INVENTED SPELLING PROGRAMMES AND THE ACCESS TO THE ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE IN KINDERGARTEN

This study aims to understand the effects of two invented spelling programmes in the developmentof children’s invented spelling, namely to the phonetization of writing and to understand the correlationsbetween phonological awareness and knowledge of letters and the phonetization procedures. Fiftysixfive-year-old were divided into two experimental groups and one control group. In the pre and posttests,children’s spellings were accessed through pseudo-words that contained fricatives and stops workedduring the programmes and other non worked phonemes, both in initial and in final position. In between,G1 worked the grapho-phonetic correspondences of fricatives and G2 of stop consonants. Results showthat both experimental groups achieved greater progress in spelling than the control group with no statisticallysignificant differences between the experimental groups. In these groups the participants were ableto spell the worked and the non worked phonemes in initial and in final position correctly. In G1, statisticallysignificant differences were found, with better results in the phonetization of the worked fricativesin initial position than in final position. The results also indicated that the number of letters known in thepre-test has a significant correlation with the number of phonetizations in the post-test, whereas phonologicalawareness does not