Özet:

Introduction: Weaknesses in phonological awareness skills can be seen in children with reading difficulties, speech sound disorders, stuttering or developmental language disorders which are the disorders speech and language therapists frequently work with. In addition speech and language therapists can make significant contributions to the children on defining, assessing and training the phonological awareness skills with their background knowledge about phonetics and phonology. Therefore, it is recommended that speech and language therapists integrate these skills into their therapy when working with preschool and school-age children with phonological awareness deficits. For all these reasons, speech and language therapist candidates are expected to graduate with a certain knowledge level of phonological awareness. It is thought that determining the knowledge level of speech and language therapist candidates regarding phonological awareness is important in terms of raising better equipped speech and language therapists and increasing the quality of clinical practice. Therefore, the first aim of this study is to determine the knowledge level of speech and language therapist candidates regarding phonological awareness. Also it was aimed to examine whether the knowledge level of the participants differed according to their grade levels, gender, taking lecture or doing research about phonological awareness. Method: In this research participants, were 543 speech and language therapist candidates from various universities of Turkey. In order to collect the data a surrvey was used which is titled ‘Determining the Knowledge Level About Phonological Awareness’. The survey was delivered to the participants via internet. The frequency and percentage values were calculated for the participants who gave correct answers to each item. In addition, Mann Whitney U or Kruskal Wallis H tests were used according to the normal distribution assumption to determine whether the knowledge level of the participants differed according to their grade level, gender, taking lecture or doing research about phonological awareness. Results: As a result of this study, it was seen that a great majority of the participants (94.8%) know that speech and language therapists have important roles on phonological awareness. According to the results 4th grade students, females, those who took lectures and who did research about phonological awareness were more knowledgeable than 1st grade students, males, those who did not take lectures and who did not do research about phonological awareness. On the other hand the results showed that participants' level of knowledge was quite low. Conclusion: It is recommended to enrich the lecture contents on the nature, assessment and training of phonological awareness skills. Practitioners are recommended to increase their theoretical knowledge on the assessment and intervention of phonological awareness skills and reflect their theoretical knowledge to their clinical practice.

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