Letter's recognition in early literacy through snakes and ladder games

This study aims to determine the process of applying the game of snakes and ladders in increasing letter recognition in children aged 4-5 years at the Pembina State Kindergarten of Langsa City and to see the activities of children in learning to recognize letters using the game of snakes and ladders. This research is a type of Classroom Action Research (CAR). The subjects in this study were the 17 children of group B of the Pembina State Kindergarten in Langsa City. The method used in data collection, namely, observation and interviews. Data collection techniques using descriptive quantitative. The results of the study showed that the game of snakes and ladders can improve children's ability to recognize letters. At the time of pre-action observation, the percentage of ability to recognize letters was 43% with indicators recognizing letter symbols 15%, making meaningful scribbles 15%, writing and speaking letters (A-Z) 11.7%. In the first cycle the percentage of increase in children's letter recognition was 66.4% with a category of 15 children starting to develop 2 children developing according to expectations (BSH) with indicators recognizing letter symbols 20.5%, making meaningful scribbles 23.5%, writing and writing. pronounce the letters (AZ) 22%. Furthermore, in cycle II there was a very significant increase, namely 98% with the criteria of 13 children developing as expected (BSH) and 4 children developing very well (BSB) with indicators recognizing letter symbols 33%, making meaningful scribbles 32%, writing and speaking letters (AZ) 32%. Based on the description of the results of the research before the action, cycle I and cycle II, it can be concluded that the snake and ladder game is able to improve the ability to recognize children's letters in the Pembina State Kindergarten of Langsa City.

PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ KNOWLEDGE AND AWARENESS OF SUPPORTING EARLY LITERACY

This study aims to investigate preschool and primary school preservice teachers’ knowledge and awareness of early literacy skills. Basic qualitative research approach was applied and data were collected through interview forms. A total of 158 preservice teachers (78 preschool preservice teachers and 80 primary school preservice teachers) attending the faculty of education at a state university in Turkey participated in the study. Data obtained from the participants were content analyzed. The results revealed that preservice teachers studying at both departments are familiar with early literacy skills while they have limited knowledge of its content and sub-skills. It is also found that most of the preschool preservice teachers define early literacy as letter recognition and pronunciation, school readiness and learning how to read and write at an early age; and primary school preservice teachers as learning how to read and write at an early age. Since preservice teachers representing both groups have misconceptions about the concept of early literacy, it would be appropriate to organize courses that offer examples of classroom practices concerning early literacy skills for preservice teachers attending the undergraduate program

Co-occurrence statistics affect letter processing

Reading requires the successful encoding of letter identity and position within a visual display, a process that relies on both visual and linguistic resources. In a series of experiments, we investigate whether readers’ lifelong experience with letter co-occurrence regularities supports letter processing. Skilled readers were briefly exposed to strings of five consonants; critically, letters in position 2 and 4 were embedded in either high (B in MBL) or low (PBG) transitional probability (TP) triplets. When presented with two strings differing by the critical letter (e.g., MBLSD vs. MCLSD), participants correctly identified the right option more often in high-TP than low-TP contexts, regardless of position. Experiment II featured both a Same-Different and a Reicher-Wheeler task with response time constraints, and further qualified the contextual facilitation effect, with high-TP eliciting faster ‘same’ judgements only for letters in position 2. In a third experiment, context had no effect on Same-Different matchings with strings of pseudo-characters sharing letter low-level visual features. Our results indicate that co-occurrence statistics affect letter recognition in tasks that emphasize whole-string processing. This effect is genuinely orthographic, as it is conditional on intact letter identities, and with increasing task demands it only surfaces for letters close to word onset.

Emergence of a compositional neural code for written words: Recycling of a convolutional neural network for reading

The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of human inferotemporal cortex that emerges at a fixed location in the occipitotemporal cortex during reading acquisition and systematically responds to written words in literate individuals. According to the neuronal recycling hypothesis, this region arises through the repurposing, for letter recognition, of a subpart of the ventral visual pathway initially involved in face and object recognition. Furthermore, according to the biased connectivity hypothesis, its reproducible localization is due to preexisting connections from this subregion to areas involved in spoken-language processing. Here, we evaluate those hypotheses in an explicit computational model. We trained a deep convolutional neural network of the ventral visual pathway, first to categorize pictures and then to recognize written words invariantly for case, font, and size. We show that the model can account for many properties of the VWFA, particularly when a subset of units possesses a biased connectivity to word output units. The network develops a sparse, invariant representation of written words, based on a restricted set of reading-selective units. Their activation mimics several properties of the VWFA, and their lesioning causes a reading-specific deficit. The model predicts that, in literate brains, written words are encoded by a compositional neural code with neurons tuned either to individual letters and their ordinal position relative to word start or word ending or to pairs of letters (bigrams).

Application of Neural Network in Letter Recognition Using the Perceptron Method

Modeling with neural networks is the learning and adjustment of an object. The perceptron method is a learning method with supervision in a neural network system. In designing a neural network that needs to be considered is the number of specifications that will be identified. A neural network consists of a number of neurons and a number of inputs. To identify some letters, it takes several neurons to distinguish them. These neurons will generate a combination value that is used to identify the letters. so that the resulting network must have parameters that can be set by changing through the rules of learning with supervision.

Learning by Doing Intervention: Addressing Phonological Difficulties of Children through Audiolingual Method and Total Physical Response

Phonological awareness is a critical skill that children must master during the early foundations of literacy. It is considered a highly accurate predictor of a child’s success in learning to read. However, at the expected age, there are cases in which children have not developed phonological awareness that consequently result in poor reading skills. This case study sought to determine the alphabet knowledge of two seven-year-old children and address their difficulties in phonological awareness through the alphabetic code. The researchers conducted ten sessions of phonological interventions to children with identified language learning difficulties in reading. The data analysis and collection process included curriculum document reviews, diagnostic assessments, phonological interventions, and evaluation. Diagnostic results indicated that the children have difficulties in letter recognition of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) patterns, blending, and segmentation of phonemes. However, anchoring on the principles of learning-by-doing delivered through oral-situational as a core language approach, the interventions in this case study were found effective for phonics instruction. The audio-lingual method and the total physical response in learning phonics, or letter sounds, activated children’s basic phonological skills. Repetition, drilling, memorisation and performing language or vocabulary concepts using physical movement to react to verbal input can lessen the phonological difficulties of children. In light of the current global situation, no previous studies have applied a case study utilizing both audiolingualism and total physical response to address the phonological issues of non-readers. Hence, this study offers scientific and pedagogical implications.

PENGEMBANGAN MEDIA PEMBELAJARAN UNTUK PENGENALAN HURUF PADA ANAK USIA DINI BERBASIS AUGMENTED REALITY

ABSTRAKPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk menghasilkan suatu produk berupa media pembelajaran pengenalan huruf berbasis Augmented Reality (AR) pada anak usia 4-5 tahun. Dikarenakan belum adanya media pembelajaran pengenalan huruf berbasis AR, yang mana pembelajaran tersebut dapat memfokuskan dalam pembelajaran pengenalan, pengejaan serta menirukan suara huruf pada media. Metode yang digunakan pada penelitian ini adalah metode penelitian R&D (Research and Development) dengan model pengembangan ADDIE. dengan lima tahap yaitu analisis, desain, pengembangan, implementasi dan evaluasi. Media pembelajaran berbasis Augmented Reality ini telah di validasi oleh beberapa pakar yaitu pakar media, pakar bahasa dan pakar materi. Hasil validasi oleh pakar media rata-rata sebesar 86% dengan kategori sangat valid, hasil validasi oleh pakar bahasa rata-rata sebesar 78% dengan kategori valid dan hasil validasi oleh pakar materi rata-rata sebesar 89% dengan kategori sangat valid. Selain divalidasi oleh beberapa ahli, media pembelajaran ini juga telah di uji coba kepada guru dan orangtua. Hasil uji coba terhadap guru TK Kartika X-12 sebesar 90,6% dengan kategori sangat valid dan orangtua dengan hasil rata-rata skala kecil dan skala besar sebesar 95,5% dengan kategori sangat valid. Dari hasil tersebut, maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa media pembelajaran pengenalan huruf pada anak usia 4-5 tahun berbasis Augmented Reality dapat dikategorikan valid dan layak digunakan serta bisa dikembangkan.Kata kunci: Augmented Reality, Media Pembelajaran, Pengenalan Huruf ABSTRACTThis study aims to produce a product in the form of Augmented Reality-based letter recognition learning media for children aged 4-5 years. Because there is no AR-based letter recognition learning media, which learning can focus on learning recognition, spelling and imitating the sound of letters on the media. This research method uses the R&D (Research and Development) research method with the ADDIE. This Augmented Reality-based learning media has been validated by several experts, namely media experts, linguists and material experts. The average validation result by media experts is 86% in the very valid category, the average validation result by linguists is 78% in the valid category and the validation results by material experts are on average 00% in the valid category. Besides being validated by several experts, this learning media has also been tested on teachers and parents. The test results on TK Kartika X-12 Kindergarten teachers were 90.6% with a very valid category and parents with an average result of a small scale and a large scale of 95.5% with a very valid category. From these results, it can be concluded that the learning media for recognizing letters in children aged 4-5 years based on Augmented Reality can be categorized as valid and feasible to use and can be developed.keywords: Augmented Reality, Learning Media, Letter Recognition

Write, Attend and Spell

Text entry on a smartwatch is challenging due to its small form factor. Handwriting recognition using the built-in sensors of the watch (motion sensors, microphones, etc.) provides an efficient and natural solution to deal with this issue. However, prior works mainly focus on individual letter recognition rather than word recognition. Therefore, they need users to pause between adjacent letters for segmentation, which is counter-intuitive and significantly decreases the input speed. In this paper, we present 'Write, Attend and Spell' (WriteAS), a word-level text-entry system which enables free-style handwriting recognition using the motion signals of the smartwatch. First, we design a multimodal convolutional neural network (CNN) to abstract motion features across modalities. After that, a stacked dilated convolutional network with an encoder-decoder network is applied to get around letter segmentation and output words in an end-to-end way. More importantly, we leverage a multi-task sequence learning method to enable handwriting recognition in a streaming way. We construct the first sequence-to-sequence handwriting dataset using smartwatch. WriteAS can yield 9.3% character error rate (CER) on 250 words for new users and 3.8% CER for words unseen in the training set. In addition, WriteAS can handle various writing conditions very well. Given the promising performance, we envision that WriteAS can be a fast and accurate input tool for smartwatch.