The effect of supporting phonological awareness skills intervention programs on phonological awareness skills of students with learning disability

This study aims to investigate the effect of supporting a phonological skill awareness intervention program (SESFAR) on the phonological awareness skill of students with dyslexia. The study is planned with an experimental pattern based on a pre-test/post-test single group model. The sample of the study consists of a total of 12 students in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade in an elementary school in Kırşehir city centre by selecting four students with dyslexia from each grade and the student's classroom teachers. The students are selected with criterion sampling method among purposeful sampling methods. The criteria are selected as students with dyslexia despite not having any mental disability. For data analysis, the reading performance of the students is assessed with "Running Records" before the application and the reading level is found to be "frustration level". The students with frustration levels are applied to the "Phonological Awareness Scale" as a pre-test. After the pre-test stage, the students are applied to the SESFAR intervention program for 8 weeks in 32 sessions. The SESFAR intervention program content includes "skills for dividing the sentence to words, dividing the words to syllables, rhyme awareness, combining syllables, matching the words according to first phone and last phone, discarding the first phone and last phone of the words". The students are applied with "Phonological Awareness Scale" as post-test after the application. According to the pre-test point averages of the students before the application, while the phonological awareness skills werw low in the 1st and 2nd grades, and moderate in the 3 rd grades, it was determined that the phonological awareness skill levels were high for all classes according to the post-test mean scores after the implementation. According to pre-test and post-test data analysed with Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, there is a difference in favour of post-test scores when the pre-test and post-test scores are compared for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd-grade level students with dyslexia for phonological awareness skill, word awareness skill, syllable awareness skill, rhyme awareness skill and phoneme awareness skill after SESFAR intervention program but this difference is not at a statistically significant level. Additionally, the views of students' classroom teachers (social validity) included in the program revealed that the program has high social validity.