THE EFFECTS OF A KINESTHETIC SYNTHETIC PHONICS PROGRAM ON PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND PHONICS SKILLS OF STRUGGLING STUDENTS

Abstract

The current study looked at how a Kinesthetic Synthetic Phonics Program affected the phonemic awareness and phonics skills of students who were having trouble. The study used a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test and a post-test control group. Thirty first-grade students who were having trouble were chosen through purposive sampling and put into either an experimental group (n = 15) or a control group (n = 15). The experimental group learned through a kinesthetic synthetic phonics method, while the control group learned in a more traditional way. We used a standardized phonemic awareness test to gather data before and after the intervention. Before the test, the control and experimental groups did about the same (p = .939). The control group showed very little change after the test (p = .200), while the experimental group showed a lot of improvement (p < .001). The independent samples t-test showed that there was a big difference between the groups after the test, t(28) = −21.50, p <.001. The results show that a Kinesthetic Synthetic Phonics Program can help students who are having trouble with phonemic awareness and phonics skills. This supports the use of kinesthetic and multisensory methods in teaching reading and writing to young children.