Brennan, F., & Ireson, J. (1997). Training phonological awareness: A study to evaluate the effects of a program of metalinguistic games in kindergarten. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9, 241-263. Description of subjects   Thirty-eight kindergarten children participated in this study. Their average age was five years four months. The subjects attended an American school located outside of London. Description of methodology   Three kindergarten classrooms were involved. Two classes consisted of the comparison groups and one class was the experimental group. The experimental group received a training program that focused on metalinguistic games. One of the comparison groups continued the regular kindergarten program. The other comparison group used the Success in Kindergarten Reading and Writing program.   The experimental group spent two hours every morning engaged in language activities. Fifteen to twenty minutes of the two hours were spent on metalinguistic games and activities. "The games followed the sequence of activities suggested by Frost & Leonnegaard (1995) and were divided up systematically, with the first three months spent developing phonological awareness above the level of the phoneme" (p. 246). The training started out focusing on listening games and games with sounds. Rhyming games were introduced after the students mastered the listening activities. The children progressed to sentences and word games. Syllabic intonation patterns and multi-syllabic word activities followed the word games. Finally, students concentrated on phonemes   The Success in Kindergarten Reading and Writing program is created to develop reading and writing skills in young children. Four modules are included in this program. This training focused on the picture/word association module and the alphabet module. "The main purpose of the picture/word association module is to provide opportunities for a child to volunteer his or her words associated with a variety of pictures" (p. 247). "The alphabet module, which is often combined with art work, introduces the child to the written symbols of the English language and the noting of selected sounds of letter combinations in ways which are correlated with language development" (p. 247).   The second comparison group used Letterland characters to learn letter names and sounds. Children were exposed to one new letter/sound each week. Language activities followed the new letter/sound a week. Summary of findings   The experimental group outperformed the two comparison groups in phonological awareness skills. "Both the training group and the Success in Kindergarten group scored significantly better than the control group on the vc/cvc word reading test, the teacher assessment of high frequency words, and on the spelling task. However the phonological training group did not perform significantly better than the Success in Kindergarten group" (p. 257). The authors concluded that phonological awareness training is most successful when it is a complement to the teaching of reading. Both the phonological awareness group and Success in Kindergarten groups reached early phonemic spelling compared to the control group.