Reading is a fundamental skill, which is crucial for school learning. Although the literacy process begins in the first grades of primary school, a child develops certain skills that form the basis of initial literacy already in the pre-school period. One of the key concepts for the development of reading skills is phonological awareness. Many children with speech and language disorders also have poor phonological awareness due to their auditory processing deficits and incorrect pronunciation. In order to prevent or limit the problems of children, which are important for the introduction of reading skills, support for children should be therefore provided. Support can take the form of individually targeted training, aimed at compensating for children's problems. In such training, child's strong areas and interest are also taken into account, thus enabling children to learn more easily and effectively. In the master's thesis, we wanted to research whether we could influence the development of phonological awareness in a selected preschool child who has problems in this area. The study included a six-year-old and three-month-old boy with speech and language disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with whom we conducted the training. We conducted an interview with the boy’s mother, which allowed us to identify his strengths and better understand the problems in the field of phonological awareness. As part of the empirical work, we conducted a phonological awareness training with the selected boy, which we designed based on the Phonological Awareness Training by Gillon (2008). The training included 20 sessions lasting 45 minutes. The contents of the sessions were systematically designed to promote phonological awareness as well as also included the boy’s strong areas and interests. The effects of the training were checked with the sub-test Auditory Discrimination of the ACADIA test, the sub-test Rhyming of the Pre-Reading Abilities Test, and the Test of phonological awareness. Comparison of the results before and after the training showed the boy's progress in almost all assessed phonological awareness skills. Specifically in the areas of auditory differentiation, rhyming, identification of initial and final sounds, discrimination the initial sound in word, identification the sound m in word, segmentation of words into sounds and phoneme blending. The exception was the segmentation of words into syllables, in which the boy already achieved a very high result in the initial testing, which remained the same at the final testing. Based on the obtained results, we can conclude that the conducted training contributed to the improvement of the child's phonological awareness. With the master's thesis, we contributed concrete knowledge to the special pedagogical profession about the use of selected training and its effects on working with children with difficulties in the field of phonological awareness.
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