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)
See page 24 of the TSTL 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
In considering your planning, here are some questions to help ensure your program encompasses key elements:
Is the learning playful and engaging?
Does the cognitive demand match the ages and abilities of your learners?
Does the pacing and complexity of tasks move from easier to more difficult?
Are opportunities for practice offered frequently and across the day?
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 (see page 9) - 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 feedback helps correct ‘missteps’ before they become habitualized.
The use of gestures, visuals, and manipulatives anchor learning.
Mastery of one task is not dependent on mastery of another. For example, students don’t have to be able to blend and segment onset/rime or syllables perfectly before they begin working with individual phonemes (e.g. identifying the first or last sound of a word).
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 chart below).
FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS IN KINDERGARTEN
As educators begin planning for phonological-phonemic awareness instruction, they must first 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.
MOVING QUICKLY TO THE PHONEME LEVEL IN KINDERGARTEN
The chart above provides an idea of how students might be expected to progress through the cycles of instruction.
TSTL lays out cycles of instruction to move students forward while continually reviewing and reinforcing learning.
The introductory cycle targets the building of foundational concepts as well as working with larger parts of language (e.g., whole word, syllable, onset-rime).
After this cycle, instruction moves on to the phoneme level (i.e., individual sounds in words) as research shows that this has the greatest impact on developing future reading fluency.
While educators may need to back up to larger segments to scaffold or activate prior knowledge, moving forward to phonemes is important and should be done as quickly as possible.
In all matters of instruction, assessment informs our planning. Educators will find more information about assessment later in this section (page 24), as well as in Section 7: Planning for Assessment on page 50. That said, do not delay getting started in this work with your students!
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 Practise
You may choose to use a commercial product such as Heggerty or Pratique Phonémique to help with your planning. Use these resources to find word lists and/or to decide which 2-3 phonological tasks your students currently need experience with. While some students will pick up on tasks quickly, some will not. Pick and choose content to carefully design the pattern of instruction that serves your students.
HEGGERTY: PRE-KINDERGARTEN
Heggerty is a resource to help educators build explicit phonological awareness practice into daily routines. It is important to remember that Heggerty is a resource to support our programs and it is not recommended as a program to follow cover to cover.
Here are some key considerations keep in mind:
Select 2 to 3 skills to work on per day based on your students’ current phonological awareness skills.
Repeat practise of these same skills throughout the week (i.e. move across the page, not down in the resource) to build understanding and automaticity.
Move from large segments (i.e., compound words, syllables) to phonemes (e.g., beginning, ending and middle sounds) as quickly as possible.
When students are struggling at the individual sound level, backing up to bigger parts to scaffold and then moving forward again can be a very effective strategy, but don’t get stuck on big parts.
Rhyming skills are not required to develop other phonological awareness skills; continue moving forward even if rhyme is not mastered.
Avoid sentence repetition tasks (educator says a sentence, students repeat and then count the number of words) due to the working memory required to effectively do this task. The concept of word isolation can be addressed in other ways.
Pieces of Heggerty can be broken up across the day and do not have to be done all in one sitting. For example, do one or two pieces during each nutrition break.
Once students can do a skill orally, it is time to also add graphemes (written letters) to the phonemic awareness work.
EMBEDDED MNEMONICS
Each class should have a complete bilingual set of embedded mnemonic letter cards, which includes: a deck with upper and lowercase, a deck with uppercase only and a deck with lowercase only. Digital copies can be found HERE.
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.
Phonological Skills
Phonological Fun with fruits and vegetables (created by request for an educator teaching about healthy food)
Phonological Fun with winter clothes (created by request for an educator wanting to build phonological skills using specific vocabulary)