitate reading acquisition for French immersion children who may be at-risk for later reading difficulties. Keywords Phonological awareness Á French immersion Á Early intervention Á Early identification Á Reading achievement Introduction Considerable research evidence has established that early identification and instructional intervention is key for the remediation and prevention of later reading difficulties (National Reading Panel, 2000; Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, 2000; Wise & Chen, 2009). In recent years, preliminary evidence has shown that children & Xi Chen xchenbumgardner@gmail.com 1 Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 123 Read Writ DOI 10.1007/s11145-015-9585-9