Developing the Phonemic Awareness of Students Who Are Hard of Hearing and Have Dyslexia

The term phonemic awareness refers to the ability to not only recognize that language is composed of distinct sounds but also the ability to manipulate those verbalized components of words. It is an essential element of reading, which also affects writing, since the two skills are complementary. English Language Learners (ELLs) and students with dyslexia struggle with phonemic awareness as do hard-of-hearing students. The combination of these characteristics tends to intensify the problems these students have and the support they require, which in turn necessitates awareness on the part of teachers and other education professionals. In this study, synthetic phonics and stretched segmenting are used to develop the phonemic awareness of a hard-of-hearing ELL student diagnosed with dyslexia. This single case study found both strategies to be effective in supporting the subject student.

Evaluating the Impact of the delivery of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on the Acquisition of Upper and Lowercase Recognition Skills of Omani Third Graders

Letter name knowledge is regarded as being among the soundest indicators of later reading skill and an imperfectly established alphabetic knowledge is a well-known predictor of future reading challenges. Hence, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a synthetic approach to phonics, specifically Jolly Phonics (JP), to determine its contribution to Omani third graders’ acquisition of uppercase (UC) and lowercase (LC) recognition. The study sample consisted of 117 Omani male and female third graders in two cycle one schools in Al-Dhahira Governorate in the Sultanate of Oman during the academic year 2019/2020. The study employed a quantitative descriptive research design, in which data was collected using an UC and LC letter recognition test. The findings revealed that the although the third graders in this study’s sample have on average achieved the JP programme’s objective in terms of UC and LC letter recognition skills, not all students have achieved the minimum required level in this literacy skill; whereby 43.6% of the students were below the minimum required level and the remaining 56.4% of students were at or above the minimum required level. Besides, there was a statistically significant difference between third graders’ scores in UC letter recognition and LC recognition in favour of UC letters. The study concluded with a set of recommendations for the MOE and English teachers, in order to develop the delivery of synthetic phonics teaching as a literacy-enhancing approach, namely JP, in the Omani context. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this study is important for being the first to evaluate the impact of the delivery of synthetic phonics teaching (i.e. JP programme) on the acquisition of upper and lowercase recognition skills among Omani EFL third graders since the programme’s implementation in 2014.

Parents, carers, and policy labor: Policy networks and new media

Based on literacy policy educational reform in Australia, this article explores the role of new media, policy labor and what small data analysis can reveal about parents and carers as networked policy actors. Using qualitative critical network (QCN) analysis, legacy and social media data, this article provides a snapshot of how policy actors interact online to labor for education reform. This article shows that parent and carer advocacy is central to the success of the universal synthetic phonics (USP) social media campaign in Australia. It also shows that analysis of the new media networks that connect policy actors should be a core part of understanding policy dynamics in the 21st century.

Using Systematic Synthetic Phonics to Accelerate Rural Indigenous Children’s Acquisition of Early Literacy Skills

Studies focusing on the strategy of phonics in Malaysia have highlighted the insufficiency and ineffectiveness of SBELC phonics training received by teachers, resulting in confusion among them as to what really constitutes effective use of the phonics strategy. On the other hand, systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) has been proven beneficial in accelerating the performance of children in their early literacy. However, few studies have been conducted on English language learners as the majority of those research was focused on native speakers of the English language. Against this background, this article presents a description of a systematic way of teaching phonics that could inform teachers on how the strategy can be optimally utilised to accelerate the performance of students who are possibly at risk of being left behind. It then reports an investigation that compared the efficacy of SSP against SBELC phonics in accelerating the acquisition of early literacy skills with a group of indigenous children residing in the rural parts of Sarawak, Malaysia. Five instruments; (1) productive letter-sound test, (2) free-sound isolation test, (3) reading test, (4) spelling test, and (5) oral-reading fluency test were administered to measure phonemic awareness, decoding, reading, and spelling ability. Data were collected from the pretest and the posttest. The results demonstrate that both groups recorded significant improvement in reading and spelling, but children in the experimental group (SSP) outperformed the control group (SBELC phonics) significantly. Following this, SSP should be implemented in classrooms to help accelerate children’s early reading fluency and spelling ability.

Instructional psychology and teaching reading: Ending the reading wars

This article explores the ‘reading wars’ from the perspective of instructional psychology, which focuses on the environmental and instructional factors that facilitate students’ progress in learning to read. It draws on research (computational analysis and classroom-based experimental studies) to inform a novel intervention that teaches reading through systematic synthetic phonics and real books, rather than the more traditional phonically decodable reading schemes. The article discusses: (1) the criteria that inform curriculum design, (2) the instructional principles that underpin effective teaching, (3) teaching methodology, (4) an instructional analysis that explains why students are perceived to have difficulties in learning to read, and (5) the implications of instructional psychology for educational psychologists.

A national intervention in teaching phonics: A case study from England

At the start of the 21st century, literacy teaching in state primary schools was conducted under a framework guided by a National Literacy Strategy, which recommended a model of reading called ‘The Searchlights Model’. Early on it became clear that rises in performance predicted from adoption of this strategy were not happening. This led to a review of the effective teaching of early reading under the chairmanship of Sir Jim Rose (Rose, 2006). Rose recommended that the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) be adopted as a framework. It also recommended that pupils be taught how to read words in the first instance through the adoption of programs of systematic synthetic phonics. A change in government reinforced this policy and added a national program of early assessment of grapheme-phoneme knowledge. These changes uncovered an important issue: namely that there was no national program for ensuring that teachers had the necessary professional subject knowledge to teach phonics effectively. Steps have been taken to mitigate this. The most recent data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Studies (PIRLS) 2016 study suggests that England is now beginning to close the achievement gap, with the pupils in the lowest percentiles making the most improvement.

The Effect of Synthetic Phonics on the Development of Students’ Reading Aloud Skill

This study aims to know the effect of synthetic phonics on the development of students reading aloud skills. This study was conducted at State Junior High School 3 Babelan, Bekasi, Indonesia. This study used a quantitative method, true-research experimental design with one group pre-test and post-test. The population of this research is all 8thgrade students, and for the sample, the writer used two classes of 8th grade as the sample, which first-class is experimental class and second as control class with participant number 72 students. Data obtained from the test and their kind of test namely is test pre-test and post-test, to know that synthetic phonics is effective the writer compared the result of the post-test from the experimental class and control class average. The findings showed that the learning process used synthetic phonics to make students develop their reading aloud skills. The experimental class (VIII-1) the lowest score is 71 and the highest score is 89 meanwhile control class (VIII-6) the lowest score is 62 and the highest score is 75, the difference of the highest scores between experimental and control class is 14, it means experimental class gained 14 scores. It can be concluded that synthetic phonics is effective in the development of students’ reading aloud skills, this study recommends continuation using synthetic phonics to develop students’ reading aloud skills.