The purpose of this study was to determine if children trained in phoneme awareness in kindergarten would differ in invented spelling from children who did not have this training. A reliable scoring system was created to evaluate the invented spelling of the kindergarten children. The children were selected from 18, all-day kindergartens in four, demographically comparable low-income, inner-city schools. Prior to the intervention, the 77 treatment children and the 72 control children did not differ in age, sex, race, PPVT-R, phoneme segmentation, letter name and letter sound knowledge, or word recognition. During March, April, and May of the kindergarten year, treatment children participated in an 11-week phoneme awareness intervention that included instruction in letter names and sounds. After the intervention, the treatment children significantly outperformed the control children in phoneme segmentation, letter name and sound knowledge, and reading phonetically regular words and nonwords. Of primary interest in this study is the fact that the treatment children produced invented spellings that were rated developmentally superior to those of the control children. The 7-point scale created for scoring the developmental spelling test was found to be highly reliable using either correlation (r= .98) or percent of agreement (93%).Interest in the beginning stages of literacy development has focused attention on young children's early attempts to write. Of particular interest to researchers and practitioners are the very early invented spellings created by young children prior to formal reading and spelling instruction. Our ability to understand these invented spellings was made possible by the work of linguist Charles Read. In his original study in 1971, Read reported on the invented spellings he observed in a group of 20 Boston preschool children. In Read's analysis, children's knowledge of English phonology (the sound system of English) was related to their ability to deduce the alphabetic principle. This principle "rests on an awareness of the inter-
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234Journal of Reading Behavior nal phonological (and morphophonological) structure of words that the alphabet represents" (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989, p. 1). When a child becomes aware of the fact that a word has an internal structure, he or she can begin to use alphabetic transcription. The creation of invented or unconventional spellings by young children is an indication that children have started to develop an awareness of the internal structure of words-specifically, an awareness of the phonemic segments (sounds) represented by an alphabet.Read's original analysis sparked a series of studies seeking both to confirm and to extend his work (Beers, Beers, & Grant, 1977;Beers & Henderson, 1977;Bissex, 1980; Burns & Richgels, 1989;Chomsky, 1971Chomsky, , 1979Ehri & Wilce, 1986Harste & Burke, 1980;Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984;Liberman, Rubin, Duques, & Carlisle, 1985;Mann, Tobin, & Wilson, 1987;Morris & Perney, 1984;Zutell, 1980). As a resu...
