Phonemic Awareness as a Determinant of Reading Abilities of Children with Reading Disabilities in the Buea Municipality, South West Region of Cameroon

Purpose: This study was aimed at examining phonemic awareness as a determinant of reading abilities of children with reading disabilities in the Buea Municipality, South West Region of Cameroon Methodology: This Study Was Based on the Premise That Phonemic Awareness Has Been Identified As The best early indicator of a learner’s reading potentials because it sets the stage for phonics, and literacy. A quasi-experimental design was adopted for the study with 14 participants, 7 in the experimental group and 7 in the control group. A pre-test and post-test were administered to the children before and after the intervention. The instrument used for data collection was a phonemic awareness test that constituted elements of reading, sound identification, deletion of the first phoneme, deletion of the second phoneme, initial phoneme identification and final phoneme identification. Data was analyzed using EpiData Version 3.1 Cohen’s d test and Cramer’s V test. Findings: Results indicated that the phonemic awareness has a significant effect on the reading abilities of children with reading disabilities, this was based on the mean difference of the pre-test (11.37) and post-test (15.17) giving a mean difference of 3.8 with a paired sample t-test of 2.844 giving a significant value of P= 0.05. The study concluded that effective instructions through the development of a child’s ability to understand how individual phonemes can be manipulated and arranged to create words can stop and repair the learning gap and can impart the skills an older reader missed in the earlier grades. Recommendation: Based on the findings, it was recommended that teachers should be more inclusive in their handling of students’ .Also, parents should be encourage to help children back at home to develop reading skills.