Developing Assessment and Teaching Program for Learning Hiragana Letters

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The present study aimed at developing assessment and educational program as well as applying them to those children and adults with reading difficulties including hiragana letters. First, data which was based on 90 normal 4-to-6 year olds (Sakaguchi, et al'91) was used to modify the Bisyllable Word Test originally designed for aphasic patients (Tezuka, 1987). This modified version was then transformed into a computer soft program by using FCAI (Horiguchi, 1995). Thus, the Bisyllable Word Test, version 2 was again administered to the aphasic patients and high school students with mental retardation (Sato, et al, '96). This soft was found to be useful in assessment and teaching reading hiragana letters to the developmentally handicapped children and aphasic patients. This FCAI program was then developed into other educational programs, such as "shiritori" (finding last syllable of a word and making into a new word which starts with that last syllable) (Kobayashi, et al, '95). Application of "shiritori" games in teaching a developmentally handicapped child was also reported (Iitaka, et al, '95). The final report is written in such way that special education teachers and speech therapists could make use of FCAI program in their teaching or therapy.