Browsing by Author "Kangas, Karoliina"

The study aims to find out how children perform tasks that measures phonological awareness and what kind of differences they may have in those at the beginning of the first grade. Many researchers have pointed to the fact that there are differences between children in linguistic and phonological awareness So the hypothesis is that there are differences in children per-forming tasks which measures phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the awa-reness of sounds of the words and it is one part of the linguistic awareness. Linguistic aware-ness means paying atenttion to the language and taking an outside reflection to the language. This study was quantitative research and the research method was an experimental study. The research took part in the first class of 25 students, 14 boys and 11 girls. The students ca-me from two different first grades. Data were collected at the beginning of the autumn, and it consisted of four phonological awareness tasks. The tasks were comparing the length of the words, hyphenation of words, and recognize the first and the last sound of the word. The data were analyzed using spss-programme, which was calculated as the average values of the va-riables in the case of phonolocigal awareness of the tasks. The differences between the va-riables examined in the Mann-Whitney U-test. Children who had been in kindergartens pre-school or in primary schools pre-school had sta-tistically significant differences in hyphenation of words. Children who had been in primary schools pre-school performed this task better. They also performed better in comparing the length of the words and recognizing the last sound of the word. It would seem, therefore, that the children who have been in primary schools pre-school are better in phonological aware-ness tasks than children who were been in kindergarten pre-school. However, the material was so small the results cannot be generalized. The results may also be affected by the fact that there were 17 children who have been in kindergartens pre-school and only 7 children in primary schools pre-school. Children from class 1A and 1B had a statistically significant difference in spelling. 1A class did statistically significantly better in hyphenation of words than 1B class. 1A did better in all of the phonological awareness tasks, except in recognizing the last sound of the word task, even though other differences were not statistically significant. 1A class' success in hyphenation task may explain the fact that there have been better hypenater in that class by chance.