Effectiveness of Audio Posters as Innovative Instructional Materials for Enhancing the Phonemic Awareness of Kindergarten Learners: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Phonemic awareness is a fundamental early literacy skill that enables young learners to recognize, identify, blend, segment, and discriminate individual speech sounds in spoken words. Developing this skill during the Kindergarten years is crucial as it provides a foundation for subsequent reading and literacy development. This paper determined the effectiveness of Audio Posters as innovative instructional materials for enhancing the phonemic awareness of Kindergarten learners at Babag II Elementary School, Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was employed involving 60 Kindergarten learners, with 30 learners assigned to the control group and 30 to the experimental group. A researcher-made Phonemic Awareness Development Assessment Tool was used to assess learners' phonemic-awareness performance before and after the intervention. Pretest results showed that all learners in both groups were at the Beginning level. After the intervention, 20 learners (66.67%) in the experimental group reached the Developing level, and 2 (6.67%) reached the Consistent level, while all learners in the control group remained at the Beginning level. The experimental group obtained a higher posttest mean of 136.70 (SD = 11.95) than the control group, which obtained 86.40 (SD = 7.06). Welch’s independent-samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the groups, t(47.05) = -19.84, p < .001. The Audio Poster was associated with improved phonemic awareness among learners. The study recommends using it as supplementary instructional material and continuing to provide structured phonemic-awareness activities. The study developed an Audio Poster-Based Phonemic Awareness Learning Package for Kindergarten learners as its output.