Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty, which mostly originates from difficulty in phonological awareness. Well-developed phonological awareness is one of the basic conditions for skills, such as reading and writing, to develop in pupils to the extent that their learning process is not stymied or slowed down. Pupils with dyslexia face bigger or smaller difficulties in school on a daily basis when assimilating reading and writing skill that is why it is important to additionally promote their phonological awareness, where special education teacher can use carefully planned musical activities.
The possibility of promoting phonological awareness with music or music activities of performing, listening and creating was written about in the theoretical part. In studies, the correlation between rhythmic abilities and phonological awareness stood out especially. The effects of music activities are not limited only to develop music abilities but can be transmitted to the language area because of the analogy between music and language (phonological awareness, reading). The empirical part of the qualitative research (the study was only partly quantified) presents the case study in which a pupil with dyslexia was included. We designed a three-month program with music activities to promote the development of phonological awareness and reading with a pupil. Music activities were set to promote rhythmic and melodic hearing. We evaluated the effects of the program based on the comparison of results on tests before and after the execution of the program, which was copyrighted. During the course of the program, the learning development was studied with the help of the monitoring protocol for observing the child's response in the musical and linguistic fields, which was copyrighted.
Learning results after the music activities program showed progress in pupil with dyslexia in observed areas of musical development in most of the performed tests/subtests. The results of the final measurement, taking into account the results of the re-measurement, in the linguistic field showed that the pupil in the phonological awareness field advanced in: removing the voice in the word, removing the (first) syllable in the word, auditory segmentation (final voice), auditory segmentation – listening, and auditory synthesis. Improvements in reading skills resulted from: reading speed, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. In particular, the speed of loud and quiet reading has improved. We believe that progress in the field of phonological awareness and partially in reading skills is mainly due to the promotion of the skill of musical auditory listening perception and auditory temporal processing, which involves cognitive manipulation with sound-acoustic information. When analyzing the results of the measurements, we took into account aslo the influence of other factors that could have an impact on the results of the measurements (maturation and teaching).
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