This study was designed to research the difference in parental training in phonemic awareness on the achievements of their children who had been identified as struggling readers. Subjects were children from ten kindergarten and first grade classrooms residing in federally subsidized housing. An experimental group (the phonemic awareness trained group) and a control group (the read aloud group) attended 10-week training. Groups were determined by random assignment. Experimental group parents were trained to administer phonemic awareness instruction daily to their children. Results of this study did not support the hypothesis that parental tutoring in phonemic awareness statistically improves performance on phonologically based assessments for emergent readers. Data on phoneme segmentation fluency and nonsense word fluency were collected from 10 students, five in the phonemic awareness trained group and five in the read aloud trained group. There was not a statistically significant difference (p < .05) on the posttest scores of the two groups. The p-value was at .295, which is more than the set value .05.

Due to the wide dispersion of scores on the posttest measures and the small sample size of the study, outcomes of the two treatments were then compared using the Mann-Whitney U test. This is a non-parametric, two-sample, rank-sum test. The phoneme segmentation fluency posttest verified the calculated value of U as 7.5, which exceeded the critical value of U (2.0). Likewise, on the nonsense word fluency posttest, the calculated value of U was 10.50 which exceeded the critical value of U (2.). Results for both of these tests led the researcher to retain the hypothesis that parental training and implementation of phonemic awareness instruction for their child does not affect learning phonemic awareness. The researcher also discussed further research that is needed and implications for classroom teachers in the area of parental involvement in phonemic awareness training.