Date Approved

Fall 1998

Graduate Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Education (M.Ed.)

Degree Program

College of Education

First Advisor

Joseph Fisher

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to look at a variety of phonological awareness studies and their impact on students with reading difficulties and to implement a program to develop student's reading abilities and look at its impact on student's knowledge of vowel and consonant recognition, vowel sounds, and sight words. Phonological awareness can be defined as one's sensitivity to, or explicit awareness of, the phonological structure of words in one's language. A number of researchers (eg., Libennan, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989) have concluded that adequate awareness of the phonological structure of words helps to make learning to read words a more understandable task for the young child. Without awareness of the phonological segments in words, our alphabetic system of writing is not very comprehensible. In fact, most children who experience difficulty acquiring early reading skills can be shown to lag behind in the development of phonological awareness (Felton & Wood, 1989). If a child is not sensitive to the phonological structure of speech, instruction in the use of letters to represent sounds in words will not make much sense. Therefore, a review of the research has indicated that training children in phonological awareness can have beneficial impact on their reading and spelling skills. The purpose of the summer program was to provide early intervention in the area of reading through intensive small group instruction utilizing multi-sensory strategies to improve awareness of vowel and consonant recognition, vowel sounds, and the development of sight words.

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