| The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability for deaf students. The research questions were (1) What is the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability for deaf students? (2) Is phonemic awareness a necessary but not sufficient skill for the reading development of deaf students? Participants were twenty-nine (29) deaf primary school students enrolled in a residential school for the deaf The dependent variable, reading ability, was measured by a retelling task. The independent variables were age, language ability, and phonemic awareness. Language ability was determined through expert analysis of participant interviews. Phonemic awareness was measured by a word-to-word matching task. Descriptive techniques and multiple regression analysis were employed to analyze the data. Results indicated that reading ability was significantly correlated to language ability, but not to phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness did not contribute to any of the variance in reading ability. The results of this study question the role of phonemic awareness as necessary for reading development to occur. |
