The Effect of phonemic awareness on EFL word recognition in a Sample of Arabic Native Preschool Children Speakers

Abstract

This study examined the effect of phonemic awareness training on word recognition of English as a foreign language. Sixty-four children from a kindergarten (mean age 5.4 years; range: 5.55.9) participated in the study (n= 32) for the Experimental group, (n=32) for the control group. All participants were Arabic native speakers living in Tanta, Egypt at the time of the study and they reported a low reading ability of English language. Eight weeks of phonemic awareness training was assigned merely to experimental group (EG) whereas no phonemic intervention was assigned to control group (CG). A three subscale of Word Recognition Ability Task (WRAT) measures the changes obtained in the dependent variable. Results indicated statistically significant differences among the experimental and control groups on measures of phonemic awareness and reading. These results suggest that phonemic awareness training for low achieving beginning readers could be beneficial.