Abstract
ABSTRACT The attainment of the alphabetic principle is one of the earliest signs of successful literacy acquisition. Public school students from the Dominican Republic have low literacy skills, partly because of not being systematically exposed to the alphabetic principle while learning to read. This paper presents the results of an intervention to teach the alphabetic principle using a tablet-based game. Nineteen kindergarten students were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group during the last month of the 2017 school year. Students from the experimental group played with the game for ten sessions of 20 minutes each. Students from the experimental group outperformed the control group in syllable recognition after the intervention. The intervention did not influence other reading skills. Automatic syllable identification has been shown to boost early literacy acquisition, although it is not sufficient for students to become fluent readers.
Highlights
The alphabetic principle refers to the reader’s knowledge that visually presented letters and letter combinations represent specific sounds
This study aimed to determine if students who received the tablet-based intervention in the alphabetic principle show more gains in literacy skills –at least in syllable reading– than students who do not receive the intervention
To obtain gain scores for each participant, we subtracted pre-test scores from post-test scores, and we ran a one-tailed independent sample t-test to determine if the experimental group had more substantial gains than the control group
Summary
The alphabetic principle refers to the reader’s knowledge that visually presented letters and letter combinations represent specific sounds. Two of the most renowned ways are by either exposing the child to whole words or text while guiding them to discover the patterns between graphemes and phonemes intuitively, and the other is by teaching the alphabetic principle explicitly through systematic instruction (Byrne, 2013). These practices are not mutually exclusive; evidence from education, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience recommends prioritizing the latter in early literacy acquisition (Ehri et al, 2001; Taylor et al, 2017). The teaching of the alphabetic principle should be progressive (from simpler to harder), systematic, and constant
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