Abstract
It is important that before entering primary school, the child’s phonological awareness is supported by a variety of different activities whereby phonological awareness is based on a well-developed hearing ability. Hearing is part of the musical activities that support/encourage phonological awareness with the development of rhythmic and melodic music listening. In this article, we aimed to investigate the effects of musical activities derived from the methodological system of Edward Willems on phonological awareness through a quasi-experimental study with 70 children aged 4 to 7 years. Thirty-five of them received 1 hr of music instruction per week for 6 months (experimental group) and the other 35 children received no such musical support (control group). We tested each child’s phonological awareness at the beginning of the music program and after 6 months. The results of the analysis of covariance showed that there was a statistically significant difference in phonological awareness between the experimental and control groups in favor of the experimental group. The results of the research confirmed that musical activities based on the methodological system Edgar Willems are a good and effective means of promoting phonological awareness, especially in early childhood.
Highlights
A very important role in social and economic development has been attributed to the development of reading in recent decades (Christmann et al, 2015; Costa et al, 2016)
Based on the observed differences in the mean values of the initial measurement of phonological awareness in the children we had divided into the control and experimental groups, we performed an analysis of variance for independent samples
The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in the initial measurement between the experimental group (M = 44.50, SD = 14.33) and the control group (M = 34.31, SD = 18.05; F(1, 68) = 6.798, p = .011), which means that there were systematic differences in the level of phonological awareness in the groups even before the intervention was performed
Summary
A very important role in social and economic development has been attributed to the development of reading in recent decades (Christmann et al, 2015; Costa et al, 2016). Phonological awareness is most strongly associated with reading skills (Costa et al, 2016), especially with decoding (Hogan et al, 2005; McKenna & Dougherty Stahl, 2015; Swank & Catts, 1994; Vellutino et al, 2004). Phonological awareness assessment provides information about reading in kindergarten but loses its predictive power at the second grade. Phonological awareness and word reading become so highly correlated that phonological awareness does not add information to the prediction of fourth-grade reading. Recent Slovenian studies (Jenko, 2016; Šimnic, 2016) have shown that phonological awareness is one of the most important factors in the development of reading literacy among students with intellectual disabilities Phonological awareness and word reading become so highly correlated that phonological awareness does not add information to the prediction of fourth-grade reading. (Hogan et al, 2005, p. 285)
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