Effects of Phonemic Awareness Instruction on the Encoding Skills of Children with Speech Impairment - Essay Example

Phonemic awareness instruction and phoneme-grapheme correspondence have no significant effect on the ability to encode information for persons with Severe Speech Impairment (SSI).

Four specific research questions were included in the study as noted on page 1297. These related to

1.  The application of phoneme-grapheme correspondence before the introduction of phonemic awareness assignments
2. Phonemic awareness after phoneme-grapheme correspondence instruction CVC pseudo- and real word encoding skills compared to the application of the latter in isolation.
3. The generalization of phonemic awareness instruction to encoding pseudo and real words.
4. The maintenance of the effects of encoding instructions after instruction termination.

The independent variables in the study include phoneme-grapheme correspondence and Phonemic awareness. On the other hand, the dependent variables include accuracy in encoding CVC pseudo-encoding and real word encoding.  They were also able to hear, had corrected vision, normal non-verbal intelligence

Methods

The study was conducted using one group subjected to multiple tests. Each sample was subjected to three experimental procedures. The sample was composed of pre-reading children who were native English speakers. They also had functionally unintelligible speech, had phoneme-grapheme correspondence performance of less than fifty percent for selected letters, and a certain level of motor abilities.

The independent variable was defined by referring to other researchers’ definitions. For example, Phonological awareness was defined as “the explicit (conscious) awareness of the sound structure of a language and the ability to manipulate phonological segments” (Blischak, Shah, Lombardino, and Chiarella’s, 2004, p1295) – a definition borrowed from Adams. Some of the measures used included Peabody picture vocabulary test-iii and test of nonverbal intelligence. The study engaged correlation analysis in which the researchers sought to determine the relationship between the independent and dependent variables.

Result, Discussions, and Conclusions

The researchers are keen to present their literature, facts, and results logically and clearly following the usual research format. They also manage to fulfill their objectives as they finally note that phonemic awareness instruction and phoneme-grapheme correspondence have a significant effect on the ability to encode information for persons with speech impairment. They make mention of the fact that their study on phoneme segmentation and phoneme-grapheme correspondence were modified so as to allow for non-speech responses ((Blischak, Shah, Lombardino, and Chiarella’s, 2004, p. 1303).  Apart from mentioning the above modification, the researchers do not offer an in-depth discussion of the limitations of their study.

Conclusion

In my view, the study was conducted successfully, the objective of the study having been achieved. The study was conducted following approved research methods although the analysis of the data should have been more in-depth and the limitations of the study clearly defined.