The efficacy of gillon phonological awareness training programme

Literacy is a skill that gives the individual the ability to learn oneself. Literacy skills both increase the social cohesion of the individual and ensure an independent existence in the society. Supporting phonological awareness skills, which is one of the most important predictors of literacy performance, is therefore very important. However, there are not enough systematic and efficient therapy programs in our country to support children's phonological awareness skills. The aim of this study is to adapt the Gillon Phonological Awareness Training Program (Gillon PAT) to Turkish language and to examine its efficacy on children with typical development and at risk for reading disorder. Gillon PAT is a ten-week intervention program that includes the tasks of rhyming and producing rhyme between words, finding the phoneme at the beginning of the word, finding the phoneme at the end of the word, blending the word into phonemes, phoneme segmentation and creating different words by manipulating phonemes. Adaptation of Gillon FEP to Turkish language was done with a pilot study conducted with three children who showed typical development. The research group of Gillon FEP consists of 24 children aged 5-6 years old with typical development and 9 children aged 5-7 years at risk for reading disorder. 24 children with typical development were assigned to experimental and control groups by random sampling method. Pretest, posttest and follow-up data were collected from experimental, control and at risk groups. Within group comparisons were analyzed with the Friedman Two-way ANOVA test, and the comparisons between groups were analyzed with the Mann Whitney U Test. As a result of the statistical analysis, Gillon FEP was found to be efficacy in developing phonological awareness skills.