Promoting Phonological Awareness in German:A Meta-Analysis

International meta-analyses show significant effects of phonological awareness training on the acquisition of written language. In the present meta-analysis of 27 primary studies the effects of phonological awareness on the early reading and writing skills are assessed in German. In general, we found higher effects for preschool training programs. However, preschool training did not have significant effects on decoding, but small effects on spelling skills. This pattern could be attributed to differences in the consistency of phoneme-grapheme vs. grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Moderator analyses indicated that children with weak vs. good initial competencies equally benefit from the training. Furthermore, combining the training with a phonic-letter training yielded no additional effects in comparison to a purely phonological awareness training. Overall, the meta-analytical training effects of the German programs were lower than in the international meta analyses. For these findings linguistic and methodological explanations are given.