Phonological Awareness
Phonological Awareness Skills
Phonological awareness involves recognizing and manipulating the spoken parts of words. Some examples of what this includes: identifying rhyming words, breaking a word into syllables, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes. Research has demonstrated that for a large number of children who struggle with reading, poorly developed phonological awareness is the main difficulty (Stanovich, 1986).
Since this does not come naturally to the human brain, it is important that phonological skills and knowledge be introduced, practiced, and reviewed systematically and explicitly over time.
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the highest order portion of phonological awareness which relates to the ability to work with individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words. For instance, blending individual sounds into a word, segmenting a word into its individual sounds or deleting a part of a word (e.g., remove the /h/ from ‘hat’).
More information on Phonological Awareness
Recordings:
Phonological Awareness 101 (prerequisite for the recorded sessions below, whether Kinder or Primary and Beyond sessions)
Check out page 24 of Teaching Sounds, Teaching Letters for suggestions of assessment tools, including tracking sheets, page 20 for instructional ideas, page 25 for resources, page 54 for suggested instructional cycles, and page 90 for ideas of playful practice during transitions, outdoor play, centers, as well as whole- and small-group instruction.
Planning for Effective Phonological-Phonemic Awareness Instruction
CONSIDERATIONS FOR EFFECTIVE PRACTICE
Research so far indicates that:
The phonological-phonemic awareness component of a lesson needs to be brief, and contain no more than two to three activities or skills.
Knowledge of foundational concepts (see below) are a key component of building phonological awareness skills.
The targeted skill should be explicitly stated.
A gradual release of responsibility teaching model - I do, We do, You do - strengthens learning.
New skills need time to be practiced and should be reviewed daily.
Choral response for most-group instruction increases opportunities for practice by all students and increases engagement with new skills.
Immediate and explicit corrective feedback helps correct ‘missteps’ before they become habitualized.
The use of gestures, visuals, and manipulatives anchor learning.
It is easier to hear and manipulate larger chunks of sound (i.e., words, syllables, onset-rime) than individual phonemes. Practice of isolating, blending, and segmenting larger units of sound scaffolds the learning and application of these skills with phonemes. Keep in mind that we want to have students working on awareness of individual sounds (i.e. the phoneme level) as quickly as possible as this will have the most impact on reading. Working at the individual sound level is the most important goal (Brady, S., 2020).
Assessment informs where instruction should start on the continuum of skills (see the chart above "Progression of Awareness of Phonemes")
FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS IN KINDERGARTEN
As educators begin planning for, as well as assess phonological-phonemic awareness, it is essential to consider whether students have important foundational concepts clear in their minds. A child will find it difficult to identify the last sound they hear in a word if they do not understand the concept of ‘last’. And an educator may find it challenging to explain rhyming to a child who is not familiar with the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’. Building these foundational concepts provides a common language from which phonological and phonemic awareness can be built.
ADDING GRAPHEMES
DON’T GET STUCK ON RHYME!
Once students can do a skill orally, it is time to add graphemes (written letters) to the phonemic awareness work. Educators might choose to do this during their daily alphabet routine. Continue practise at the oral level for more challenging skills that students are still developing.
For example, if students can identify the initial sound, start attaching the grapheme, but continue to work orally on final and medial sounds: “/m/ is the first sound in moon. What letter spells that sound? What sound do you hear at the end of the word?”
While rhyming can help students tune into the sounds in words, it does not contribute to reading the way that segmenting, blending and other phonological awareness skills do. If students are having difficulty with rhyme, you can move along the continuum to other skills and continue to monitor their progress. Rhyme can be practiced and reinforced through many games and stories, but does not require mastery to move forward with other phonological awareness skills (Shanahan 2015).
Assessment Tools for Phonological Awareness
Assessment in this area focuses on both foundational concepts and phonological and phonemic awareness. By learning what students’ existing knowledge and skills are, educators can make informed decisions using knowledge of important foundational concepts and the phonological awareness scope and sequence. This will support planning for most or small group instruction, transitions and playful practice.
For additional information about various phonological awareness tools and tracking sheets, please see page 24 of the TSTL or click HERE
Resources to Support Phonological Awareness Teaching and Practice
PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN YOUNG CHILDREN
All OCDSB schools with elementary programs received a copy of this book. This book includes a range of activities from simple listening games to more advanced exercises in rhyming, alliteration, and segmentation, specifically targeting phonemic awareness in our youngest learners. While this is an English resource, many of the games are easily modified for French instruction.
FOCUS ON PHONEMIC AWARENESS
All OCDSB schools with elementary programs received a copy of this book.
It is a comprehensive resource to screen, teach, and remediate phonemic awareness and includes extensive word lists to support educators in this work.
WORD LISTS AND PICTURE CARDS can also be used to find words that align with different areas of phonological-phonemic instruction.