An Investigation into Teaching Phonemic Awareness through Shared Reading and Writing Teresa A. Ukrainetz, Margaret H. Cooney, Sarah K. Dyer, Aimee J. Kysar and Trina J. Harris University of Wyoming This study examined teaching phonemic awareness by embedding sound talk within meaningful literacy experiences of shared reading and writing. Small groups of 5 and 6-year-old children were seen three times a week for seven weeks. Four phonemic awareness tasks – first and last sound identification, sound segmentation and deletion – were targeted in each session, with scaffolding fitting task difficulty and individual child ability. Results showed that such naturalistic instruction lead to gains in phonemic awareness compared to a no-treatment control group for both the treatment group as a whole and for a subgroup of children with lower literacy levels. Treatment-specific improvement was evident in three of the four phonemic awareness tasks: first sound identifi- cation, last sound identification, and sound segmentation. Additional observa- tions of language and literacy benefits for this emergent literacy approach were also identified. Phonemic awareness, or the awareness of the sound structure of words, is a metalinguistic skill important to the successful acquisition of reading and writing. Controlled studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of phonemic awareness training in individual and classroom situations for typically developing children and children with language impairments (for example, Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991; Fox & Routh, 1975, 1983; Gillon, 2000; van Kleeck, Gillam, & McFadden, 1998). Training procedures have followed devel- opmentally sequenced mastery of skills in contrived activities apart from reading and writing contexts. While there has been strong support for explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness (NICHD, 2000), there has been little investi- This work was supported by a Faculty Grant-in-aid from the University of Wyoming. Direct all correspondence to: Teresa Ukrainetz, Ph.D., Div. of Communication Disorders, P.O. Box 3311, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071-3311; Phone: (307) 766-5576; E-mail: tukraine@uwyo.edu. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15, No. 3, 331–355 (2000) © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. ISSN: 0885-2006 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 331