Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness is recognition of the different parts that make up a word and the sounds associated. This involves, syllables and sounds as well as understanding the smallest unit of a word which is a phoneme. An important part of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest parts of a word (phoneme). This breaks words down to the letter sound or in cases of ch, or th for example, the blended sound.

Skills involved in Phonological Awareness

Rhyme: Students practice recognizing and and producing words that rhyme.

Alliteration: Students practice repeating and producing alliterative phrases.

Sentence Segmentation: Students practice segmenting sentences into words.

Syllables: Students practice blending and segmenting syllables in words.

Onset and Rime: Students practice identifying the initial consonants (onset) and the vowel and any other consonant that follow it (rime).

Phonemes: Students practice blending, segmenting, manipulating, and deleting individual phonemes (sounds) in words.

(FCRR, 2005).

Phoneme Manipulation

Elision (Deletion): Deleting a sound from a word. "Say frog without the /r/ sound " "FOG"

Substitution: Changing the sound in a word. "Change the /c/ sound in CAT to the /r/ sound." "RAT"

Addition: Adding a sound to a word. "Add the /s/ sound to the beginning of the word TOP" "STOP"

Implications for Reading

Before students learn to read, they are practicing language skills. Language acquisition skills begin at birth. Babies are listening to the sounds around them and trying to make sense of them. This turns into learning to form words and understand word meaning. The main skill involved is hearing sounds and understanding where sounds fit in words. This is part of phonological awareness. As students begin understanding letter-sound relationships, they are developing pre-reading skills. This will over time develop into sounding out words on a page or sounding a word out loud to write it on paper. Before, applying these skills to reading, it is important to practice skills for listening to words and understanding how they are made. These activities could involve counting syllables or how many sounds are in a word as well as matching sounds to letters. These listening and speaking activities are important practice before starting to teach reading.

Strategies

Say It Move It

This is an activity where students slide a tile down the page as they pronounce each phoneme that makes up the word.

Syllable Toss

This activity gets students moving in the classroom. The teacher puts a poster board up on the wall that has 5 circles labeled 1-5. There are picture cards that students look at and say the word out loud. The students then throw the ball at a circle based on how many syllables were in the word.

Alphabet Bag

This activity gets the whole family involved. Each day, students bring a drawstring bag back and forth from school and put an object that starts with the focus letter in the bag. This helps to give concrete examples for each letter.

Silly Names

This game engages students by using their names in it. The teacher takes away the initial sound in students' names to demonstrate deletion.

Where in the Word is it?

The teacher chooses a letter to focus on and has students determine where they here that sound in a word. Is it in the beginning, middle or end? This would be done with a list of words that had the sound in different places.

Intervention Programs

Wilson Foundations

Tier 1

Whole group or small group

Grade Level K-3

This program is primarily used as a prevention strategy, catching weaknesses early on and fixing them. This is a multi-sensory structured language program with a focus on phonemic awareness, phonics/word study, high frequency word study, reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, handwriting, and spelling.

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Bridge the Gap

Tier 2

Small Group

2nd Grade and up

The lessons in this program are quick lasting only about 5-7 minutes each as a quick remediation tool. It is done in 3 parts focusing on phoneme isolation, blending and segmenting, and the final part is phoneme manipulation.

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Voyager Passport

Tier 2

Small Group

Grades: K-5

The lessons in this program last about 30 minutes and focus on themes of "adventures". There are 12 adventures total. The program follows the 5 pillars of reading and has formative assessments built into each lesson.

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Funemics

Tiers 2-3

Small Group

Grades: K-2

This program focuses on gaining awareness of words, syllables, rhyming, phonemes, and phoneme manipulation. It is a multi-sensory program for tier 2 students struggling and for tier 3 students.

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Fountas and Pinnell

Leveled Literacy Intervention

Tier 3

Small Group

Grades: K-5+

This is intended to be a short-term intervention and students can progress at their own pace. The program includes specialized lesson plans to go along with leveled reading books. For early literacy, this program introduces letter sounds in a specific order. This program includes options for middle school and high school in addition to the elementary programs.

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Formal Assessments

Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing 2nd Edition (CTOPP-2)

Authors: Richard Wagner, Joseph Torgesen, Carol Rashotte, Nils A. Pearson

Age Range: 4-24 Broken into (4-6) and (7-24).

Time: 40 minutes

Cost: $374

CTOPP-2 Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing 2 | Overview (pearsonassessments.com)

This test measures phonological awareness, phonological memory, and naming. The purpose for this test is identifying strengths and weaknesses in phonological processing and determining how far behind a student might be. It is broken into 12 subtests:

Elision
Memory for digits
Blending words
Sound matching
Phoneme Isolation
Blending Non-words
Segmenting non-words
Nonword Repetition
Rapid digit naming
Rapid letter naming
Rapid color naming
Rapid object naming

Phonological Awareness Test-2 Normative Update (PAT-2:NU)

Authors: Carolyn Robertson + Wanda Salter

Age Range: 5 yrs - 9 yrs 11 months

Time: 50 minutes

Cost: $225

Phonological Awareness Test-2 Normative Update | PAR (parinc.com)

This test measures awareness of spoken syllables and phonemes as well as sound - symbol correspondence. There are 6 subtests:

Rhyming
Segmentation
Isolation
Deletion
Substitution
Blending

There are also 2 supplemental subtests:

Phoneme- Grapheme Correspondence
Phonemic Decoding

Informal Assessments

Letter Slap

The teacher makes the sound and students have fly swatters and letter cards. The cards have 10 letters. Students slap the letter that makes the sound that the teacher made.

Flash Cards

A flashcard with a picture is held up and the students identify the sounds that make the word.

Apps for Phonological Awareness

Starfall

Starfall is a free online resource with games. There is a low-cost option that adds more features if a teacher would like to purchase that. There is one version of Starfall for pre-k and kindergarten and another option for grades 1-3. These games help students to learn the relationship between letters and sounds.

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Teach Your Monster To Read

This is available in the Google Playstore and the Apple App Store. This helps developing readers to learn sound and letter associations as they play engaging games.

Chimp Fu Syllable

This app is available on both Google and Apple. This is a Fruit ninja style game chopping words down into syllables.

Reading Eggs

This app progresses from the basic pre-reading schools up into the middle school reading skills. There are games to learn each skill along the way. It is available for both google and apple.

ABC Mouse

This is a website that can be used for progress monitoring as well as for engaging reading activities. There are games and a points system involved. The points system acts as positive reinforcement as students continue to practice their skills. It can be used for pre-reading all the way up through 2nd grade.

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References:

Babeckos, K., DesMarais, R., Sarah, & Brenner, M. M. (2016, March 8). Funēmics®. Read Naturally, Inc. Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.readnaturally.com/product/funemics

Bridge the gap: Intervention lessons. Heggerty. (2022, April 4). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://heggerty.org/product/bridge-the-gap/

Carruth, L., & Bustos, C. (2019). Phonemic Awareness: It’s All in the Sounds of Language. Texas Association for Literacy Education Yearbook, 6, 55–58.

Comprehensive test of Phonological Processing: Second edition. CTOPP-2 Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing 2. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.pearsonassessments.com/store/usassessments/en/Store/Professional-Assessments/Speech-%26-Language/Comprehensive-Test-of-Phonological-Processing-%7C-Second-Edition/p/100000737.html?tab=overview

Family and Community Engagement Research Compendium. (n.d.). Early Literacy. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://teacher.scholastic.com/products/literacypartnerships/pdf/initiatives/EarlyLiteracy.pdf

FCRR. (2005). Kindergarten and first grade student center activities. Kindergarten and First Grade. Retrieved April 11, 2022, from https://www.fcrr.org/student-center-activities/kindergarten-and-first-grade

Fundations. Wilson Language Training Fundations Comments. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.wilsonlanguage.com/programs/fundations/

Graham, K. (2022). Developing phonemic awareness through fun, interactive games! Practical Literacy: The Early & Primary Years, 27(1), 26–28.

Kennedy, E., Dunphy, E., Dwyer , B., Hayes, G., McPhillips, T., Marsh, J., O'Connor, M., & Shiel, G. (2012). Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education (3-8 Years). NCCA. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://ncca.ie/media/2137/literacy_in_early_childhood_and_primary_education_3-8_years.pdf

Leveled literacy intervention resources. Fountas and Pinnell. (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://www.fountasandpinnell.com/intervention/

PAT-2: NU. PAR. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.parinc.com/Products/Pkey/491

Report of the National Reading Panel [electronic resource] : teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. (2000). [Bethesda, Md.?] : U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health

The Journey Matters. pack for it. Supplemental Learning | K-5 | Voyager Passport. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.voyagersopris.com/literacy/voyager-passport/overview#:~:text=Voyager%20Passport%20is%20a%20comprehensive,level%20of%20ESSA%20criteria%3A%20Strong.

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