The Effects of a Phonological Awareness Training Program

The Effects of a Phonological Awareness Training Program on Hearing-Impaired Children Sarah J. Stewart Advisor: Dr. Ann Geers

Purpose • To see what effects a phonological awareness training program would have on hearing- impaired children

What is Phonological Awareness? • The understanding that words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes • The ability to think about and manipulate those sounds • Considered to be predictive of reading ability

Various Tasks Associated with Phonological Awareness 1 The ability to hear sounds in words 2 The ability to focus on the components of sounds in words that make them similar or different 3 Blending and syllable splitting 4 Phoneme Segmentation 5 Phoneme Manipulation

Reading Instruction for Hearing. Impaired Children • Hearing-impaired children have difficulty learning to read • Often lag behind their hearing peers academically (especially in reading) • Incorporating phonological awareness activities in their reading curriculum would facilitate reading growth

Methods • Subjects: 5 hearing-impaired children enrolled at CID • Procedure: pre-/post-test design used to evaluate effects of the training program • Lindamood Auditory Conceptualzation Test used as a phonological awareness measure

Test Administration • Pre-check done to verify that each subject understood the tasks • Scores converted to percentage correct • Four of the five subjects scored below the recommended minimum for their current reading grade level in school

Intervention • Sounds Sensible Phonological Awareness Training Program for Reading (S. P. I. R. E. ) • Each subject received approximately 30 minutes of training each weeks for six weeks • Training was received during the school day, in addition to their reading program

Results • All but one subject scored below the recommended minimum score for their current reading grade level • Three of the five subjects showed no change (+/- 2 points) from pre- to post-test • The other two obtained improved scores

Results (cont. )

Pre- and Post-test Performance on the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test • Post-test scores did not differ significantly from the pretest scores

Results (cont. )

Results (Cont. ) • The amount of training received is not related to improvement from pretest to posttest • The training program may be helpful to some hearing-impaired children such as children C, D, and E who exhibit reading levels more than 1 year behind expectation for their age

Conclusions • Phonological awareness training can have a positive effect on the acquisition of phonological awareness tasks • More information is needed to determine how effective the training program is

Conclusions (cont. ) • Longer periods of intervention • Control group: another group of hearingimpaired children who are given the same pre- ad post-test measures, but receive no phonological awareness training