Davis, C., Morgan,S., & Torgesen, J. (1992). Effects of two types of phonological awareness training on word learning in kindergarten children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 364-370. Description of subjects   Forty-eight kindergarten students from seven elementary schools participated in this study. The schools the children attended were serving students from predominantly working class families.   The 48 subjects were chosen from a pool of 143 children. Students who scored between the 15th and 50th percentile and who had positive teacher recommendations were selected to participate in this study. Description of methodology   The purpose of this study was to evaluate two oral-language programs that focused on phonological awareness and word learning. The children were divided into three groups. One of the experimental groups participated in phonological awareness training that consisted of analysis and synthesis (segmenting & blending) activities. The second experimental group received instruction in blending activities only. The control group worked on language-experience activities.   Students were pretested on the following measures: phoneme-segmentation test, phoneme-blending test, measure of alphabetic reading (Word Analysis subtest from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test), and general verbal ability (Vocabulary subtest from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition). The posttest measures included the phoneme-segmentation test, phoneme-blending test, and a reading analogue task. The pretest and posttest measures were individually administered. Summary of findings   Results showed that the children who received the blending/segmenting training significantly improved their skills in segmenting words into phonemes. The blending/segmenting subjects generalized their phonological awareness skills, which resulted in learning to read new words. The researchers suggested that "the training program might have proceeded more smoothly if the tasks had been introduced in the opposite order. The researchers intend to revise the activities so that children will become familiar with and successful at performing synthetic activities with each word set before they engage in analytic tasks" (p. 369). In conclusion, the results suggested that "as long as phonological awareness is taught as a prereading, oral-language skill, it appears useful to include both types of tasks in the training exercises" (p. 369).