Visual Phonics Intervention for Young Learners

1
Visual Phonics Intervention for Young Learners

• Abby Basbagill

2
Overview of Previous Research

• Visual phonics has proven effective in teaching
  letter-sound relationships to deaf and
  hard-of-hearing students thereby improving
  students overall reading achievement.
• There is support for the use of STS/VP with
  kindergarten through 3rd grade students with
  hearing impairments. The students demonstrated
  improvement on rhyming judgments and decoding.

3
Overview of Previous Research

• A study found that kindergarten children who were
  at risk for reading failure could improve their
  phonemic awareness and letter-sound relationship
  skills when their reading program was
  supplemented with STS/VP.
• Another study suggested that after 1 year of
  STS/VP as a supplement of the regular reading
  instruction, kindergarten and first grade
  participants demonstrated statistically
  significant increases on standardized measures.

4
Whats the issue?

• Researchers must identify instructional
  strategies that are effective for the more
  difficult to teach young child as early as
  preschool. These instructional strategies should
  be teacher and learner friendly yet lend
  themselves to adaptations necessary to meet
  learners individualized needs.

5
Visual Phonics

• Visual Phonics is a unique intervention tool that
  uses a multisensory approach to teaching phonemic
  awareness and phonics skills.
• For younger learners, being able to see and feel
  phonological concepts serves to establish,
  enhance, or reinforce the literacy foundation
  provided by phonological awareness.

6
Visual Phonics

• STS/VP provides a hand sign for every phoneme in
  the English language. Each hand sign imitates
  some aspect of the mouth, tongue, and/or throat
  movements needed when producing the sound and in
  some cases, provides visual or kinesthetic links
  to letter shapes.
• Written symbols can be drawn under complex
  vowels, digraphs, and irregular spellings to
  clarify sounds in printed context for struggling
  readers.
• This approach puts the multisensory instruction
  at the level of sounds, not letters, providing a
  unique and consistent foundation for phonemic
  awareness and letter-sound relationships

7
What type of skills can be taught?

• Literacy skill development
• Letter/sound relations
• Blend/sound relations
• Spelling
• Reading fluency
• Communication

8
Prerequisite Skills Required

• Prerequisites for visual phonics include
  imitation, vision and hand movement abilities.
• As long as the hand sign is not similar to any
  other hand signs and consistent to the learner
  the hand sign can be modified for those who do
  not have excellent motor skills.

9
Visual Phonics compared to other strategies

• While multisensory approaches in the classroom
  are not unusual many of the multisensory
  approaches used in reading involve only
  tangentially related activities (e.g. tracing
  letters, drawing letters in the air, substituting
  colors for sounds to give the children
  representations of phonemes).
• While these activities may have some benefit they
  may not provide explicit and systematic
  instruction on the target reading skill.
• For younger learners, being able to see and feel
  phonological concepts serves to establish,
  enhance, or reinforce the literacy foundation
  provided by phonological awareness

10
Supplemental Strategy

• Cihon, Gardner, Morrison, and Paul (2008) found
  that kindergarten children who were at risk for
  reading failure could improve their phonemic
  awareness and letter-sound relationship skills
  when their reading program was supplemented with
  STS/VP.
• Visual Phonics can be used to explicitly teach
  targets a student is having difficulties with
  supplemental to their current curriculum.

11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)