At Letterland, we’re proud to know that the use of characters and actions to teach phonics is supported by academic research. Additionally, the Letterland system is also in line with research on memory and the way we learn.
Each Letterland character has a personality and lives in a realistic environment filled with alliterative objects. By integrating phonics with life experience, they provide children with a systematic and motivating framework for learning all 44 sounds and their spellings and for developing full literacy.
Read on to learn about the the most recent academic research done on Letterland.
Letterland Effect Sizes Compared to the Average of Prior Studies (Roberts & Sadler, 2018)
A total of thirty-eight preschool children were randomly assigned one of two explicit teaching treatments to teach alphabet letter sounds over a 7-week period. One teaching treatment was Letterland (featuring integrated mnemonics and short narratives about the letter sound characters) and the other was the Control (using plain letters and alphabet books). There were significant treatment effects in favour of Letterland on identifying letter sounds (1.31), initial phoneme identification (0.61), phoneme blending (0.62) and letter writing (0.46). These treatment effects are significantly higher than the average of prior studies (0.24) (Piasta & Wagner, 2010).
“We emphasize that the superiority of the [Letterland] integrated mnemonics group was in comparison to carefully matched alternative instruction rather than [an] untreated control group.”
Roberts, T. A., & Sadler, C.D. Letter sound characters and imaginary narratives: Can they enhance motivation and letter sound learning?
Early Childhood Research Quarterly (2018), doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.04.002
Letterland Effect Sizes* Compared to the Average of Prior Studies**
* Effect Size quantifies the difference between two groups (0.8 = large; 0.5 = medium; 0.2 = small)
** Piasta & Wagner, 2010: average effect size for preschool letter sound instruction (0.24).
Further examples of Research and Data are available at: www.letterland.com/research