The effectiveness of a phonological-based intervention for students in their first year of school : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Literacy Education at Massey University, Hokowhitu, New Zealand
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Date
2012
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Massey University
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Abstract
New Zealand has a long tail of underachievement in reading with the results of
international literacy surveys consistently showing that while some New
Zealand students are among the best readers in the world, the gap between the
best and poorest readers continues to widen. Research evidence indicates that
a potential reason for the increasingly large gap is a lack of focus on the explicit
teaching of phonologically-based decoding skills in the early years of school.
The purpose of this study was to first determine the levels of alphabet
knowledge and phonological awareness in a group of students at school entry
and compare these levels to a group of slightly older students also in their first
year of school. A second aim was to evaluate the efficacy of a nine-week
explicit intervention that targeted phonologically-based skills for improving
decoding ability. This study is a modified replication of a study conducted by
Greaney and Arrow (2012). The study is a non-randomised, pretestintervention-
posttest design with one control group. A total of 30 students were
included in the study. The intervention group involved a new entrant class while
the control group involved a year one class. All students were assessed using a
range of phonologically-based assessments. The intervention group received
the intervention in addition to their regular literacy programme while the control
group only received their regular literacy programme. The results showed that
the students within the intervention group entered school with a range of
phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge. A key finding was that the
students who had received the intervention significantly outperformed the
control group on two measures of isolated decoding (the Burt word reading test
and pseudoword reading) when pretest letter sound knowledge was controlled.
The results of this study highlight the importance of using phonologically-based
assessments with students as soon as they start school in order to identify
those at risk and plan effective programmes to meet the needs of these
students.
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Keywords
New Zealand literacy, Reading in primary school, Emergent literacy, Phonologically-based reading, Literacy programmes