The PhonicStick: A Swedish Study : How do children age 5 and 6 handle the PhonicStick and will the use of it affect their phonological awareness?

Abstract: Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise, identify and manipulate components in words. Phonological awareness is an important part of the early literacy learning, although researchers disagree on how the connection arises. In the United Kingdom, synthetic phonics is a recommended way to teach literacy and the Jolly Phonics is a common approach within this method. In Sweden, mostly synthetic but also analytic methods are used for literacy teaching. The PhonicStick is developed as a communication device for impaired people and is based on the Jolly Phonics. In this study, the PhonicStick was being tested on children aged 5 and 6 years in mainstream pre-school classes to evaluate the use of it and its use for improvement of phonological awareness. The participating children were randomly divided into a test and a control group. All children were pre- and post-tested to analyse the possible improvement of parts of the phonological awareness. The test group went through three PhonicStick sessions, including different games and tests. The results from the pre- and post-tests of phonological awareness showed no significant differences between the test and control group. However, four out of five PhonicStick tests showed a significant improvement between session 1 and session 3. This shows that the children in the study were able to handle the PhonicStick after only three sessions, including remembering phonics the without visual information and producing words including two or three phonics.