Turkish Adaptation of Visual Phonics

Reading is one of the most significant academic skills and numerous students have difficulties with reading including students who are deaf and hard of hearing. An average student with hearing impairments graduates from a high school with a fourth-grade reading comprehension level that is alarmingly poor. Several reasons may cause this low reading achievement and one of them is a lack of phonological knowledge. Unfortunately, deaf and hard of hearing students mostly do not receive instruction that is phonics based. Even though the curriculum should be the same for all students, instructions need to be differentiated based on students' needs. Visual Phonics is a teaching tool to improve phonological skills using multisensory modalities and has the promise to improve the phonological skills of students with reading difficulties, especially for students who are deaf and hard of hearing. A growing body of research studies supported the effectiveness of this evidenced based strategy. Although Visual Phonics has been successfully utilized for almost four decades in the USA, it has not been used in Turkey and there is no strategy similar to it. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to inform educators and parents about Visual Phonics and to adapt it to the Turkish Language. [This paper was published in: "EJER Congress 2023 International Eurasian Educational Research Congress Conference Proceedings," Ani Publishing, 2023, pp. 308-321.]