Phonemic Awareness

Page Created by Gabrielle Vega 2020

WHAT IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual phonemes.

Before children learn to read, they have to become aware of how the sounds in words work.

"Phonemic Awareness tasks demand that children analyze or manipulate the units of sound rather than focus on meaning" (Yopp)

Key Researchers: Yopp & Yopp, Michael Heggerty

Phonemic Awareness...

improves children's word reading and reading comprehension
helps children learn to spell

~"Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a foundational skill, essential for learning to read. As students learn to identify sounds through oral and auditory activities, become phonemically aware. Engaging in phonemic awareness instruction develops students' understanding of sounds, and that knowledge directly impacts their spelling and writing" (Heggerty)

~"Reading problems can be prevented if all students are trained in letter-sound skills and phonological awareness, starting in Kindergarten" (Heggerty)

~"The hypothesis that reading acquisition and phonemic awareness are related has been repeatedly supported by research" (Yopp)

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY?

KEY TERMS

Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound in spoken language

Grapheme: the smallest part of written language that represents a phoneme in the spelling of a word. (b, d, f, p, ch, sh, th)

Onset: the beginning of the word before the first vowel

Rime: the first vowel and the rest of the word

Phoneme Approximation: the ability to dictate where a specific sound is in a given word and what sound is at the beginning, middle, and end

Phoneme Counting: the ability to count the number of sounds in a word

Phoneme Segmentation: the ability to break words into individual sounds

Phoneme Substitution: the ability to manipulate spoken words by manipulating certain phonemes for others

Identity: the ability to recognize the same sounds in different words

Isolation: the ability to identify where a sound is heard in a particular word

Categorization: the ability to recognize the word in a set of three or four words that has the "odd" sound

Blending: the ability to listen to a sequence of separate phonemes and combine them to form a word

Addition: the ability to add phonemes to a word to create a new word

Deletion: the ability to recognize the word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word

STRATEGIES FOR THE CLASSROOM

"Objective of any phonemic awareness activity should be to facilitate children's ability to perceive that their speech is made up of a series of sounds" (Yopp)

Common Tasks:

Isolation: recognizing individual sounds in words (first sound in "paste")

Identity: recognizing the common sounds in different words (sound that is the same in "bike," "boy," "bell")

Categorization: find the odd sound in sequence of words (bud, bun, run)

Blending: listening to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and putting them together to make a word

Segmentation: tap out or count the sounds (ship has 3 sounds /š/ /i/ /p/)

Deletion: when a phoneme is removed the child learns to recognize the word that remains (remove /s/ from “smile” is mile)

PHONEMIC AWARENESS GAMES

CVC Word Builders

Skills Practiced:

Sound Discrimination
Phoneme Manipulation

Sound Box Answer Boards

Skills Practiced:

Sound Discrimination
Blending
Segmenting

Zingo

Skills Practiced:

Sound Discrimination
Segmenting
Blending
Deletion
Manipulation

Phonemic Awareness Board Game

Skills Practiced:

All skills

DIFFERENTIATION

"In order to teach phonemic awareness effectively and to design instruction that differentiates for the different levels of phonological awareness that children bring to school, teachers have to have an understanding of the order in which individuals typically acquire these skills" (Guilford)

Initial Sound Sorting: first step toward differentiated phonemic awareness instruction

Repetitive procedure meant to help children with weak phonological skills begin to develop them (*identified as at risk on measures of letter name fluency or phonemic awareness screenings)
Oral-only activity

Segmenting and Blending: for students who need to work on segmenting sounds

orally populating the language units necessary for reading (blending speech sounds) and spelling (segmenting speech sounds)

Say-It-And-Move-It: more complex than simple segmentation and blending

Used with language units of increasing complexity - syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes
Requires manipulatives and can be used as a link between phonemic awareness and phonics
Can be used to differentiate for any Kindergarten or First grader (beginning readers who are working to develop automatically at the one-syllable-word level benefit from this strategy

Initial Sound Sorting

Segmenting and Blending

Say-It-And-Move-It

ASSESSSMENTS

DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) - First Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
CTOPP (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processes) - assesses phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming
TOPA (Test of Phonological Awareness) - tells how well children can isolate phonemes in spoken words and how well they understand the relationship between letters and phonemes
PAT (Phonological Awareness Test) - assessment of phonological awareness, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, and phonemic decoding skills
Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation - assesses children's phonemic awareness and identifying those children who may experience difficulty in reading and spelling
PAST (Phonological Awareness Skills Test) - assesses segmentation, deletion, substitution ; determines the point of instruction for students and monitoring progress