Supervisors info:
Ευγενία Μαγουλά, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Παιδαγωγικό Τμήμα Δημοτικής Εκπαίδευσης, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Γαλανάκη Ευαγγελία, Καθηγήτρια, Παιδαγωγικό Τμήμα Δημοτικής Εκπαίδευσης, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Αλέξανδρος-Σταμάτιος Αντωνίου, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, Παιδαγωγικό Τμήμα Δημοτικής Εκπαίδευσης, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
A large part of the difficulties experienced by children with mild and moderate mental retardation compared to the majority of their peers is learning at a slower rate, related to more specific rather than abstract concepts, lack of attention and concentration, difficulties in perception and memory, limited thinking skills (ΥΠΠΕΘ,2004). In addition, children with mental retardation have difficulties in phonological awareness, the ability of children to understand that oral speech is composed of linguistic units- the words, which are composed of syllables and phonemes (Taffa, 2001).
As far as the level of phonological awareness of a child is concerned, it functions not only as a predictive indicator of its future reading ability but it can also decisively influence and cause success or failure in reading ability (Porpodas, 2002).
K. Porpodas (2002) considers that children who have not been practiced or have poorly practiced phonological awareness or have learning difficulties in reading, during their studies at kindergarten, would be useful if they can experience learning combined with practices of phonological awareness. In view of: a) firstly, the research by Hatcher et al (1994) that learning to read on children of 7 years of age who faced learning difficulties, was facilitated when combined with the practice of these children in phonological awareness and b) second, that children with intellectual disabilities often need a more systematic and specific learning on learning which can continue one, two or more years after the age of kindergarten (Polyxronopoulou, 1997) we find it quite important to implement an intervention program to develop the phonological awareness level of a child with mental retardation.
The research method that used, was the case study of a child who diagnosed with mental retardation and associated speech problems. After evaluating the child in his weighted test of Konstantinos Porpodas (2002) “Diagnostic Difficulty and Investigation Test”, an intervention program was implemented to enhance his phonological awareness. In this intervention program, we sought to investigate whether there was an improvement in the phonological awareness of the child. We also studied whether this assistance through intervention also affected other areas such as the Reading Decoding, the Reading Understanding and the Short-Term Phonological Information Memory which affect its reading ability.
At the end of the treatment intervention, there was a reassessment of the test. From the results of the reassessment we concluded that the areas in which the student was improved, were Phonological Awareness and Reading concerning the reading and completion of incomplete proposals.
Keywords:
mental retardation, phonological awareness, reading ability, reading decoding, reading comprehension, short-term memory of phonological information
