Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) refers to any means of settling disputes outside of the courtroom. It typically includes negotiation, conciliation, and mediation. ADR can save financial and emotional costs. Not only is litigation expensive and time-consuming, but it can be very stressful. You may feel that an important part of your life is on hold while you are waiting for a trial data, wondering and worrying about the outcome. Going to court can make people anxious because they feel they face hard to understand procedures, unfamiliar legal language and win/lose scenarios. On the other hand, you have more control over the format if you use ADR. For example, mediation is a fairly informal process, conducted in regular English and the solution must be agreed to by both of you. Similarly there is no resolution without agreement in a collaborative law case, and the parties are actively and directly involved in each step of the process including information gathering, evaluation and negotiation.
It should be noted that, different languages have different writing system for example, logographic for Chinese language and alphabetic for English, Finish and German languages (Cain, 2010). It is worth mentioned that majority of research of phonological awareness, word decoding and overall reading development focuses on alphabetic writing system especially on English language. This essay only focuses on alphabetic system because the consistency between speech-sound relationships is not equal in every languages and the relationship between phonological awareness, decoding and skilled reading may vary as well (Cain, 2010). In the following sections evaluate that how are phonological awareness and decoding skills essential for skilled reading:
Phonological Awareness and skilled reading:
The ability of identifying and manipulating the structure of an utterance which involves a wide range of skills for example, letter knowledge, syllabic structure of words, and segmentation of phonemes regardless of the meaning of words is defined as phonological awareness (PA) skills (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). Gillion (2015) described it as a ‘multilevel skills’ of separating words into small unit. He argued that, a word can be described according to the following levels of PA skills:
Syllabic awareness: Syllabic level awareness refers to a realization of divided words into syllables. Each syllable structure requires some principles for example, each syllable need to contain a vowel, for several consonants who cannot be clustered in alphabetic language like English cannot start of end a syllable, Syllable structure follows the stress pattern of word (Gillion, 2015).
Onset-Rime awareness: Within a syllable two parts are involved- onset and rime. This is known as onset-rime awareness (Gillion, 2015). For example, in the word ‘mum’ ‘m’ is the onset and ‘um’ is rime of the syllable. This awareness level can be seen on rhyming test.
Phoneme or phonemic level awareness: Phoneme is described as the smallest unit of sound that change the meaning of a word (Gillion, 2015). For example, the word ‘bad’ contains three phonemes- /b/, /a/, /d/. If one of these is changed, a different word will be created for example /dad/.
For developing efficient reading skills, children need to understand different levels of
