PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN KINDERGARTEN IN LA TRINIDAD DISTRICT

This study determines the phonemic awareness of kindergarten learners in La Trinidad District. It made use of descriptive research design with the descriptive survey method and the questionnaire as the main data gathering instrument. The respondents of the study were forty public kindergarten teachers in La Trinidad District. The responses were counted, tallied, and subjected to the average weighted mean computation. The findings revealed that the extent of importance of phonemic awareness in kindergarten is very important; the degree of difficulty of the learners on the task in manipulating words is moderately difficult and the degree of seriousness of the factors affecting phonemic awareness is very serious. The conclusions are the following: the difficulty of the task in manipulating words in phonemic awareness is attributed to the learners’ individual capacity to learn and the lack of face to face contact with the learners. The very serious problems encountered by the teachers are attributed to the different learning abilities and disabilities of learners and the current learning modality where they learn phonemic awareness at home wherein their parents have no skills in teaching phonemes.