Phonemic Awareness Assessment in First Grade in Public Primary Schools in Mathira East District of Nyeri County, Kenya

Phonemic Awareness Assessment in First Grade in Public Primary Schools in Mathira East District of Nyeri County, Kenya

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Phonemic Awareness Assessment in First Grade in Public Primary Schools in Mathira East District of Nyeri County, Kenya.pdf (479.65 KB)

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Authors

Njoroge, Martin C

Gathigia, Moses G.

Abstract

This study set forth to assess phonemic awareness among Grade One learners of Public Primary Schools in Mathira East District of Nyeri County, Kenya. This study was based on the Sociocultural Theory of human learning. The study population comprised of 40 public primary schools in Mathira East District of Nyeri County, Kenya with a population of 1382 pupils in Grade One. The study sampled 4 public primary schools in line with Gay’s (1996) postulation that a sample size of 10% would be representative. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation was individually administered by the researchers to test whether the Grade One learners could distinguish the basic phonemes within the spoken word. Each test was marked and scores for each learner recorded. The learners were then categorised into phonemically aware, demonstrating emerging phonemic awareness and lacking phonemic awareness. The study also found that learners experienced pronunciation problems with the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative sound /ʃ/, the voiced dental fricative /ð/, the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /dʒ/, the high, long, back and rounded vowel /u:/ and the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /eɪ/. Two linguists with a bias in language education were also interviewed by the researcher in order to recommend the best strategies of enhancing phonemic awareness. The study recommends that phonemic awareness strategies that take into cognizance the alphabetic principle and orthographic familiarity should be employed in the teaching of phonemes. This study concludes that scaffolding explicit phonemic awareness strategies is necessary to ensure that students achieve success in reading and writing.

Description

Journal article

Keywords

Phonemic awareness , Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation , Sociocultural Theory

URI

https://repo.pacuniversity.ac.ke/handle/123456789/1580.2

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