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Teaching phonological awareness to young children with learning disabilities
R E O'Connor1, J R Jenkins, N Leicester
1College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
Exceptional Children
|May 1, 1993
Summary
Preschool children with disabilities learned specific phonological skills like rhyming, blending, and segmenting. However, they struggled to generalize these skills across different tasks or categories.
Area of Science:
- Early Childhood Education
- Special Education
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Phonological awareness is crucial for early literacy development.
- Children with disabilities may face challenges in developing phonological skills.
- Understanding the feasibility of teaching these skills is essential for intervention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess the feasibility of teaching phonological manipulation skills to preschool children with disabilities.
- To investigate the learning and generalization of rhyming, blending, and segmenting skills.
- To explore the relationship between cognitive development and phonological learning in this population.
Main Methods:
- Forty-seven preschool children (4-6 years old) with disabilities participated.
- Children were randomly assigned to rhyming, blending, segmenting, or control groups.
- Progress and generalization of skills were measured post-intervention.
Main Results:
- Children showed significant progress in the trained phonological skill categories.
- Limited generalization was observed within and between phonological task categories.
- Cognitive development predicted some learning but did not limit overall phonological task acquisition.
Conclusions:
- Teaching specific phonological manipulation skills is feasible for preschool children with disabilities.
- Interventions should address potential generalization deficits.
- Cognitive development is not a barrier to learning these foundational literacy skills.