An exploration of phonological awareness and phonemic-to-graphemic awareness intervention on phonological skills and reading

Reading standards continue to be a pressing issue in many countries and this is a situation currently reflected in the United Kingdom.

In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment ranking, the UK ranked 22nd out of 72 countries in reading.

This is highly concerning as the assessment evaluates 15-year-olds' understanding and use of written language.

Towards the end of compulsory schooling, it is expected that young people would have developed fluent decoding skills as a foundation to good reading comprehension.

The focus and concern surrounding reading standards and therefore literacy has led to a range of research into what intervention works to support the development of literacy skills and reading.

Systematic phonics has been recommended as an effective method of instruction in supporting early readers. Most research label phonics as an intervention, which refer to an intervention targeting phoneme-to-grapheme awareness.

A systematic review was undertaken to evaluate if 'phonics intervention' is effective in improving reading ability of children with special educational needs.

The review indicated that phonics instruction had minimal impact on improving reading skills in this group of children.

One of the main factors that led to this conclusion was the lack of rigorous research with robust methodological quality.

The empirical paper aimed to explore if a brief intervention focusing on phonological awareness and phonemic-to-graphemic awareness delivered through Precision Teaching impact on phonological skills and reading in children with English as an additional language (EAL).

The experiences of Teaching Assistants (TAs) who work alongside children with EAL was also explored.

The results showed that the intervention impacted some outcome measures as expected but not to the extent that was hypothesised.

The empirical paper also explored if similar patterns of findings could be seen in EAL children living in a predominantly non-English speaking country.

The findings showed slightly different results to participants in the UK. Implications of these findings were discussed in relation to supporting children with EAL to read.

The researcher finally discusses how the findings from the review paper and the empirical paper will be disseminated.

Activities that will be undertaken by the researcher includes presenting at a research conference so these findings can be shared with a specialist audience.

The researcher plans to share these findings with participants of the empirical paper so these can influence practice within the school setting.