Validating Scliar’s early literacy system: A grapheme-phoneme relation

Abstract

The main purpose is discussing Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System (SSA) first validity evidence. Method: Sixteen subjects (10 girls and 6 boys) comprised the Experimental Group, EG (mean age 6.02) and 16 subjects (7 girls and 9 boys) formed the Control Group, CG (mean age 6.10). At the experiment beginning, the EG was submitted to an intervention program based on SSA. Two master degree students developed the experiment, guided by Scliar-Cabral, during 2011. They visited the EG’s school twice each week. After this intervention, both groups read aloud a list of 38 pseudo-words with four or five graphemes, one of the tasks composing the Battery of Reception and Production of Verbal Language (Scliar-Cabral, 2003b, 119-250).  Each pseudo-word was signaled by the experimenter. The task was designed to assess children’s ability to convert a grapheme into its correspondent phoneme. Results: Using the confidence level of 5% (α = 0.05), with freedom (df) degree 30, we obtained a p- value of 0.01 as a result of a t test (independent samples, two-tailed test, equal variances). This value is below the limit for the null hypothesis acceptance, that is p > α = 5%. Thus, there is no more than 1% chance that the differences between the data averages from the two classes are randomly determined. The effect size was large, with a Cohen’s d value of 0.97. Test results indicate that SSA application influenced the experimental group performance