Does Daily Exposure through the Use of Nursery Rhymes Better Support Students’ Phonological Awareness Skill Development?

The purpose of this study is to determine the best way to help students develop phonological awareness skills. It seeks to answer these questions: Can the use of nursery rhymes help to develop phonological awareness skills in preschool? Will the use of nursery rhymes help students learn to listen and hear the play with words, and therefore understand the concepts of phonological awareness with ease? If there is phonological awareness practice that is routinely embedded daily into the classroom schedule, will student notice the key skills quicker and develop the concept deeper than students’ develop in the past who have not been exposed to as intense phonological awareness activities daily? NURSERY RHYMES BENEFIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS 4 Does Daily Exposure Through the Use of Nursery Rhymes Better Support Students’ Phonological Awareness Skill Development? With the shift of every decade, there is something new and exciting that increases with popularity. In the twenty-first century, we are seeing high increase for technology advancement and more busy families than in previous decades. It is becoming more and more evident as night time stories are now iPad shows in some families, nursery rhyme play in the morning has been taken over by iPad games, and car ride conversations and I spy is less frequent with DVDs. With the replacement of screen time students are receiving fewer amounts of vocalized words being spoken back and forth, leading to fewer conversations, less make believe storytelling, and playing with silly rhymes to pass the time. This is particularly concerning with the increase in academic skills being required within a child’s kindergarten year. Another shift with the decade is the academic push down of grade level expectations. Many factors play a big role in a child’s educational experience and one that many teachers may or may not agree on is the increased curriculum that they are having to use. Kindergarten students when they begin the year are already expected to know a majority of both uppercase and lowercase letter names and begin to know their sounds. Within the first week, they are already working to write sentences, while some children may not even know how to write their names. For those children who were not able to receive a highly credited preschool education prior to kindergarten they may feel behind before they even get started. Children not receiving early literacy experiences leads to considerable challenges in students acquiring reading skills (Terrell, 2018). Without helping students play with words and sounds at a young age, they are at risk of developing a deficit in phonological awareness and related processing skills. There has been a great amount of studies showing students exposure to NURSERY RHYMES BENEFIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS 5 phonological skills during early years hits the child’s zone of proximal development period (Rohde, 2015; Terrell, 2018; Piasta, 2016). Students who are able to develop adequate phonological skills prior to kindergarten tend to be a strong predictor of later achievement in literacy. Alphabetic knowledge is another high predictor of later reading success. Review of the Literature The Importance of Emergent Literacy Many parts of language and literacy skill development is natural and spontaneous in its nature. However, phonological awareness skills are not that easy and take more work and planning to learn. These skills are not naturally developing. With that, there is the need for children to receive some form of valuable early literacy education prior to entering kindergarten. As many children spend time in daycares or preschools, most any traditional preschool curriculum hit on a single skill for the week and have a rotating cycle of phonological awareness skills they are working on. What research is showing now is that effective instruction needs to be brief, explicit lessons, and taught through multiple distributed instructional cycles (Jones et al., 2012). “Recent research studies indicate that phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are highly correlated with later reading accuracy and fluency” (Brand, 2006, p. 133). The authors Frey and Fisher (2010) did a study looking at the physical changes of the brain while children received instruction in language building activities. Putting the major neuroscience aside for now, Frey and Fisher (2010) state how Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to physically change, is an important consideration given that our actions can permanently alter the learner’s brain. Neuroplasticity is an important concept in early childhood education because of the role of background knowledge.is built through direct and indirect experiences and.these new neural NURSERY RHYMES BENEFIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS 6 pathways are used in later reading-related task, such as making connections and visualizing. (Frey & Fisher, 2010, p. 105) With this in mind, it is important to have engaging instruction that makes new knowledge to be acquired, learned, and recalled, build off those pathways already started. In this research the importance of repetition in its ability to lead to automaticity, which is key to helping children increase their fluency and understanding was noted. The importance of visuals in learning and how allowing for children to imitate that of adults are key items to building a foundational learning skill set (Frey & Fisher, 2010). Through these key items, Frey and Fisher discuss how developmentally appropriate practice for children in preschool settings is most certainly needing to take place for making the most of what is stored in children’s brains. Early Literacy in Context. We all know that reading and learning to read is a predominant skill for not only school success but also leading a successful life in the future. In the Teaching Strategies GOLD standards there are clear objectives for each age appropriate development and learning milestones for children that build off of the previous benchmark level. Learning to read starts with the basic idea of a child showing interest in a book. Moving on to a child being able to correctly orient a book and turn the pages left to right starting at the front of the book and moving towards the back. Children then learn various features and gain an understanding that text carries a message and can be meaningful when it is read. Children may also begin to indicate where to start reading and which direction to read the text, as well as, some awareness of various letters, words, and or punctuation in books. The basic beginning concepts of early literacy also includes children’s interactions during reading experiences, book conversations, and text reflections as they ask and answer questions about the book, refer to pictures and contribute particular language from the book at an appropriate time. As children NURSERY RHYMES BENEFIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS 7 begin to identify story related problems and events, through retelling while talking with the adult that is reading to them, children are establishing the function and process of reading. This is a key skill to have well before children begin to try to decode text and begin to read the words themselves. Leigh Rohde (2015) furthers this concept in her scholarly study looking at the way that emergent literary can be viewed. She discusses how “these early skills, include the knowledge and abilities related to the alphabet, phonological awareness, symbolic representation, and communication” and extends the idea that if early literacy was viewed more as an interactive process of skills and context rather than a linear series of individual components children would gain more from their daily experiences (Rohde, 2015, p. 1). It is not new knowledge that children develop oral language skills by using consistent patters and sequences, many researchers have further inquired on this topic. Phonological awareness is similar in this skill development pattern for we know that children typically begin with rhyming and alliteration and then move onto segmenting and blending of phonemes (Rohde, 2015). However, what is not as clear is the path at which children’s “series of associated and concurrent experiences that result in the building of knowledge and skill related to the literacy process” (Rohde, 2015, p. 3). Research has stated how early literacy evolves given a rich literacy experience and knowledgeable adults that of which the child can learn from. What is occurring though is not all children have knowledgeable adults to help them further along in their literacy development. Knowing the stages of development of emergent literacy and the interrelationships between each component is key to being able to scaffold and differentiate the teaching you do to better the learning your students achieve (Rhode, 2015). Rohde’s research looks further into determining the basic components that emergent readers must learn and understand before they can read a NURSERY RHYMES BENEFIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS 8 sentence, passage, or book and then how to get this knowledge available to those whom are in the children’s environments (parent, grandparents, caregivers, daycare providers, early childhood educators). Rohde determined the building blocks for early literacy are these three components (a) Print Awareness, (b) Phonological Awareness, and (c) Oral Language (Rohde, 2015). Print awareness is not only the knowledge of and ability to recognize and name letters, but also identify the sounds of the letters, produce the letter sounds, and match text letters with their sounds. Print awareness also encompasses the concept of print: book handling, knowledge that print carries a message, the difference between a word and a letter, etc. Phonological awareness as defined by Rohde’s is “the ability to detect, identify, and manipulate the sound structure of language” through rhyming and segmenting activities (Rohde, 2015, p.