The Effect of Poetry Focused Supportive Educational Program to Preschool Children's Phonological Awareness

Abstract

The study aims to examine the effect of the Poetry Focused Supportive Educational Program (PFSEP), which was prepared for preschool children, on children's phonological awareness skills. In order to support the phonological awareness of preschool children, poetry focused educational program was developed using phoneme awareness, rhythmic utterance and sound games. PFSEP's activity plans cover the phases of word awareness, syllable awareness, rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness, including phonological awareness skills. In addition, while organizing the activities of the PFSEP, care was taken to ensure that it is suitable for practice in the form of play-based activities and small groups in which children can participate more actively. In the research, the pretest-posttest control group was studied in a quasi-experimental design. The research study group was determined by using the easily accessible sampling method among the preschool within the primary schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in the city center of Denizli in the spring term of the 2017-2018 academic year. A total of 32 children, 16 in the experimental group and 16 in the control group, participated in the study. "General Information Form" and "Yangın Erdoğan Erdoğan Phonological Awareness Scale" (YEEPAS) were used as data collection tools. After the pretest was applied to the experimental and control groups, the PFSEP was implemented in the experimental group for eight weeks. After applying the PFSEP, the posttest was administered to the children in the experimental and control groups. As a result of the research, there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group in the total phonological awareness score and all sub-dimension scores of the scale. The retention test applied to the experimental group four weeks after the post-test supports the significant difference. This result shows that the PFSEP is effective in improving phonological awareness skills.