The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on letter decoding ability of children with reading disability by phonological awareness training. Study questions are as follows;
First, What is the developmental trend of the phonological awarene...
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on letter decoding ability of children with reading disability by phonological awareness training. Study questions are as follows;
First, What is the developmental trend of the phonological awareness of children with reading disability through phonological awareness training.
Second, how much does phonological awareness training give effects on letter decoding ability?
Third, what is the relationship between phonological awareness development and letter decoding ability?
Two male children with reading disability(6 years old and 8 years old) took part in this study. Child A showed 111 points of intelligent quotient in WISC-R and his reading level was less than 5 years old reflecting 1 year retardation. Child B showed 117 points of intelligent quotient in WISC-R and his reading level was 5 years and 10 month reflecting 3 years retardation. Child A had phonological awareness training for four months with 39 sessions, 3 times a week. Child B had the same training for three months with 34 sessions, 5 a week.
The components of phonological awareness training programs were as follows;
1) Syllable counting (for example, to let say the number of syllable after being heard the word which are consisted of 1, 2, 3 or 4 syllables from trainer).
2) On-setting rime (for example, to let children select words Which have the same initial or last letter sound of example words).
3) Phoneme Blending (for example, to pronounce letters after combination of (ㄱ) and (ㅏ).
4) Phoneme substitution (for example, to pronounce letters after replacing (ㄱ) in (가) with (ㄴ).
5) Phoneme add up (for example, to pronounce words after adding up (ㅁ) on (가).
6) Phoneme deletion (for example, to pronounce letters after deleting (ㅁ) from (감).
Phonological awareness test and letter decoding test were performed in order to figure out phonological awareness ability and letter decoding ability of the two children. Phonological awareness test is consisted of total 56 questions with 4 questions of syllable counting, 4 questions of on-setting rime, 12 questions of phoneme blending, 24 questions of phoneme substitution, 6 questions of phoneme deletion and 6 questions of phoneme add up. Letter decoding test is composed of 5 questions with sequence change of 1 syllable of children's own name and 5 questions of phoneme change in their names. Data was processed by percentage (scoring rate = number of exact answer / total number of questions) × 100).
Study results derive as follows:
First, two children with reading disability showed continuous development in phonological awareness. Syllable segmentation has aleady been learned before intervention and phoneme deletion and phoneme add up performance faced drastic improvement. Phoneme substitution performance takes linear improvement or improvement after a certain period. Phoneme blending ability was continuously developed showing improvement, retardation upkeep and improvement cycle.
Second, phonological awareness training was effective on letter decoding ability of children with reading disability.
Third, improvement of phonological awareness ability accompanies letter decoding ability. Children with reading disability showed significant improvement of letter decoding ability after they reached prominent level of ability for phoneme deletion, phoneme add up, and phoneme substitution.
In conclusion, the results suggest that phonological awareness training is effective on the ability of letter decoding of children with reading disability.