Investigating the utilization of teaching activities related to phonological awareness by mainstream and general education teachers

In order to survive in social life and gain academic success, literacy skills are the most important skills that need to be mastered. Literacy skills that are attained in early childhood set the foundation for future literacy skills. In early childhood literacy skills need to be fortified by family members, pre-school and primary school teachers. Pre-school period is especially critical in the development of fundamental skills that will enable mastering the future literacy skills without problems. During pre-school period, activities need to be developed in preparation for the acquisition of literacy skills, phonological awareness being the primary skill, vocabulary, comprehension, alphabetical knowledge, visual perception, written conception, listening, and speech. Phonological awareness skill developed during pre-school period plays an important role in the attainment and development of early literacy skills. Teachers bear an important responsibility in teaching literacy skills, starting at early childhood period and spanning a whole lifetime. Literacy skills development requirement, that start during this period, puts an expectation on teachers to develop various activities and to provide sufficient time in their teaching timetables. In this respect, the purpose of this research was the evaluation of the frequency of phonological awareness teaching activities, used by first and second year primary school teachers. In this research, carried out in Central Eskisehir, singular and relational search methods have been utilized. First and second grade primary school teachers in Turkey form the population. Samples were taken during 2012-2013 educational year from 142 first and second year primary school teachers. Data collection was carried out with the aid of "Usage Frequency of Phonological Awareness Teaching Activities" (UTPATA) questionnaire, developed by the researcher. The questionnaire consisted of 20 multiple-choice questions and 3 open ended questions. Content analysis was used to analyse the 3 open-ended questions. Research results revealed that usage frequency of phonological awareness teaching activities by 104 of the teachers was low, 38 of the teachers was high. The usage frequency of phonological awareness teaching activities by 16 teachers, whose classes included hearing impaired students, was found to be low. From these results it can be concluded that the usage of phonological awareness teaching activities by teachers, whose classes included hearing impaired students was lower than other teachers. Participants' age, sex, number of years in service and the universities they graduated from made negligible difference in the usage of phonological awareness teaching activities. As one of the results derived from this research, it can be suggested that the need to raise the level of awareness of teachers - primarily pre-school teachers, teachers in special needs education and primary school education - of the importance of phonological awareness in the development of literacy. Furthermore, in order to have children with better literacy skills in their future lives, teachers need to be equipped with sufficient knowledge and teaching skills with regards to phonological awareness. For this reason, class teaching and special needs education departments of universities have to enrich their teaching programmes to emphasize the importance of phonological awareness and literacy skills.