No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This systematic literature review is aimed to investigate what previous research showed regarding use of phonics instruction in children's early reading development. Due to the fact that international studies such as PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy  Study) showed that children´s reading ability in Sweden is getting lower and lower with each year. Every fifth student's ability to read is too low according to a Swedish report “This is how we solve the reading crisis in primary school”. To find out what the scientific research shows, the following research question was chosen: What effects does phonics instruction approach have on students' early literacy in the early years of primary school?Initially this study presents governments documents and their perspective on reading. Moreover, this study presentes PIRLS results that show that children's reading ability is getting lower with each year. Furthermore, this study presents definitions of two reading instruction methods Phonics and Whole language, phonological awareness and phoneme awareness. This study also shows research that analyzes how phonics methods affect students' early reading. Based on thematic analysis in this study scientific evidence has presented that teaching early reading by using phonics methods benefits all the student's reading skills, especially students who have developed decoding difficulties. The most central in phonics approach is to learn the alphabet and its function, that language sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters or combination of letters (graphemes). According to phonics, students need to be able to decode to be good readers. This literature review also presents results  that show how balanced teaching with elements of both phonics and whole-language approach is very beneficial in students' early literacy and how teachers competence in teaching early reading using phonics methods is important in students' early reading development.   Keywords: phonics, primary school, phonological awareness

The purpose of this research effort was to examine whether the feature retention patterns and phonological knowledge of children with suspected apraxia of speech (AOSc) in comparison to those of children with phonological impairment (PI). A second purpose was to determine if a relationship exists between phonological knowledge and feature retention. The study consisted of three groups of children: PI, AOSc, and typically developing (TD), ages four to seven. A 245-item speech sample was collected from each group. Feature retention percentages and phonological knowledge, represented by percent correct underlying representations (PCUR) were calculated for each child. All groups retained place the least, followed by manner, with voicing being retained most. The null hypothesis was confirmed, with PI and AOSc groups exhibiting no significant differences across feature retention percentages or phonological knowledge. The positive correlation of voicing retention and PCUR of the AOSc group was the only significant relationship found.

<p>Literacy is an important part of communication. Phonological awareness, i.e. the ability to recognise the sound units of language and to manipulate them, has been found to be crucial in literacy acquisition.</p><p>In 2005 the development of a communication device, a talking joystick called the PhonicStick, started at The School of Computing at the University of Dundee in Scotland. The main focus with the project was to help children with physical disabilities to create spoken words by blending sounds together on the PhonicStick. It was also hypothesized that the PhonicStick could act as a support to literacy learning with typically developing children.</p><p>The aim of the present study was to investigate if a group of 10 typically developing South African 5-6 year old children could learn how to use the PhonicStick in three sessions and to see if their phonological awareness improved by using it. The training with the PhonicStick took place over a period of three weeks. The participants’ phonological awareness was screened before and after the sessions with two sub-tests of The Phonological Awareness Test (PHAT). In addition, their ability to produce sounds and words with the PhonicStick was tested.</p><p>The results showed that all the participants appeared to be interested in the PhonicStick and that they found it relatively easy to manoeuvre. The participants’ ability to produce sounds and words on the PhonicStick showed a statistically significant improvement from the first session to the third session. The participants’ phonological awareness skills did not appear to improve after three sessions. More time is needed to find out if this training would result in improved phonological awareness skills.</p>

Literacy is an important part of communication. Phonological awareness, i.e. the ability to recognise the sound units of language and to manipulate them, has been found to be crucial in literacy acquisition. In 2005 the development of a communication device, a talking joystick called the PhonicStick, started at The School of Computing at the University of Dundee in Scotland. The main focus with the project was to help children with physical disabilities to create spoken words by blending sounds together on the PhonicStick. It was also hypothesized that the PhonicStick could act as a support to literacy learning with typically developing children. The aim of the present study was to investigate if a group of 10 typically developing South African 5-6 year old children could learn how to use the PhonicStick in three sessions and to see if their phonological awareness improved by using it. The training with the PhonicStick took place over a period of three weeks. The participants’ phonological awareness was screened before and after the sessions with two sub-tests of The Phonological Awareness Test (PHAT). In addition, their ability to produce sounds and words with the PhonicStick was tested. The results showed that all the participants appeared to be interested in the PhonicStick and that they found it relatively easy to manoeuvre. The participants’ ability to produce sounds and words on the PhonicStick showed a statistically significant improvement from the first session to the third session. The participants’ phonological awareness skills did not appear to improve after three sessions. More time is needed to find out if this training would result in improved phonological awareness skills.

The structure of phonological processing for typically developing children has been debated over the past two decades. Recent research has indicated that phonological processing is best explained by a single underlying phonological ability (e.g., Anthony and Lonigan, 2004). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to determine the structure of phonological processing for school-age children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). The second goal was to determine the relationship between the components of phonological processing and expressive and receptive language ability. The participants were 222 school-age children identified by their schools as having MID. Confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to determine the structure of phonological processing. The results indicated that a model with one phonological awareness factor and one naming speed factor explained the data better than competing models with a single latent factor or more than two latent factors. There was a negative significant relationship between phonological processing and naming speed. There were positive bivariate relationships between phonological processing and expressive and receptive language. There were negative bivariate relationships between naming speed and expressive and receptive language. These results are consistent with other research findings with typically developing children, indicating a similarity in the relationships between phonological process and language for children with MID. Theoretical and instructional implications are discussed.