Developing Phoneme Bending Skills of Grade I Pupils through Play-Based Activities

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

In today's schools, too many children struggle with learning to read. Lack of phonemic awareness hinders the ability of the learners to blend sounds into words. In this study, Play-Based activities with blending sounds were employed to the pupils to develop phoneme blending skills. Engaging learners with a lot of fun blending sound activities helped to increase the pupil's phonemic awareness.

METHODS

The researcher used a purposive sampling method. Based on the pre-assessment results, 11 identified pupils underwent intervention through a series of activities in the form of games during the second quarter of the school year 2018-2019. After completing the required sessions, the identified pupils underwent post-phoneme blending assessment, to determine the level of their phoneme blending skills. A paired t-test was also used to find out if the difference is significant or not. The assessment tool, both in pretest and post-test, composed of 15 CVC words, and the mastery levels are categorized into "not mastered" or very poor in phoneme blending (scores ranging 0-4 words), "beginning mastery" or needing improvement in phoneme blending (scores ranging 5-8), "nearing mastery" or good in phoneme blending (scores ranging 9-12) and "mastered" or very good in phoneme blending (scores ranging 13-15).

RESULTS

The mean scores of 11 identified pupils who took the pre-phoneme blending assessment is 3.8181 which falls to not mastered level or very poor in phoneme blending. Thus, an appropriate intervention must be employed. After the intervention, the identified 11 pupils had a mean score of 9.8181 in the post-phoneme blending assessment. This is in the nearing mastery level (good in phoneme blending). There is an increase of scores on the post-assessment that proved the effectiveness of the intervention. Results reveal that the p-value of 0.000 is less than the significance level of 0.05 which indicates better performance of pupils during the post-test. Thus, there is a significant difference in the performance of the pupils

DISCUSSIONS

The results demonstrate that the intervention developed the phoneme blending skills of the identified pupils. Therefore, it is good to note that Play-Based Activities had developed the phoneme blending skills of the identified grade 1 pupils. It is also encouraged that the said activities may also be applied in all learning areas so that pupils would have more learning experiences in phoneme blending development.