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The impact of visual phonics on the phonological awareness and speech production of a student who is deaf: a case study
__Paragraph__ This study explored the effectiveness of Visual Phonics as a reading instructional tool when used in conjunction with a modified version of the Fountas and Pinnell Kindergarten Phonics Curriculum. The Fountas and Pinnell Curriculum is a compilation of minilessons that engage students in learning about, recognizing, and using letters, lettersounds, and words. The study participant was a 4-year-old deaf child who had a cochlear implant. The goal of the study was to determine whether the student’s phonological awareness and speech production improved over the course of a 6-week intervention. Identical pre- and postintervention tests were administered to measure the extent of any improvement. It was found that Visual Phonics used with a phonics-based curriculum significantly increased phonological awareness and speech production; implying that the use of Visual Phonics cues with a phonics curriculum can support phonological awareness and provide an alternative source of information about spoken and written language.

__Bib__ Smith, A., Wang, Y. (2010). The impact of visual phonics on the phonological awareness and speech production of a student who is deaf: a case study. American Annals of the Deaf. 155(2). 124-130.

Phonological awareness and decoding in deaf/hard-of-hearing students who use visual phonics
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This study was designed to examine the relationship between phonoligcal awareness and the amount of time spent in a special "Visual Phonics" literacy instruction program. Two unique performance tasks, both using visual phonics to aid the student in working through the exercises, were used to measure the students' reading ability. The first task was a a phonological awareness task, a rhyming task where the student had to choose the two pictrues that rhyme from a group of three. The second task was a decoding exercise involving pseudohomophones, which are letter strings that when "pronounced" sould like an English word, such as "FOCS" meaning fox. Both tasks used Visual Phonics symbols in place of letters to "spell out" the word answers. The study assessed 10 Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing students, ranging in grade from Kindergarten to Third, who were receiving literacy instruction that utilized a sign supported curriculum. The students' reading ability was measured in correlation with the length of time they spent in the newly introduced "Visual Phonics" literacy instruction program. The hypothesis was that literacy instruction using visual Phonics with Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing students would be correlated with increased ability to carry out phonological awareness and decoding tasks. The findings indicated that these students were able to use phonological information to make rhyme judgments (describe) and to decode; however, no relationship between performance on reading ability and length of time in literacy instruction with visual phonics was found.

__Bib__ Narr, R.F. (2008). Phonological awareness and decoding in deaf/hard-of-hearing students who use visual phonics. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. 13(3). 405-416.