This research aims to study the effects of phonological awareness training program using children's song
to the phonological awareness, reading ability and word recognition of the intellectually disabled students
with language disorders and subsequently provide fundamental materials for effective teaching and learning
to improve the language ability of the intellectually disabled students with language disorders that are
closely related to language education. Hence, in keeping with the goals, this research was conducted upon
14 intellectually disabled students with language disorders who study at E special middle school in K city,
Gyeongsang-namdo, allocating seven in the experimental group and the other seven in the control group.
A preliminary testing was conducted in order to prove the homogeneity between the two groups. The
experiment was conducted twice a week, a total of 16 times in 8 weeks from September 9 2013 to
October 25 2013, and while a phonological awareness training program was conducted after school to the
seven students in the experimental group, no actions were taken upon the students in the control group.
A posttest was conducted in order to analyze the results of the training program, for this test a testing
tool identical to the one used for the pretest was used. The testing tool used in this research was the
phonological awareness testing tool developed by Eun-A Baek(2003), the reading assessment tool developed
by Won-Ryeong Lee(2001), and the word recognition testing tool developed by Seong-In Hong(2001) all
to test the phonological awareness, reading ability and word recognition of intellectually disabled students
with language disorders. First, after conducting the phonological awareness training program using children's
song, the sub elements of phonological awareness ability - syllable detection, syllable structure awareness,
syllable body, last syllables, alliteration and rhyme- were recorded and divided into pre-intervention and post-intervention sets to be evaluated, and afterward the differences in the variation between the two sets
were studied. Second, after conducting the phonological awareness training program using children's song,
the sub elements of reading ability - character reading, word reading and pseudoword reading - were
recorded and divided into pre-intervention and post-intervention sets to be evaluated, and afterward the
differences in the variation between the two sets were studied. As a result, it was found out that the
experimental group showed a bigger improvement in the sub elements of reading ability than the control
group. Therefore, this proves that phonological awareness training programs improve the sub elements of
reading ability - namely, word character reading, word reading and pseudoword reading. Third, after
conducting the phonological awareness training program using children's song, the subtypes of word
recognition - nonsense word recognition, meaningful word recognition - were recorded and divided into
pre-intervention and post-intervention sets to be evaluated, and afterward the differences in the variation
between the two sets were studied. As a result, a significant difference in all the sub elements of word
recognition between the experimental and control group was shown. Therefore, it can be said that
phonological awareness training using children's song statistically improves word recognition ability to a
significant degree.