ABSTRACT
The attainment of the alphabetic principle is one of the earliest signs of successful literacy acquisition. Public school students from the Dominican Republic have low literacy skills, partly because of not being systematically exposed to the alphabetic principle while learning to read. This paper presents the results of an intervention to teach the alphabetic principle using a tablet-based game. Nineteen kindergarten students were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group during the last month of the 2017 school year. Students from the experimental group played with the game for ten sessions of 20 minutes each. Students from the experimental group outperformed the control group in syllable recognition after the intervention. The intervention did not influence other reading skills. Automatic syllable identification has been shown to boost early literacy acquisition, although it is not sufficient for students to become fluent readers.
Keywords:
Literacy; educational games; software; computer games
Thumbnail
Thumbnail
Control group. Students from this group received regular schooling.
Note. Phonological awareness 1 = initial sound; Phonological awareness 2 = sound discrimination. Gain scores were calculated by subtracting pre-test scores from post-test scores on each literacy sub-skill for each group participant. Error bars are standard deviations. * p < .05 for an independent sample t-test