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AWEJ Volume.3 Number 2. June 2012 pp. 117 - 147
Alfaisal University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Building on Tamimi and Rababah (2007), the present study investigates the efficiency of explicit phonological awareness intervention in contrast with formal classroom instruction on developing phonological awareness skills for Jordanian EFL second-graders in a governmental school. Based on some views (Adams 1990, Yopp 1992, Stanovich 1994, and Chard and Dickson 1999), a phonological training program was designed with focus on five phonological awareness skills: segmentation, isolation, deletion, substitution and blending, and on their respective sub-skills. On measures of Robertson and Salter’s (1997) Phonological Awareness Test (PAT), the experimental group that had undergone 15 40-minute phonological awareness sessions outperformed in deletion, substitution and blending skills the control group which continued to receive formal classroom instruction based on Action Pack 2. The findings corroborate previous research conclusions favoring explicit phonological awareness interventions, and thus call for integrating phonological awareness interventions in Jordanian basic stages’ curricula.
Dr. Yasser Al-Tamimi is an Associate professor of Linguistics at the English Department
of Alfaisal University in Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD degree in phonetics and
phonology from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom in 2002. He teaches a
number of English language and linguistic courses, and his research interest includes
language acquisition, speech pathology, applied linguistics, in addition to phonetics and
phonology