Phonological awareness (Coursework Sample)

Phonological Awareness
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Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness denotes the understanding of an individual that speech is created or made up of abstract units that comprise of onset and rime units, syllables, and individual phonemes. This comprehension underlies the developing ability of children to perform or undertake sound manipulations like sound blending into words and words segmentation into sounds. Print knowledge, on the contrary refers to an umbrella or collective term that encompasses print concept of children and their alphabet knowledge. Therefore, this term typically refers to an individual’s understanding of the functions and forms of letters and written language and their corresponding or related sounds. Print knowledge is regarded to have a reciprocal relationship with phonological awareness thus explaining the research conducted by Ambrose, Fey, and Eisenberg (2012) regarding the two variables. The major purpose of the conducted study was to determine whether the preschool-age children having CI (cochlear implants) bear age-appropriate print knowledge plus phonological awareness and to inspect the relationships of these particular skills with related language and speech abilities. Another motive of the study done was to examine or inspect whether and how oral language and speech skills contribute to variance in the print knowledge and also in phonological awareness abilities of children having CIs.
The phonological awareness results indicated that the mean value or score of the cochlear implant group was within a single standard deviation of the normative sample mean of the preschool early literacy Test. However, this value was greater than a single SD (standard deviation) lesser than the mean of the (NH) normal-hearing group. For the print knowledge results, the performance of the Cochlear implant group did not vary significantly from the one of the normal hearing group. The cochlear implant group results indicated that print knowledge together with phonological awareness were correlated significantly with speech production, language, and speech perception. The results indicated that the print knowledge as well as phonological awareness was strongly predictive of the future or later abilities of reading, and theoretical and empirical reasons to expect the preschool-age children having CIs to be delayed significantly in a single or both of the two early literacy domains existed. The scores generated on speech production, oral language, and perceptions of speech tasks were correlated moderately with the phonological awareness for the children having CIs. The implication was that despite the huge strides that the children had made in development of language because of CIs and the related care, the preschool-age kids having CIs and behind their Normal hearing counterparts in language, speech perception, and speech production ability are probable to fall behind in the development of phonological awareness as well. The other conclusion arrived at by the study following the results obtained was that although the skills of oral communication formed a vital linguistic base of which the phonological awareness may actually grow, the other factors not determined in the study like quality and frequency of episodes of parental teaching, experience with the materials of literacy, and the quality of literacy experiences of preschool play a fundamental role in phonological awareness development among the children having CIs.
The research also generated a number of conclusions regarding print knowledge. An anticipation that print knowledge being a skill that is more constrained than phonological awareness would generate a favorable comparison between the CI group and the NH group on the undertakings of the print knowledge than on the phonological task was proved positive. The study unequivocally ascertained that children having CIs could demonstrate or shoe age-appropriate skills of print knowledge. Owing to the reason that the abilities of print knowledge are correlated positively with the later literacy skills, children being able to achieve the age-appropriate performance of at least some tasks of print knowledge irrespective of delays in language and speech skills bodes well for the potential achievement of reading of the...