The effects of Colorful Worlds of sounds program on phonological awareness of preschool children

The aim of the current study is to investigate the effects of Colorful Worlds of Sounds Program on phonological awareness skills of preschool children. The research design is quasi-experimental pretest-posttest with control group. Study group was choosen from a preschool by random sampling among public preschools located in Eskisehir city center during the 2014-2015 education year of spring semester. In that preschool located in Eskisehir, one of the preschool classroom in which 5 years of age (60-72 months) children were enrolled was assigned experimental group and another classroom was assigned as control group. There were 24 children in experimental group and 19 children in the control group. "General Demographic Form" and "The Phonological Awareness Scale of Early Childhood Period (PASECP)" were used as measurement tools. PASECP used as pretest and posttests to assess the effects of the program. Children in the control group did not participate in any program. After the pretest was applied to children in the experimental and control groups, Colorful Worlds of Sounds Program was implemented to the experimental group children by the researcher. The activities of Colorful Worlds of Sounds Program included the components of phonological awareness which are word awareness, syllable awareness, rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness and activities were formed by giving attention to the difficulties of all these components. Also, the appropriate activities for the tasks belong to the components were assigned from simplest to the hardest one. In the program mostly big group activities were implemented but small group activities also were used. While implementing the program, various story books, photographs of objects and real materials were used. Activities involving active play chance for children were tried to be included into the program instead of having work sheets. The program implemented throughout eight weeks, three days in a week and an hour in a day. At the end of the implementation, posttest was applied to the both experimental and control group. 2x2 mixed ANOVA was used to reveal whether there is a significant difference between the pretest and posttest of total phonological awareness scores of between groups or not. Moreover, 2x2 mixed ANOVA was used to compare pretest and posttest scores obtained from the subtests (deciding whether two words rhyme or not, identifying the beginning sounds of words, composing a new word from a given beginning sound, distinguishing/grouping words beginning with the same sound among words, telling a word by blending phonemes, separating a word into syllables, telling a word after deleting a word/syllable, identifying the letters). The results indicated that there was a significant difference between total phonological awareness scores of experimental and control groups and all subtests scores of the groups. Based on these results it can be said that Colorful Worlds of Sounds Program was effective to develop preschool children's phonological awareness skills. Keywords: Preschool education, Early childhood education, Phonological awareness,Emergent literacy