Development of an Animation Lesson Entitled Tonal Reading: The Live Syllables of High-level Consonants and the Live Syllables of Paired Low-level Consonants Using Minimal Pairs to Improve the Tonal Reading of Primary School Students at Fund Education Schools in Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya Province

Abstract

     This research aims to 1) study the need to develop an animation lesson entitled Tonal Reading: The Live Syllables of High-level Consonants and the Live Syllables of Paired Low-level Consonants for primary school students in fund education schools in Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya province using minimal pairs, and 2) to develop a high-quality animation lesson entitled Tonal Reading: The Live Syllables of High-level Consonants and the Live Syllables of Paired Low-level Consonants using minimal pairs. The first purpose was achieved through 1.1) a quantitative study, whose data were collected from Thai language primary school teachers working at fund education schools using a need assessment questionnaire regarding animation lesson development, and
1.2) a qualitative study, whose data were gathered using structured interviews. The participants were Thai language teachers at the professional level, linguistics experts, and technology experts. The quantitative data were analyzed using mean (μ), standard deviation (σ), and PNI_modified  The qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis. The data for the second purpose were analyzed using mean and standard deviation.

The findings of this research revealed that 1) concerning the need for animation lesson development, the quantitative results showed that the Mean of the real situations was lower than the Mean of all aspects in the expected situations. When considering each aspect, it was found that the aspect of students’ ability to accurately and precisely vary the tone of the words whose initials are the live syllables of paired low-level consonants was the most needed (PNI_modified = 0.56). The second most needed one was the aspect of students’ ability to notice the differences between the words whose tone mark sound was inconsistent with the form during tone reading practice (PNI_modified = 0.45), and the third most needed aspect was students’ ability to vary accurately and precisely the tone of the words whose initials are the live syllables of high-level consonants (PNI_modified = 0.44). Regarding the qualitative study, the stakeholders commented that high-level and low-level consonants usually cause confusion among students in tonal reading the most because the form and sound of the tone mark in the words with these consonants were not consistent. 2) an animation lesson entitled Tonal Reading: The Live Syllables of High-level Consonants and the Live Syllables of Paired Low-level Consonants using minimal pairs had high quality. That is, the mean was 4.49, and the standard deviation was 0.51.