Abstract
Pupils need phonemic awareness so that they have the ability to manipulate the individual sounds in words. However, they sometimes focused more on reading comprehension rather than recognizing the letter sounds which build the words for reading. This action research was designed to improve the pupils’ phonemic awareness by using hand gestures through digital video and it involved three cycles. The participants involved were 24 Year 2 pupils from one of the primary schools in Malaysia. Three different data collection methods used were tests, pupils’ work and observation. The findings showed there was an improvement of mean scores from 40% in Test 1 to 91% in Test 2. The pupils’ oral exercises also improved from 52.14% to 96.07%. The results from the observation checklist and notes also showed they became more aware in learning English through their increased communication and active participation in the lesson. This shows that the technique was able to help pupils to learn and remember the sounds of phonemes as they could read the words correctly. It is suggested to carry out further research to develop the pupils’ skills in phonemic awareness through body movements in addition to hand gestures.
Highlights
The pupils must realize that spoken words can be broken down into individual sounds, letters within words stand for sounds, and individual sounds blended together yield words (Spector, 1995), so pupils need phonemic awareness to be able to make use of letter-sound information (Phajane, 2014)
In the Malaysian English syllabus, phonemic awareness was under the reading module (Module 2) in Kurikulum Standard Sekolah Rendah (KSSR) or Standard Curriculum for Primary School
Reflections of Past Teaching and Learning Experiences Phonemic awareness has been included in the KSSR and the content standard for it is by the end of the 6-year primary schooling, pupils will be able to apply knowledge of sounds of letters to recognise words in linear and non-linear texts
Summary
1) How does the use of hand gestures in digital video improve the pupils’ phonemic awareness on phonemes ‘igh’, ‘ear’ and ‘air’? As I found that the pupils were not well-exposed to phonemic awareness and it has led to the problems in their reading skills, I decided to improve their phonemic awareness by using a teaching and learning strategy of hand gestures through digital video.
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