Kim Freeman

Phonemic Awareness

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

Assessing Phonemic Awareness

Implications for the classroom

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to manipulate phonemes in spoken words. Successful development of phonemic awareness leads to word recognition, comprehension, and spelling. Students who received training in phonemic awareness made significant progress in reading and spelling acquisition when compared to students who did not receive training (Yopp 1992). Children who do not develop phonemic awareness miss critical skills in the reading process. Research demonstrates that directly teaching PA to young children causes them to respond more rapidly to beginning reading instruction and results in improved reading development (Byrne & Fielding,Barnsley, 1993; NRP,2000).

When assessing phonemic awareness, students should be able to perform the following tasks:

Recognize individual sounds in words /m/ /a/ /n/

Recognize the same sound in different words m-ad, l-ad

Recognize the word with the different sound in a sequence of words (cold, sold, mold, loud)

Listen to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable

word /c/ /a/ /t/ cat

Break a word into its sounds by counting the sounds in each word cat /c/ /a/ /t/ -3

Recognize what word remains when a specific phoneme is left out dog /d/-og

Phonemic awareness instruction can be a fun activity if the teacher involves children in various language activities. The classroom should be full of print with word walls and charts. The teacher must have an understanding that phonemic awareness does not come easy for all children; therefore, it is important to individualize instruction for the success of all the children in the classroom. Beginning readers need many authentic opportunities to explore reading and writing, as well as being exposed to many different forms of text(Nichols,Rupley,Rickelman,Algozzine, 2004). Because instruction is complex, it is important that teachers are knowledgeable about the skills related to phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, Onset and Rhyme.

References

Allor,J., Denny,R., Kristin & Gansle. (2006). The Stop & Go Phonemic Awareness Game: Providing Modeling, Practice and Feedback. __Preventing School Failure__, 50 (4), pg23.

Beach, S., Young, J. (1997). Children's development of literacy resources in kindergarten: A model. __Reading Research and Instruction__, 36 pg241-265.

Nichols, W., Rupley,W., Rickelman, R., Algozzine, B. (2004). Examining Phonemic Awareness and Concepts of Print Patterns of Kindergarten Students.__Reading Research and Instruction,__43(3),pg56-82.

External Links

Reading Rockets: Teaching Phonemic Awareness Letter Knowledge

www.readingrockets.org

Fostering Phonemic Awareness and Vocabulary

www.thecenterweb.org

Emerging Reading and Word Identification Skills

www.eduplace.com

Phonemic Awareness knowledge and concepts of print

www.sbcco.org

RICA Content Specifications

Commentary by Vanessa Avis

Kim here are few proofreading edits that I hope will help with the setup of your page.

1. When segmenting a word into individual sounds each phoneme is placed in between two lines, like this: man= /m//a//n/.

2. If you align all of your writing on the left (remove all indents) the boxes that appear on your final page will disappear.

3.When you omitted the /d/ in dog, you stated what remained is go. It should be og.

I think you did a good job explaining the various skills children are expected to achieve with phonemic awareness instruction. I also found in Michael Pressley's book a wealth of studies. He particulary refers to the Bradley & Bryant study as being one of the first quality studies on phonemic awareness. This may give you some historical perspective. Hope these references help.

Pressley, M.,(2006). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York, NY:Guilford Press

Bradley,L., & Bryant,P.E.(1983)Categorizing sounds and learning to read:A causal connection. Nature,301,419-421.

Commentary by Philicia Randolph

Kim, I think you did a really good job dissecting the individual phonemic awareness skills that students need to be on their way to becoming proficient readers. You were concise and you did a fine job of linking your page to your classmates. However, I think it would help if you named the specific skills so that people reading your page could become familiar with the terminology used in Reading instruction and research. In addition, there are eight skills listed in research but you only refer to six in your presentation. You refer to phoneme isolation #1, phoneme identify #2, phoneme categorization #3, phoneme blending #4, phoneme segmentation #5, and phoneme deletion #6. Phoneme addition (where children make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word) and phoneme substitution (where children subtitute one phoneme for another to make a new word) were not included. For more information, you can go to the National Institute for Literacy website at www.nifl.gov. I will also have a copy of this document in class on Thursday if you want to see it.