Amerikan Head Start Okul Öncesi Öğretmenleri Bireyselleştirilmiş Fonemik Farkındalık Koçluğu

Ahmet SİMSAR,Lauren DENNY,Sara Beth TOURS

doi:10.17984/adyuebd.532495

Abstract

Phonemic Awareness instruction in the preschool setting can help children become better readers in elementary school. Yet, within the United States there is no consistency in the quality of the instruction within preschool in this topic. Especially, children who are in Head Start programs are “at risk” for reading failure and may need phonemic awareness skills even more for school success. This study explored three preschool teachers in a Head Start preschool in Western Pennsylvania through phonemic awareness coaching via an iPad on an app called ShowMe. Teachers received weekly phonemic awareness coaching sessions and were then to record a lesson they taught to their students and give a reflection of the lessons at the end of the week. All three teachers (with varying educational and experience levels) were able to teach at the least complex level of the phonemic awareness continuum. While two of the three teachers were able to achieve more complex levels of the phonemic awareness continuum. These findings are critical and show a need to have more professional development on phonemic awareness for preschool teachers within the United States.

Highlights

Researchers have found that phonemic awareness skills are the best predictor of future reading skills (Every Child Reading; An Action Plan of the Learning First Alliance, 1998; Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Bworn, Adams, & Stuart, 2002)
The qualitative data that was collected for this study was an initial open-ended interview with notes taken, documents from the teachers of weekly lessons and how their coaching sessions went, a journal of how the teachers were doing kept by the coaches, audio communication via the ShowMe app (Learnbat, 2018) of the week’s lesson to the teachers from the coaches, audio communication via the ShowMe app of one lesson from the week from the teachers to the coaches, and audio communication via the ShowMe app to the coaches from the teachers on how their week went with the lesson, and a final focus group
Findings are presented from the following research questions: (1) Teacher starting points; (2) Phonemic awareness activities; (3) Engagement in weekly coaching session; and (4) Expansion of lesson

Summary

Introduction

Researchers have found that phonemic awareness skills are the best predictor of future reading skills (Every Child Reading; An Action Plan of the Learning First Alliance, 1998; Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Bworn, Adams, & Stuart, 2002). There is a lack of research on phonemic awareness with regard to how much preschool teachers are teaching, designing, and providing high quality literacy instruction within their preschool classrooms. With this said, the aim of this qualitative study was to describe and develop individualized phonemic awareness coaching sessions for three preschool teachers at a preschool in Western Pennsylvania. Teachers play a key role in phonemic awareness instruction. They need to model the sounds and the procedures of the instruction so that the students can properly reproduce the sounds (Kenner et al, 2017). Phonemic awareness instruction generally consists of rhymes and alliteration through nursery rhymes, exposure to tongue twisters, oddity tasks such as comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration, counting out the number of phonemes in a word, and performing phoneme manipulation tasks such as adding or deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder (Yopp & Yopp, 2000)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion