شبكة المعلومات العربية التربوية

Phonological awareness skills are considered essential components that contribute in acquiring and developing reading in children. Research studies indicate that phonological awareness is an important indicator of literacy skills in school. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of both gender differences and age level on phonological awareness skills for preschool children. The sample of the study consisted of 450 preschool children from kg1 and KG2 randomly selected from 32 preschools attached to private schools in the governorate of Muscat, Oman. The study adapted some of the tests included in the phonological awareness test-second edition (PAT-2): rhyme discrimination, rhyme production, sentence segmentation, syllables segmentation, phone segmentation, isolation of first sound, isolation of final sound, isolation of middle sound, deletion of compound words, deletion of phonemes, substitution with cubes, blending of syllables, and blending of phonemes. The study also used two subtests from the comprehensive test of phonological processing (CTOPP-2): matching of the first sound and matching of the last sound. The researcher used the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to examine the effect of both gender and grade level on phonological awareness skills. The results of the study showed no significant main effect of gender in phonological awareness tests. The results also showed a significant main effect of age level in favor of KG2 in most of the phonological awareness skills except for syllable blending. (Published abstract)