Abstract:
This study aimed to examine the extent to which resource room teachers implement the phonological awareness strategy and its relationship with the development of reading skills among students with learning difficulties in Palestine, considering several demographic variables. The researcher employed the descriptive correlational method due to its suitability for the nature of the research problem and used a questionnaire as the main tool to collect data from resource room teachers in public schools. The findings indicated that teachers’ implementation of the phonological awareness strategy was generally high across most of its domains, and that such implementation contributed significantly to improving students’ reading skills, particularly in connecting letters to their corresponding sounds, enhancing phoneme segmentation and blending skills, and increasing reading fluency. The results also showed no statistically significant differences attributed to teachers’ gender, educational qualifications, or years of experience, suggesting a consistent level of strategy application across different teacher backgrounds. Furthermore, a positive correlation was found between the degree of phonological awareness development and students’ improvement in reading skills, highlighting the crucial role of phonological awareness in fostering reading abilities. Based on these findings, the study recommended activating specialized training programs for resource room teachers and providing a rich educational environment with supportive tools and activities, which would enhance the quality of educational services for students with learning difficulties and promote their academic success and educational adaptation
