Why use phonemic awareness

When instruction is engaging and developmentally appropriate, researchers recommend that all kindergarten students receive phonemic awareness instruction Adams, The following table shows how the specific phonological awareness standards fall into the four developmental levels: word, syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme.

The table shows the specific skills standards within each level and provides an example for each skill. Instruction should be systematic. Notice the arrow across the top. The levels become more complex as students progress from the word level to syllables, to onset and rime, and then to phonemes.

Notice the arrow along the left-hand side. Students progress down each level—learning increasingly more complex skills within a level. For example, look at the Phoneme Awareness column. Students learn to isolate, identify, and categorize phonemes first. Then students are taught to blend phonemes to make a word before they are taught to segment a word into phonemes—which is typically more difficult. The most challenging phonological awareness skills are at the bottom: deleting, adding, and substituting phonemes.

Blending phonemes into words and segmenting words into phonemes contribute directly to learning to read and spell well. In fact, these two phonemic awareness skills contribute more to learning to read and spell well than any of the other activities under the phonological awareness umbrella National Reading Panel, ; Snider, So, as we plan phonological awareness instruction, our goal is to systematically move students as quickly as possible toward blending and segmenting at the phoneme level.

The continuous sounds can be pronounced for several seconds without distortion. The stop sounds can be pronounced only for an instant. As new phonological awareness skills are introduced, using continuous sounds may be easier at first. Each lesson builds on skills taught in previous lessons, adding just a few elements at a time.

With minimal preparation, teachers or aides present scripted instruction to small groups of students, using an interactive display with brightly illustrated pages and interactive widgets viewed on a tablet or whiteboard.

The following programs do not focus on phonemic awareness but include phonemic awareness activities as part of a broader scope of instruction:. Adams, M. This is an encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level. Continuous Sound: A sound that can be prolonged stretched out without distortion e.

Onset-Rime: The onset is the part of the word before the vowel; not all words have onsets. The rime is the part of the word including the vowel and what follows it. Segmentation: The separation of words into phonemes. Sentence The sun shone brightly. Segmentation first sound isolation : What is the first sound in mop? The relation of phonemic awareness to early reading skills. The developmental continuum of phonemic awareness skills.

Which phonemic awareness skills are more important and when they should be taught. Features of phonemes and tasks that influence task difficulty. Considering the research and the role phonemic awareness plays in building the foundation of reading, it is clear we owe it to our students to do better. All students benefit from explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness. In most literacy curricula, the amount of time dedicated to phonemic awareness, and the way it is presented, is not effective enough to create phonemically proficient readers.

Often just a few minutes are devoted to this instruction, with varying skills taught each day. If we are going to do better for students, our instruction in phonemic awareness needs to be intentional. For our younger learners, we should begin instruction at the phonological awareness level compound words, syllables, onset-rime to allow students the opportunity to blend, segment, and manipulate parts of words first before we have them do that same work with phonemes.

With older learners, or struggling readers, our goal is to get to the phoneme level as quickly as possible so they can transfer these skills to reading and spelling. Phonological and phonemic awareness skills can be divided into 3 levels: early, basic, and advanced. In the past, many educators thought the basic skills of blending and segmenting were enough to create proficient readers as these skills directly corelate to decoding and encoding. However, we now know that providing phonemic awareness instruction to the advanced level is critical.

Phonemic awareness instruction is powerful, but it does not need to take long. Heggerty created quick, minutes lessons to provide students with the practice and repetition they needed to reach phoneme proficiency. Our lessons include all 8 phonological and phonemic awareness skills beginning with compound words and working our way to the phoneme level. Teaching these skills each day will allow our children the repetition and practice they need to hear, blend, segment and manipulate sounds in words.

Other assessments include the PAST or our Heggerty Phonemic Awareness assessments which provide more information by assessing more skills. Because phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, assessments are completed one-on-one and can be time consuming to administer.

You can rotate rows when students are sitting on the carpet and have a focus group each week. Once students know most of their letters and sounds, looking at their writing will show you what sounds they are hearing in words as they map those sounds to print.

Similarly, listening to students sound out or decode words is a way to assess their ability to blend sounds into words. Awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words, facility at manipulating those sounds, and the links between speech and print must be mastered for students to be fluent readers and accurate spellers of an alphabetic writing system like ours.

Both phonological and phonemic awareness focus on the sounds in language. We begin our instruction at the phonological level and narrow the unit of language until we can work at the phoneme level. It is important for students to be explicitly taught how to hear sounds in words to help them blend, segment, and manipulate those sounds.

When a student has phoneme proficiency, they are able to transfer the oral and auditory skills to print to be able to read and spell words. Phonemic awareness is the necessary foundation for creating proficient readers and writers. Moats, Louisa. Thanks for the great article , it is very useful and very well explained. Your good work and knowledge in the field is praiseworthy.

Phonological awareness develops in the preschool years, and is a good predictor of future reading and spelling abilities. Children need to develop their phonological awareness before they can learn to read and spell.

Phonological awareness is the process of working out the sounds within spoken language, and includes picking out rhyming words, recognising alliteration and counting syllables in a word. Recognising that words are made up of discrete sounds, and that those sounds can be changed, is essential for success in learning to read and spell. Similarly, understanding the connection that words are made up of phonemes and that phonemes are represented by graphemes is a vital skill for understanding print.

Being able to take words apart, put them together again and adapt them into a new word or even a nonsense word! There would not be much benefit to teaching children new grapheme phoneme correspondences GPCs without some awareness of how they combine to make a word.

Reading with a child would involve listening to them string out individual letters, without any meaning, and writing with a child would end up with them having to be told which letters they need to write.

This would be a stressful and frustrating situation for all. The Simple View of Reading Gough and Tunmer, is a useful model demonstrating how word recognition and comprehension are essential for learning to read. A child who struggles with one of these interrelated skills, such as phonemic awareness, is likely to have a poor reading ability. There are six different types of phoneme awareness skills.

The first three normally develop first with the last three taking a little longer to master:. Oral blending and oral segmenting are the main aspects of phonemic awareness and are very important skills to develop when learning to read and spell. Oral Blending focuses on the sounds we hear, rather than the words we see.