| dc.description.abstract | Phonemic awareness -"the conscious awareness that spoken words are made up of individual speech sounds?" (Walsh, 2009)- is an important prerequisite for later reading proficiency, as it acts as a bridge between spoken language and written language. Gray and McCutchen (2006) contend that children who are better at identifying sounds within spoken words can, more easily, map letters onto those sounds when introduced to print. Since the 1980s, there has been a strong interest in the role of phonemic awareness in early reading development, with research repeatedly demonstrating a significant relationship between a child's phonemic awareness and their future reading success (Adams, 1990; Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Bryant et al., 1990; Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Carson, Gillon, & Boustead, 2011; Carson et al., 2013; Cunningham, 1990; Ehri et al., 2001; Gillon, 2004; Lonigan, 2003; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). There is evidence to suggest that a child?s social background can affect his/her level of phonemic awareness (McIntosh, Crosbie, Holm, & Dodd, 2007; Nancollis, Lawrie, & Dodd, 2005). In an Irish context, national assessments of English reading (2009, 2014) have reported that the reading levels of children attending designated-disadvantaged schools are far below those of their peers attending more affluent schools. The current research provided an explicit and systematic phonological awareness programme, focused at the crucial phoneme level, to children attending a designated-disadvantaged school (DEIS), in an attempt to improve their phonemic awareness skills. The research consisted of two studies. Study One involved the assessment of one-hundred-and-seven junior infant children in two primary schools (one of which served an area of socioeconomic disadvantage). The researcher wished to establish whether socioeconomic background had an impact on Irish children's levels of phonemic awareness as they began their first year of primary school. An iPad-based phonemic awareness assessment tool, created by the researcher, was utilised to assess the children's phonemic awareness skills. The findings of this study demonstrated that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds begin school with lower levels of phonemic awareness, in particular, when assessed on tasks such as initial phoneme identity. In Study Two, an explicit and systematic phonological awareness programme, focused at the crucial phoneme level, was created by the researcher and implemented in junior infant classes in a designated-disadvantaged school. The programme was short-term in duration and ran for fourteen weeks. The children were assessed at three intervals during their first year in school using the same iPad-based phonemic awareness tool as Study One. The findings of Study Two indicated that the introduction of an explicit and systematic phonological awareness programme, focused at the crucial phoneme level, did allow children in the experimental group to achieve higher scores, in some cases significantly higher scores, when compared to children from the control group. It is envisioned that findings from this research might be used to influence policy makers to examine preventive phonological awareness programmes when targeting young children's early reading development. At present, the focus in designated-disadvantaged schools is on remediating children?s reading difficulties; however, instruction in phonemic awareness skills has the potential to identify children who may present with reading difficulties before formal reading has begun. The researcher contends that the phonological awareness programme designed as part of this research should be implemented in designated-disadvantaged schools across the country as a matter of urgency. It is also hoped that the iPad-based phonemic awareness tool, designed as part of this research, could potentially provide teachers with a time-efficient tool for the assessment and monitoring of young children's phonemic awareness skills. | en |
