Does training with the PhonicStick improve phonological awareness? : A meta study including one new pilot study

Sammanfattning: The PhonicStick is a joystick which has been developed as a communicative device to be used by people with severe physical disabilities. During the developmental phase the possibility of using this device in order to train the phonological awareness of 6 – 8 year old children was examined. The studies conducted did not show any statistical difference in phonological awareness when this was tested with current tests after the children had trained with the PhonicStick. One explanation for this could be that the children had already begun to read and write in school. Therefore, a part of the present study was aimed at investigating if a difference in results on the norm referenced tests could be obtained if the children were 4-5 years old instead of 6-8. Parts of a norm referenced test for phonological awareness and an adapted test material for the PhonicStick were used for this evaluation. The 10 examined children were equally divided into a test and a control group.In addition, a meta study was performed, where all the studies relevant to phonological awareness and the PhonicStick were evaluated. Data from these studies were summarized, and processed statistically. Only two statistically significant (p<0.05) differences could be shown after the training with the PhonicStick: both the test group and the control group obtained better results in the posttest in the test of “phoneme identification” and the test group performed better at the test “word production” then the control group. A possible interpretation of the results could be that there might be an intuitive phonological awareness that can not be tested with the current tests for phonological awareness.