The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read

by Wesley A. Hoover Published in SEDL Letter Volume XIV, Number 3, December 2002, Putting Reading First Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning to read an alphabetically written language. Yet a fair amount of confusion, especially among educators, persists about what this skill is and why it is so important. Written for practitioners, this article describes phonemic awareness and discusses why it is a prerequisite for learning to read, how we have come to understand its importance, why it can be difficult to acquire, and what happens to the would-be reader who fails to acquire it. Our discussion of phonemic awareness is framed within a particular view of reading, to which we turn first.

What is reading?
Reading, or more precisely reading comprehension, is the ability to derive meaning, particularly that intended by the author, from the printed word in short, reading is understanding the meaning of written language. The major difference between the written and the spoken word is not what is being communicated, but how the communication is taking place, by eye rather than ear. In this simple view, reading is dependent on two major cognitive capacities. The first is comprehension, the ability to understand language. The second is decoding, the ability to derive a words phonological representation (one based in the domain of spoken words) from the sequences of letters that represent it. Skilled decoding allows the reader, through print, to retrieve the meaning of words known and organized through the learning of spoken language. Together, decoding and comprehension skills combine to permit language comprehension to take place via the printed word. To foreshadow the discussion to come, while phonemic awareness is a linguistic skill, it is not a skill that is needed either for learning, or subsequently for understanding, language. Certainly, every competent speaker of a language has mastered its phonology. But since language learning is a tacit process, one that takes place without conscious attention, that mastery comes without the need for an explicit, conscious understanding of phonology. However, for learning to read, specifically for learning to decode, a conscious understanding of the phonological units underlying the spoken word is critical.

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a cognitive skill that consists of three pieces. The first piece concerns a linguistic unit, the phoneme; the second concerns the explicit, conscious awareness of that unit; and the third involves the ability to explicitly manipulate such units. Phonemic awareness is thus the ability to consciously manipulate language at the level of phonemes. Lets take each of these in turn.

A phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit. Linguists define it as the most basic unit of language capable of making a difference in meaning. As an example, the difference between the word pairs (each containing three phonemes) bit and pit, bat and bet, bin and bid, is a single phoneme, one occurring in these examples in the initial, medial, or final position, respectively, of the spoken word. Phonemes are abstract because they are not the actual sounds of which words are composed; these are known as phones. Rather they are the underlying category of which the phones are members. To illustrate this, think of how the sound represented by the letter p is different in the words pan and span. To make this readily apparent, hold your hand close to your mouth and notice that the puff of air that is released when saying the former is much stronger than that released with the latter. The puff, known as aspiration, is not distinctive in English, in that there are no pairs of words where this single difference in aspiration marks a difference in meaning. In short, these two sounds (or phones) are different, yet they represent the same underlying category (or phoneme). As we will see, the abstract nature of phonemes presents one of the obstacles a child must overcome in developing phonemic awareness. It is also important to recognize that phonemes are linguistic units and not units of writing systems. Thus, while bit, bait, butte, and bought all differ in the number of letters they possess, they each represent words containing only three phonemes, which differ only in their second phoneme. Beyond the phonemic unit, the second piece of the phonemic awareness concept entails the explicit, conscious awareness of these units. Any child who has learned a language knows the phonemes of that language if she did not, she could not recognize the difference between spoken minimal pairs in that language, like bit and pit. But being able to use that linguistic difference in speaking and listening to language is very different from knowing explicitly that the difference being used is in the initial part of the word. This explicit knowledge is the metalinguistic nature of the skill, or the ability, to consciously reflect upon the linguistic units that underlies language. More than just being conscious of the phoneme, the third piece of the phonemic-awareness concept requires some level of skill in manipulating phonemes. In learning to read an alphabetic language, it is not enough just to be aware of the phonemic units, the child also must be able to manipulate those units. Such manipulation is important because the child learning to read must be able to hold and contrast in memory both the phonemes and the letter strings that represent them. If she cannot, she will not be able to master the relationship between the letter units and the phonemic units. In learning to read, the child must be able to isolate, compare, and contrast phonemes and letter sequences for example, noting that the final phoneme in both bit and bought is the same, but that one is represented by a single letter and the other by three letters. To sum up, the three pieces of phonemic awareness are knowledge of language at the level of individual phonemes, knowledge of these language units that is conscious, and skill at consciously manipulating language at this level.

Why is a linguistic skill that is not needed to learn language so critical for learning to read a language?
As mentioned earlier, phonemic awareness is not necessary for reading all written languages, only those that are alphabetic. For instance, writing systems that use logographic representations (where a single symbol represents a word) do not require would-be readers to possess phonemic awareness. But any system that links written letters to the phonemes underlying the spoken word requires phonemic awareness, because the would-be learner cannot connect the units underlying the written word (the letters) with the units underlying the spoken word (the phonemes) unless she is consciously aware of both and has the intent to learn the relationship between the two (known as the alphabetic principle). Thus, if you know the letters and you know there is some relation between the letters and the spoken word, but you do not know the units underlying the spoken word, then you will not be able to figure out what the relationship is between the two representations. To summarize, knowledge of phonemes is critical to learn a language, but language learning is an unconscious process that only requires immersion in an active linguistic environment; explicit instruction is not necessary. In accomplishing this remarkable feat, the childs language learning system responds to information at the phonemic level without the need for conscious awareness of that level. Learning to read that language, if it is represented alphabetically, does require explicit knowledge of the phoneme since, unlike learning language, learning to read is a process that requires more

Terms Often Confused with Phonemic Awareness

Phonics: An instructional approach for helping children learn the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonetics: The process used by linguists to describe the speech sounds in natural language. Phonology: The linguistic component of language that deals with the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in languages (distinguished from the other two components of language, which are syntax and semantics). Phonological awareness: A general term for metalinguistic awareness of any of the phonological characteristics of language, including phonemic units, syllables, rimes, and words.

How do we know that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read?

Much research, conducted under a variety of research designs, converges on the conclusion that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read in alphabetic languages. First, there is evidence from concurrent correlations, which are derived from research designs that simply measure two skills in a sample of students at roughly the same point in time and then determine how those skills vary with each within the student sample. For example, a typical design might

use all the first-grade students in a school as a sample, measuring each students phonemic awareness skill and reading skill at the end of first grade. Positive correlations between these two measures exist when, in general, students with better performance on one skill (phonemic awareness) also have better performance on the other skill (reading) and vice versa (that is, when students with poorer performance on one skill also have poorer performance on the other skill). Such positive correlations are generally found when both phonemic awareness and reading skills are measured in the early elementary grades. This same positive relationship has been found whether reading skill was measured as skill in reading individual words, skill in reading letter sequences that do not form real English words but are constructed like English words (for example, the pseudoword splure), or skill in reading connected text where fluency or comprehension were measured. These correlations are consistent with a causal relationship between the two variables, where skill in one is the cause for the development of skill in the other, but they do not guarantee that the variables are causally linked (indeed, there might be a third variable that is causing the development in the other two skills). Nor, even if causally linked, do these correlations specify the direction of causation (that is, does phonemic awareness cause the reading skill or is it the other way round?). Even more suggestive evidence comes from a closer look at the distributions between phonemic awareness and reading skills concurrently measured. If you plot skill in phonemic awareness against skill in decoding (measured as reading individual pseudowords), you find triangular distributions. In these distributions, there are many instances of either low skill in both domains or high skill in phonemic awareness coupled with either low or high skill in decoding. However, there are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high skill in decoding. This pattern suggests that phonemic awareness is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for skill in decoding. That is, you must have skill in phonemic awareness if you are to acquire skill in decoding, but having skill in phonemic awareness is no guarantee for successful development of skill in decoding. To get the latter, you need something in addition to phonemic awareness (you also need knowledge of the letters and of the alphabetic principle, plus lots of practice pairing written and spoken words). Predictive correlations, derived from research designs where phonemic awareness is measured at one point in time and reading skill is measured at some subsequent point in time, are even more suggestive of causal relationships. Many studies report such correlations, where the time lag between the measure of phonemic awareness and the subsequent reading skill (measured either as decoding or reading comprehension skill) ranges from very small (a matter of months) to very large (a matter of many years). While providing stronger evidence than concurrent correlations do, these results could still appear even when the two variables were not causally related. For instance, as in concurrent correlations, there could be a third, unmeasured factor that is the cause underlying the development of both skills, where the two skills themselves are not at all causally linked. There are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high skill in decoding. The strongest evidence for a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading comes from training studies. In the typical training study design, children who lack phonemic awareness skills are randomly divided into different groups, one receiving training designed to develop

phonemic awareness skill and the other receiving training designed to develop a skill that is unrelated to reading (say, a mathematical skill like counting). After training, the different groups are given the same reading instruction, and one looks to see whether those groups that received phonemic awareness training in fact do better in both assessments of phonemic awareness and reading than those who did not. Many studies like this have now been conducted, and the majority of them report that the groups receiving phonemic awareness instruction subsequently did much better in reading development than those who did not receive such training. Now it is true that reading by itself does advance skill in phonemic awareness reading practice advances reading skill, and the more skill in reading, the more skill in phonemic awareness. This indicates a reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, where skill in one supports development of skill in the other and vice versa. But the critical question is whether some amount of skill in phonemic awareness is critical before skill in reading can advance; the evidence suggests (especially that from training studies) the answer to this question is yes.

Why is phonemic awareness so difficult for some children to acquire?

Current research suggests that most children who enter school at kindergarten do not come skilled in phonemic awareness. Research also suggests that if there is no explicit instruction in this skill, many will fail to acquire it. Further, for some small percentage of young people, even explicit training is insufficient to guarantee the development of phonemic awareness. So what is known about the reasons behind the difficulty in acquiring phonemic awareness? First, as discussed above, phonemes are abstract they cannot be isolated and presented to the child as objects. When we explain to a child that the first sound in bug is "buh," what we are actually pronouncing is neither abstract (for abstract things are by definition unpronounceable) nor something related to a single phoneme. In fact, what we are saying is a syllable, one that has two phonemes underlying it. Thus, one difficulty in developing phonemic awareness is that it is not possible to explicitly state to the child what she must become aware of, rather we can only lead her to try to induce for herself what must be acquired.

Some Examples of How Phonemic Awareness Skill Is Demonstrated

Isolation: Say the first part of the word song; say the middle part of hop; say the last part of stick. Deletion: Say the word pies without the first part. Addition: Say the word you have when you add the sound s to the beginning of the word top.

Categorization: Say the word that does not belong in this group of words: pig, pack, top, put. Substitution: Say the word you make when you take out the second part of stop and replace it with the first part of lake. Segmentation: Say how many parts there are in the word build.

Second, the sound units that are transmitted in speech that are derived from the underlying abstract phonemes do not arrive at the ear in a strict serial order. Rather the information that allows the hearer to detect the first sound in a word generally comes overlapped with information about the subsequent segment in the word linguistic information is transmitted in parallel. As an example, if we recorded our speaking of the word bug and then, starting at the end of the tape segment, cut off successive pieces and played what was left, we would never be able to isolate a piece of the tape representing only the initial phoneme of the word. Rather, the best we would come away with would be some resemblance of the first two sounds of the word. This is true because the positions of the articulators (those things we use to produce speech, like our tongue and jaw) are set to reflect both the beginning and subsequent sounds that are to be made. You can get a sense of this for yourself by noting the position of your lower jaw as you begin to say bug and bought. In the latter example, the lower jaw is lowered from the outset to prepare for the pronunciation of the vowel that follows. These co-articulation effects result in the parallel transmission of linguistic information. And this poses a significant problem for acquiring phonemic awareness, for in many cases we cannot isolate even the initial sound (or phone) that is a member of the phonemic category the child is attempting to become aware of. Again, the best we can do is to set conditions where the child will induce the phonemic category we are trying to have her attend to. Third, what we are asking the child to do is counterintuitive. For the child learning language, meaning has been paramount, while the forms in which the meaning is represented have been unimportantthey are merely the medium, which is to be ignored in favor of the message. With phonemic awareness, we are asking the child to focus attention in the opposite fashion, ignoring meaning and attending only to form. Each of these features of language make difficult the task of acquiring the awareness of phonemesbut there are instructional approaches that can be helpful. Future issues of SEDL Letter will address this topic.

What happens if a child does not acquire phonemic awareness?

For the child having difficulty acquiring phonemic awareness, the prognosis is not good. First, such a child is not able to take advantage of the alphabetic principle. She might know the letters,

even that the letters are somehow connected to the spoken word, but without phonemic awareness, she is baffled by what that relationship might be. Second, we know that exposure to print is important for figuring out the relationships between letters and phonemes. With the prerequisites in hand (namely, knowledge of the letters, phonemes, and the alphabetic principle), the greater the opportunity to pair printed and spoken words, the greater the opportunity to learn the relationship between letters and phonemes. The child who lacks these prerequisites cannot take advantage of such opportunities, and print exposure is no longer efficacious for learning to read. Third, we know that if the child is not making progress in reading by the third grade, there is very little likelihood that she will ever, regardless of the intervention used, be able to read at the same level as her same-age peers. Our challenge as educators is thus to do all that we can to make sure our students are making early progress, including mastering phonemic awareness early in their school careers. This is something that can be achieved, if only we understand what must be done and provide appropriate support mechanisms to help teachers master those techniques that can best help their students master this (and other) skills.

Definitions of Some Terms Used in Scientific Research

Convergence: When research results obtained under a variety of settings and designs lead to the same general conclusions. Correlation: An indicator of whether a measure of a skill in one area is systematically varying with the measure of a skill in another area. Concurrent Correlation: A correlation derived from a research design where the two measures of interest are taken at approximately the same point in time. Predictive Correlation: A correlation derived from a research design where there is a significant difference between the times when two measures of interest are taken. Triangular Distribution: A distribution of two variables where all combinations of measured low and high skill occur except one that is, low skill in one area is never accompanied by high skill in the other area. Training Study: A research design where students with similar skills are divided into groups, one group subsequently receiving training in a skill of interest while the other one receives no training or training in a different skill; the effects of such training are then measured on some outcome variable at some point in time after the training.

Wes Hoover is SEDL president and CEO. He holds a doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin in human experimental psychology, with a specialization in reading and psycholinguistics.

Definitions
Phonology is the study of how speech sounds are used in English and other languages. Speech sounds include sounds such as ah, humm, moo. Phonological Awareness is a general term describing a person's awareness that spoken words are made up of sounds. These sounds can be rearranged to make other words. This might seem obvious to some children but many of them need to be taught this technique. It is essential for developing reading skills. Phonograms are vowel-consonant combinations such as op as in top, mop, stop. These are called word families. Phonemes are the smallest units of spoken language. They are the sounds that form syllables and words. For example, there are three phonemes in mat. Phonemes include sounds represented by letter combinations such as th. Keep in mind that phonemes are sounds. Phoneme Awareness is essential in order to comprehend phonics. Hearing the distinct sounds must be done before identifying which sounds belong to the letters which represent the sounds. Phonics is the system of written letters and letter combinations which represent the sounds in spoken language, e. g. the written letter, p, represents the sound at the beginning of pony. The written combination, th, represents the sound at the beginning of three. Return to books about Phonics Failures and Fun with Phonology.

Teaching Tips
Before venturing into phonics instruction, the previously mentioned aspects of phonology are necessary. Hearing the sounds distinctly precedes linking them to the letters. Take care in purchasing toys which teach phonics. Be sure the letters are pronounced clearly and accurately. Sounds in some words are very similar and are easily confused: the beginning sounds in bake and make; the middle sounds in middle and little; the ending sounds in can and can't when followed closely by other words. Phonological difficulties are not only in the realm of early education. Many English speaking people have difficulty distinguishing between the French

ouu and oue sounds. Many Japanese have difficulty distinguishing between the English r and l sounds. Other languages present their own challenges. Some languages have more phonemes than English and some have less. There are about 40 to 45 phonemes in English. Phonemic awareness helps lay a solid foundation for spelling and word recognition skills. The goal is not phoneme mastery. The goal is phoneme awareness. Sometimes we focus on teaching rhymes and alliteration without enough attention to assonance in the interior of words. All of these are used in most poetic writing. For example, the phoneme p in these positions: pony, nap, apple. You can make your own illustrations: "My horse, a dapple gray, eats an apple every day." Have children find the sound p. (We aren't talking about printed letters at this point.) One of the first steps in demonstrating phoneme awareness is blending. The teacher pauses between each phoneme (n-a-p) and asks the child to blend or say the sounds quickly making a word. A more advanced task is for the teacher to say the word and ask the child to identify the individual phonemes. It is even more advanced to have the child move phonemes around or delete them. Many examples are in Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss: hop, pop, up, cup, and more. For books, see Phonics Failures and Fun with Phonology. Remember to have fun with phonemes and other aspects of phonological awareness. Some phonemes can be so difficult they result in feelings of frustration and inadequacy rather than in building a solid foundation for reading. Diphthongs and glides can confuse anyone. Consider the complication of dictionary pronunciations versus local dialects. It is recommended to begin phonics about age 5 after a firm foundation has been built in phonological awareness. A better foundation in phonics is built if children learn a few letters at a time. Consonants are the easiest to master and are usually taught first (all letters sounds except the vowels a, e, i, o, u). Preferably after mastering the consonants, first graders and second graders learn the sounds of vowels and letter combinations including suffixes such as ing and ed. Hearing the differences comes more easily to some children than to others. See the books about Phonics Failures and Fun with Phonology. Children need to practice spelling words using their knowledge of phonics. That is a good way to help children internalize the use of phonics in writing. There have been increasing doubts raised about values of the fad, invented spelling, as it relates to recognizing words in books and, indeed, the childs ability to read his or her own writing.

Teaching letter-sounds is not enough. We need to teach phonograms (word families) which are vowel-consonant combinations such as op as in top, mop, stop, and ake as in make, bake, rake . We also need to work with blending when teaching children how to sound out words. An example is a child who slowly and correctly sounded out s-a-i-d several times before he blended the letters into a word he recognized. He exclaimed, Said! That word is said!" In addition to phonics, important reading skills which lead to comprehension are fluency and vocabulary development. See the lesson for using music to expand vocabulary. Readers also need a foundation in Dolch sight words. See Dolch sight word activities which includes an explanation about their importance. Good phonics skills help readers throughout life in approaching unknown words including ones in a foreign language. One of the first steps in reading a foreign language is to become familiar with their system of phonemes and phonics, i. e. the smallest units of spoken language and how the sounds are represented by written symbols. Return to books about Phonics Failures and Fun with Phonology.

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is the awareness of all of the sounds of language. It is the ability to hear and distinguish sounds. This includes:

Recognizing sounds Adding sounds Taking apart sounds Moving sounds around

Phonemic awareness is the awareness of individual sounds, or phonemes. Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness. (If this is all Greek to you, dont worry. Just keep reading. We are going to break it down, give examples, and give you many curriculum ideas and helps along the way.) Why is it important for children to have these skills? Phonological and phonemic awareness help children become prepared to learn how letters and sounds go together into words. This makes it much easier for someone to learn to read and write! Weak skills in phonological awareness are a primary cause for reading difficulties. We have put together this information about phonological awareness as well as our complete phonological awareness kit, to help parents and teachers to be able to effectively teach these skills.

Click here to read research by the National Reading Panel about the critical role that phonological awareness plays in learning to read.

Lets start by looking at the big picture. Children learn to use language starting with big pieces and gradually moving to smaller and smaller pieces. A toddler learning to speak might say "I love you." However, he or she will not be able to break that sentence into three words or use any of the three words independently for some time yet. Gradually, the child will master words and be able to put them into more complex sentences. Then, as the child learns more vocabulary and language structure, he or she will also become aware that language is made up of even smaller pieces than words. In order to learn to read and write, a child must come to understand that language is made up of pieces:

Sentences Words Syllables Word parts Individual sounds or phonemes

This awareness is built through oral language activities. As a child learns to hear, identify, and change pieces of language, the child becomes prepared to use this knowledge to learn written language. Definitions

Phonological Awareness: The ability to listen to, recognize, and manipulate sounds of language. This includes sentences, words, rhymes, syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual sounds or phonemes. Phonemic Awareness: Part of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness refers to the ability to listen to, recognize, and manipulate the smallest pieces or individual sounds of language (phonemes). Phonics: Describes the relationship between sounds and letters that make up words. A sound, or a set of sounds, can be written down in a predictable way so that others can read what it says. Syllables: Part of a word that contains a vowel or vowel sound. For example: the word 'table' has two syllables 'ta' and 'ble'. Onset and Rime: Onset and rime is a way to break syllables into two parts: the part before the vowel and the part with the vowel and everything after it. For example, bag -/b/ /ag/ and swim -- /sw/ /im/.

Phonemes: Individual sounds of language. This does not refer to individual letters, since sometimes a combination of letters makes only one sound. For example, the word phone has five letters but only three phonemes /f/ /o/ /n/.

What is important to teach The best way to develop phonological awareness skills is to begin with more general types of listening skills and bigger pieces of language and gradually move to smaller and smaller sounds until children learn to listen to and use individual sounds of language. So, teaching the right pieces in the right order is crucial. Phonological awareness skills can be divided into three levels. At each level, children engage in learning and make discoveries about sounds that help them progress in reading and writing at the level where they are currently working. For this reason, it is important for children to go through each level in order. Click on each of the three levels to see a list of specific skills and ideas for developing them: Level 1: Setting the foundation Level 2: the building blocks of blending and segmenting Level 3: beyond the basics--big words and hard words How to teach Phonological Awareness What do we know about phonological and phonemic awareness? Research shows that they can be taught and learned--and that when these skills are developed, the result is that children have a much easier time learning to read and write (Adler, 2003)! So how do we teach it? The best way to develop phonological and phonemic awareness in young children is through interactive games and songs. These should be non-evaluative. (Don't tell children that they got it wrong. If they did not follow the concept correctly, simply model a correct response for them, help them feel successful by guiding them to give you a correct response--even repeating your response--and go on.) Children should be encouraged to participate in groups in order to build their skills without singling them out. The tone of the activities should be playful and fun. This is language play at its best! (National Reading Council, 1998) Our Phonological Awareness Kit is a complete full year curriculum. It teaches all of the phonological awareness skills using music and games. It is easy to use with minimal preparation. Click here for more information. Basic Guidelines for teaching songs and games

Keep it fun. Teach and practice the skills for a short time (approximately 5 minutes) every day.

Use music. This is one of the most powerful tools for teaching awareness of sounds. Review often. Model, model, model, model, and model.

Three stages of learning

Listening: In this stage a child learns to hear and recognize a certain type of sound or sound group (such as rhymes, words, or syllables). Imitating: After learning to hear and recognize the sound or sound group, the child next learns to imitate it. For example, the child learns to follow the model and break words into onset and rime. In this stage it is important to provide a lot of supported practice. Model, model, model! (and did I mention that it's important to model?) Independent: In this stage the child learns to do it himself or herself. The modeling and supported practice lessen to make room for more independence. Gradually, the child takes on more of the responsibility until he or she can do it alone.

For a list of the important phonological awareness concepts at each stage of emergent literacy click on the links below. You will also find fun lesson plan ideas. Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is knowledge of the sounds of oral language. It is the ability to regulate and be conscious of the sequence of speech sounds and the structure of syllables.

Sound awareness plays a vital role in the early years and is a reliable predictor of literacy development. Children with good phonological skills have a huge advantage when learning to read.

In the early years of school, the children who recognise that words can be broken down into individual sounds generally develop into competent readers. The children who struggle to make the link between sounds and words (the sound/letter link) are at a disadvantage when learning to read.

When we talk about speech sounds we are referring to the spoken sound, which is different from the written letter name.

For instance, the letter 'l' has the letter name 'el.' Contrast that with the spoken sound /l/ which is a single phoneme made by placing the tongue tip on the alveolar ridge, behind the top teeth.

Sound awareness is a conscious knowledge of speech sounds at three levels: syllables, onset and rime, and phonemes.

Syllables: syllables are the building blocks of words and language. They influence the structure and rhythm of the English language. Syllables can be individual vowels, or vowels combined with consonant sounds.

For instance, if we were to break down the word elephant into separate syllables we would have el/e/phant - three syllables.

Onset and Rime: onset and rime are phonological units that make up a syllable. A syllable can be separated into two distinct parts, the initial consonant and then the vowel, and sometimes final consonants.

For instance, the word 'catch' is made up of the onset /c/ and the rime /atch/. Rime is similar to rhyme - the difference is that with rime the spelling is constant, whereas in rhyme the spelling can change, though the sound at the end of the word sounds alike.

For instance, rime onset words for kite would include, bite, rite, spite, etc.

The rhyme words for kite would also include, bite, rite etc, but also feature words with different spelling, such as sight.

Phonemes: phonemes are the smallest structural unit of language. For example, the phoneme /p/ is a speech sound that can be found in the words patch, top, stepping, etc.

Children who cannot make the distinction between speech and letter sounds need to be explicitly taught this skill. Speech pathologists are highly competent at teaching phonological awareness skills.

Intervention for Sound Awareness Difficulty

Speech-language pathologists are well versed on the importance of sound awareness and expert at facilitating this vital skill in children with language disorder.

What follows is a brief introduction to some of the areas speechlanguage pathologists focus on when targeting phonological awareness skills.

Syllable segmentation: separate words into distinct syllables. For instance butterfly butt/er/fly.

Rhyme detection: Identify words that rhyme. For instance, sink - pink rhyme, sink sash do not,

Rhyme production: produce words that thyme. For instance, for the word 'bump' lump, dump, stump.

Phoneme segmentation: separate words into individual phonemes. For instance, sock /s/ /o/ /ck/.

Identify initial phoneme: For instance, for the word 'gold' the first phoneme is /g/.

Onset and Rime: identify words that have a universal rhyme and spelling structure. For instance, the rime 'ent' - lent, sent, tent, went, bent, etc.

This is a brief introduction to phonological awareness, and its importance. Articles and extra information about phonological awareness will be added over the coming months.

To learn more and to access phonological awareness activities please follow this link.

References

Kaderavek, J. N. (2010) Language Disorders in Children: Fundamental Concepts of Assessment and Intervention. Allyn & Bacon Paul, R. (2006) Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence. Assessment and Intervention. Mosby Schuele, C.M. & Boudrea, D. Phonological Awareness Intervention: Beyond the Basics. (2008) Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools Vol. 3 - 20

Content Last Modified 8/11

honological awareness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Phonological awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words.[1][2][3] Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.[4][5][6]

Contents
[hide]

1 Overview 2 Development 3 Phonological awareness and reading 4 Intervention 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Overview
Phonological awareness involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: (1) syllables, (2) onsets and rimes, and (3) phonemes. Awareness of these sounds is demonstrated through a variety of tasks (see below). Although the tasks vary, they share the basic requirement that some operation (e.g., identifying, comparing, separating, combining, generating) be performed on the sounds. It is assumed that the individual performing these tasks must have awareness of the units of sound in order to perform the operation.

Phonological awareness is one component of a larger phonological processing system used for speaking and listening.[7][8][9] Phonological awareness is different from other phonological abilities in that it is a metalinguistic skill, requiring conscious awareness and reflection on the structure of language.[1][10] Other phonological abilities: such as attending to speech, discriminating between sounds, holding sounds in memory: can be performed without conscious reflection. However, these other phonological abilities are prerequisite to the development of phonological awareness. Therefore, general listening skills are often among those included in phonological awareness instruction. The terms phonemic awareness and phonics are often used interchangeably with phonological awareness. However, these terms have different meanings. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that focuses specifically on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest units of sound. Phonics requires students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn the rules of spelling, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. Phonological awareness relates only to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters or sound-spellings, so it is not necessary for students to have alphabet knowledge in order to develop a basic phonological awareness of language. Phonological awareness tasks (adapted from Virginia Department of Education (1998):[11] and Gillon (2004)[1] Listening skills The ability to attend to and distinguish environmental and speech sounds from one another[11]

Alertness: Awareness and localization of sounds Discrimination: Recognize same/different sounds Memory: Recall of sounds and sound patterns Sequencing: Identify order of what was heard Figure-ground: Isolate one sound from background of other sounds Perception: Comprehension of sounds heard

Syllable-structure awareness tasks

Syllable segmentation: e.g., "How many syllables (or parts) are in the word coffee?"[12] Syllable completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a rabbit. I'll say the first part of the word. Can you finish the word ra_____?"[13] Syllable identity: e.g., "Which part of complete and compare sound the same?"[12] Syllable deletion: e.g., "Say finish. Now say it again without the fin"[14]

Onset-rime awareness tasks

Spoken word recognition: e.g., "Do these words rhyme: shell bell?"[12] Spoken rhyme detection or rhyme oddity task: e.g., "Which word does not rhyme: fish, dish, hook?" [15] Spoken rhyme generation: e.g., "Tell me words that rhyme with bell?"[13]

Onset-rime blending [9]

Phonemic awareness tasks

Alliteration awareness (aka phoneme detection and sound or phoneme categorization): e.g., "Which word has a different first sound: bed, bus, chair, ball?"[16] Phoneme matching: e.g., "Which word begins with the same sound as bat: horn, bed, cup?" [16] Phoneme isolation: e.g., "Tell me the sound you hear at the beginning of the word food"
[3]

Phoneme completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a watch. Finish the word for me: wa_____ "[13] Phoneme blending with words or non-words: e.g., "What word do these sounds make: m...oo...n?" [9] Phoneme deletion, also referred to as phoneme elision: e.g., "Say coat. Now say it again but don't say /k/"[14] Phoneme segmentation with words or non-words: e.g., "How many sounds can you hear in the word it?[12] Phoneme reversal: e.g., "Say na (as in nap). Now say na backwards"[9] Phoneme manipulation: e.g., "Say dash. Now say it again, but instead of // say /I/"[14] Spoonerism: e.g., felt made becomes melt fade[12]

[edit] Development
Although some two-year-old children demonstrate phonological awareness, for most children, phonological awareness appears in the third year, with accelerating growth through the fourth and fifth years.[17][18][19][20] Phonological awareness skills develop in a predictable pattern similar across languagesprogressing from larger to smaller units of sound (that is, from words to syllables to onsets and syllable rimes to phonemes).[19][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Tasks used to demonstrate awareness of these sounds have their own developmental sequence. For example, tasks involving the detection of similar or dissimilar sounds (e.g., oddity tasks) are mastered before tasks requiring the manipulation of sounds (e.g., deletion tasks), and blending tasks are mastered before segmenting tasks.[28] It should be noted that the acquisition of phonological awareness skills does not progress in a linear sequence; rather, children continue to refine skills they have acquired while they learn new skills.[28] The development of phonological awareness is closely tied to overall language and speech development. Vocabulary size, as well as other measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology, are consistent concurrent and longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness.[19][19][23][29][30][31][32][33][34] Consistent with this finding, children with communication disorders often have poor phonological awareness.[35][36][37] Phonological development and articulatory accuracy is often correlated to phonological awareness skills, both for children with typical speech[38][39] and those with disordered speech.[2][40][41] In addition to milestones of speech and language development, speech and language processing abilities are also related to phonological awareness: both speech

perception[31][42][43][44] and verbal short-term memory[42] have been concurrently and predicatively correlated with phonological awareness abilities.

[edit] Phonological awareness and reading

Phonological awareness is an important determiner of success in learning to read and spell. For most children, strong readers have strong phonological awareness, and poor readers have poor phonological awareness skills.[4][5][6][45] Phonological awareness skills in the preschool and kindergarten years also strongly predict how well a child will read in the school years.[15][46][47] In addition, interventions to improve phonological awareness abilities lead to significantly improved reading abilities.[15] Phonological awareness instruction improves reading and spelling skills, but the reverse is also true: literacy instruction improves phonological awareness skills.[48][49][50][51] The relationship between phonological awareness and reading abilities changes over time. All levels of phonological awareness ability (syllable, onset-rhyme, and phoneme) contribute to reading abilities in the Kindergarten through second grade.[52][53] However, beyond the second grade, phoneme-level abilities play a stronger role.[54] The relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is often explained in terms of its role in decoding and encoding.[1][55][56][57][58][59] In reading, decoding refers to the process of relating a word's written representation to its verbal representation. Especially in the early stages of reading, decoding involves mapping letters in the word to their corresponding sounds, and then combining those sounds to form a verbal word. Encoding: a process used in spelling: is similar, although the process goes in the opposite direction, with the word's verbal representation is encoded in a written form. Again, especially in the early stages of reading, encoding involves determining the sounds in a verbal word, and then mapping those sounds onto a letter sequence in order to spell out the written word. In both encoding and decoding, phonological awareness is needed because the child must know the sounds in the words in order to relate them to the letter sounds.

[edit] Intervention
Phonological awareness is an auditory skill that is developed through a variety of activities that expose students to the sound structure of the language and teach them to recognize, identify and manipulate it. Listening skills are an important foundation for the development of phonological awareness and they generally develop first.[11][60] Therefore, the scope and sequence of instruction in early childhood literacy curriculum typically begins with a focus on listening, as teachers instruct children to attend to and distinguish sounds, including environmental sounds and the sounds of speech. Early phonological awareness instruction also involves the use of songs, nursery rhymes and games to help students to become alert to speech sounds and rhythms, rather than meanings, including rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and prosody. While exposure to different sound patterns in songs and rhymes is a start towards developing phonological awareness, exposure in itself is not enough, because the traditional actions that go along with songs and nursery rhymes typically focus on helping students to understand the meanings of words, not attend to the sounds. Therefore, different strategies must be implemented to aid students in becoming alert to sounds instead. Specific activities that involve students in attending

to and demonstrating recognition of the sounds of language include waving hands when rhymes are heard, stomping feet along with alliterations, clapping the syllables in names, and slowly stretching out arms when segmenting words. Phonological awareness is technically only about sounds and students do not need to know the letters of the alphabet to be able to develop phonological awareness. Students in primary education sometimes learn phonological awareness in the context of literacy activities, particularly phonemic awareness.[citation needed] Some research demonstrates that, at least for older children, there may be utility to extending the development of phonological awareness skills in the context of activities that involve letters and spelling.[citation needed] A number of scholars have been working on this approach.[citation needed]

[edit] See also

Dyslexia Phonological Awareness for Literacy Phonological deficit hypothesis

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines

By: David J. Chard and Shirley V. Dickson (1999) This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading. Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading. Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily; Life is but a dream Bow, bow, bow your boat bently bown the beam. Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily; Bife is but a beam. Sow, sow, sow your soat sently sown the seam.

Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily; Sife is sut a seam. Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition. Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998). The most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994). No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993). Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist. For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom. Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading. The purposes of this article are to (a) clarify some of the salient findings from research on phonological awareness and reading and (b) translate those findings into practical information for teachers of children with learning disabilities or children who are experiencing delays in early reading. To this end, we answer three questions:
1. What is phonological awareness, and why is it important to beginning reading success? 2. What are documented effective principles that should guide phonological awareness instruction? 3. What principles should guide the assessment of phonological awareness?

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Spoken language can be broken down in many different ways, including sentences into words and words into syllables (e. g., in the word simple, /sim/ and /ple/), onset and rime (e. g., in the word broom, /br/ and /oom/), and individual phonemes (e.g., in the word hamper, /h/, /a/, /m/, /p/, /er/). Manipulating sounds includes deleting, adding, or substituting syllables or sounds (e.g., say can; say it without the /k/; say can with /m/ instead of /k/). Being phonologically aware means having a general understanding at all of these levels.

Operationally, skills that represent children's phonological awareness lie on a continuum of complexity (see Figure 1). At the less complex end of the continuum are activities such as initial rhyming and rhyming songs as well as sentence segmentation that demonstrates an awareness that speech can be broken down into individual words. At the center of the continuum are activities related to segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables into words. Next are activities such as segmenting words into onsets and rimes and blending onsets and rimes into words. Finally, the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes and the ability to manipulate these phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words. The recent National Research Council report on reading distinguishes phonological awareness from phonemic awareness in this way: The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51) Throughout this article we will use the term phonological awareness to mean an awareness at all levels from basic rhyme to phonemic awareness. Only in some specific instances will we use the term phonemic awareness. At this point, it is important to note that phonological awareness differs distinctly from phonics. Phonological awareness involves the auditory and oral manipulation of sounds. Phonics is the association of letters and sounds to sound out written symbols (Snider, 1995); it is a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations (Adams, 1990). Phonological awareness and phonics are intimately intertwined, but they are not the same. This relationship will be further described in the following section.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. For many children, this begins very early in the course of their language development and is likely facilitated by being read to from books that are based on rhyme or alliteration, such as the B Book by Stanley and Janice Berenstain, 1997, or Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, 1979, (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). As children grow older, however, their basic phonological awareness does not necessarily develop into the more sophisticated phonemic awareness. In fact, developing the more complex phonemic awareness is difficult for most children and very difficult for some children (Adams et al., 1996). However, it is a child's phonemic awareness on entering school that is most closely related to success in learning to read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).

Why is phonological awareness so important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be sensitive to the internal structure of words in order to benefit from formal reading instruction (Adams, 1990; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use lettersound knowledge to read and build words. As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness in kindergarten is a strong predictor of later reading success (Ehri & Wilce, 1980, 1985; Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995). Over the past 2 decades, researchers have focused primarily on the contribution of phonological awareness to reading acquisition. However, the relationship between phonological awareness and reading is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature (Stanovich, 1986). Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading. However, instruction in early reading-specifically, explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondence appears to strengthen phonological awareness, and in particular the more sophisticated phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Many children with learning disabilities demonstrate difficulties with phonological awareness skills (Shaywitz, 1996). However, many other children have such difficulty without displaying other characteristics of learning disabilities. Although a lack of phonemic awareness correlates with difficulty in acquiring reading skills, this lack should not necessarily be misconstrued as a disability (Fletcher et al., 1994). More important, children who lack phonemic awareness can be identified, and many of them improve their phonemic awareness with instruction. Furthermore, although explicit instruction in phonological awareness is likely to improve early reading for children who lack phonemic awareness, most children with or without disabilities are likely to benefit from such instruction (R. E. O'Connor, personal communication, June 2, 1998). In short, success in early reading depends on achieving a certain level of phonological awareness. Moreover, instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for most children and seems to be critical for others, but the degree of explicitness and the systematic nature of

instruction may need to vary according to the learner's skills (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998), especially for students at risk for reading difficulties. With this in mind, we discuss documented approaches to teaching phonological awareness.

Teaching phonological awareness

There is ample evidence that phonological awareness training is beneficial for beginning readers starting as early as age 4 (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991). In a review of phonological research, Smith et al. (1998) concluded that phonological awareness can be developed before reading and that it facilitates the subsequent acquisition of reading skills. Documented effective approaches to teaching phonological awareness generally include activities that are age appropriate and highly engaging. Instruction for 4-year-olds involves rhyming activities, whereas kindergarten and first-grade instruction includes blending and segmenting of words into onset and rime, ultimately advancing to blending, segmenting, and deleting phonemes. This pattern of instruction follows the continuum of complexity illustrated in Figure 1. Instruction frequently involves puppets who talk slowly to model word segmenting or magic bridges that are crossed when children say the correct word achieved by synthesizing isolated phonemes. Props such as colored cards or pictures can be used to make abstract sounds more concrete. During the last few years, publishers have produced multiple programs in phonological awareness, some of which are based on research. Two of these programs are Ladders to Literacy (O'Connor, Notari-Syverson, & Vadasy, 1998) and Teaching Phonemic Awareness (Adams et al., 1996). Figures 2 through 4 are illustrations of phonemic awareness lessons that are based on examples from these programs.
Figure 2. Instructional activity that teaches synthesis of phonemes into words. Guess-the-word game

Objective: Students will be able to blend and identify a word that is stretched out into its component sounds. Materials Needed: Picture cards of objects that students are likely to recognize such as: sun, bell, fan, flag, snake, tree, book, cup, clock, plane Activity: Place a small number of picture cards in front of children. Tell them you are going to say a word using "Snail Talk" a slow way of saying words (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/). They have to look at the pictures and guess the word you are saying. It is important to have the children guess the answer in their head so that everyone gets an opportunity to try it. Alternate between having one child identify the word and having all children say the word aloud in chorus to keep children engaged.
Figure 3. An Instructional activity that teaches segmentation at multiple phonological levels. Segmentation activities

Objectives: Students will be able to segment various parts of oral language.

Activity:
a. Early in phonological awareness instruction, teach children to segment sentences into individual words. Identify familiar short poems such as "I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream!" Have children clap their hands with each word. b. As children advance in their ability to manipulate oral language, teach them to segment words into syllables or onsets and rimes. For example, have children segment their names into syllables: e.g., Ra-chel, Al-ex-an-der, and Rod-ney. c. When children have learned to remove the first phoneme (sound) of a word, teach them to segment short words into individual phonemes: e.g., s-u-n, p-a-t, s-t-o-p. Figure 4. An instructional activity that teaches phoneme deletion and substitution. Change-a-name game

Objective: Students will be able to recognize words when the teacher says the word with the first sound removed. Activity: Have students sit in a circle on the floor. Secretly select one child and change their name by removing the first sound of the name. For example, change Jennifer to Ennifer or change William to Illiam. As you change the name, the children have to identify who you are talking about. Extension Ideas: As children become better at identifying the child's name without the first sound, encourage them to try removing the beginning sounds of words and pronounce the words on their own. After children learn how to remove sounds, teach them to substitute the beginning sound in their name with a new sound. The teacher can model this, beginning with easier sounds (common sounds of consonant s, e.g., /m/, /t/, /p/) and advancing to more complex sounds and sound blends (e.g., /ch/, /st/). Most early phonological awareness activities are taught in the absence of print, but there is increasing evidence that early writing activities, including spelling words as they sound (i.e., invented or temporary spelling), appear to promote more refined phonemic awareness (Ehri, 1998; Treiman, 1993). It may be that during spelling and writing activities children begin to combine their phonological sensitivity and print knowledge and apply them to building words. Even if children are unable to hold and use a pen or pencil, they can use letter tiles or word processing programs to practice their spelling. Instruction in phonological awareness can be fun, engaging, and age appropriate, but the picture is not as simple as it seems. First, evidence suggests that instruction in the less complex phonological skills such as rhyming or onset and rime may facilitate instruction in more complex skills (Snider, 1995) without directly benefiting reading acquisition (Gough, 1998). Rather, integrated instruction in segmenting and blending seems to provide the greatest benefit to reading acquisition (e.g., Snider, 1995). Second, although most children appear to benefit from instruction in phonological awareness, in some studies there are students who respond poorly to

this instruction or fail to respond at all. For example, in one training study that provided 8 weeks of instruction in phonemic awareness, the majority of children demonstrated significant growth, whereas 30% of the at-risk students demonstrated no measurable growth in phonological awareness (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). Similarly, in a 12-week training in blending and segmenting for small groups (3-4 children) in 2-minute sessions four times a week, about 30% of the children still obtained very low scores on the segmenting posttest and 10 % showed only small improvements on the blending measures (Torgesen et al., 1994). Torgesen et al. (1994) concluded that training for at-risk children must be more explicit or more intense than what is typically described in the research literature if it is to have a substantial impact on the phonological awareness of many children with severe reading disabilities. Therefore, we recommend two tiers of instruction. The first tier of instruction is the highly engaging, age-appropriate instruction that we introduced earlier. The second tier of instruction includes more intensive and strategic instruction in segmenting and blending at the phoneme level (e.g., Snider, 1995). Beside content, another issue that requires attention in phonological awareness instruction is curriculum design. From research, we are able to deduce principles for effectively designing phonological awareness instruction. These design principles apply for all students but are particularly important for students who respond poorly to instruction. In the design of phonological awareness instruction, the following general principles increase students' success (Chard & Osborn, 1998):

Start with continuous sounds such as /s/, /m/, and /f/ that are easier to pronounce than stop sounds such as /p/, /b/, and /k/; Carefully model each activity as it is first introduced; Move from larger units (words, onset-rime) to smaller units (individual phonemes); Move from easier tasks (e.g., rhyming) to more complex tasks (e.g., blending and segmenting); and, Consider using additional strategies to help struggling early readers manipulate sounds. These strategies may include using concrete objects (e.g., blocks, bingo chips) to represent sounds.

Research suggests that by the end of kindergarten children should be able to demonstrate phonemic blending and segmentation and to make progress in using sounds to spell simple words. Achieving these goals requires that teachers be knowledgeable about effective instructional approaches to teaching phonological awareness and be aware of the ongoing progress for each of their students. In the next section, we describe effective ways to assess phonological skills and monitor progress in phonological awareness.

Assessing phonological awareness

Assessment in phonological awareness serves essentially two purposes: to initially identify students who appear to be at risk for difficulty in acquiring beginning reading skills and to regularly monitor the progress of students who are receiving instruction in phonological awareness. The measures used to identify at-risk students must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and separate low and high performers. Measures used for monitoring progress

must be sensitive to change and have alternate forms (Kaminski & Good, 1996). In this section, we discuss only measures that have been demonstrated to be valid and reliable. We report the technical adequacy of the measures in the Appendix, rather than in the narrative description of the measure. As stated earlier, screening measures must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and must separate high from low performers. Measures of automatized color, object, number, or letter naming meet these criteria (Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Burgess, & Hecht, 1997; Wolf, 1991). Segmentation is a second skill that is highly predictive of future reading ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Unlike rapid naming, segmentation is a skill that can be taught, and the instruction of segmentation benefits reading acquisition. Screening measures must also separate high from low performers. This means that they must address skills that are developmentally appropriate. Phonological awareness skills seem to develop along a continuum from rhyme to segmenting. Typically, students develop the ability to segment words into onset and rime during kindergarten and to segment words into separate phonemes between kindergarten and first grade. Therefore, most first-grade students perform well on an onset-rime measure, whereas most kindergarten students do poorly on a measure of segmenting into individual sounds. In either case it is difficult to separate low and high performers. Although we know a great deal about identifying students at risk for reading difficulties, many questions remain unanswered. We recommend that teachers use a variety of screening measures, including one that measures automatized rapid naming and one that measures phonemic awareness sensitivity or segmenting. Typically, kindergarten students are screened for risk factors in acquiring beginning reading skills in the second semester of kindergarten. Appropriate screening measures for the second semester of kindergarten include measures that are strong predictors of a student's successful response to explicit phonemic awareness instruction or beginning reading acquisition. Such predictors of successful response to segmenting and blending instruction are the Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (TOPA-K; Torgesen & Bryant, 1993), a Nonword Spelling measure (Torgesen & Davis, 1996), and the Digit Naming Rate (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). Predictors of the successful acquisition of beginning reading skills include automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters (e.g., Wolf, 1991) and segmenting ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Other measures used during the second semester of kindergarten to identify students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills include measures of phoneme deletion. The measures appropriate for identifying first-grade students at risk for not acquiring reading skills overlap those used in kindergarten. The TOPA-K and onset-rime are no longer appropriate, as students should have developed these skills by the end of kindergarten, whereas segmenting is still an emerging skill. However, tasks such as automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters remain predictors for students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills, as do measures to determine whether students lag behind their peers in phonological awareness, such as measures of segmenting.

When using screening measures, the teacher must establish decision rules for identifying students requiring phonological awareness instruction. The decision rules vary. The TOPA-K has normed scores and provides information to help a teacher decide whether to provide phonemic awareness instruction to students who score one or two standard deviations below the mean. However, there is little research evidence to guide decision making about which children should receive the more intensive phonological awareness instruction. A second use of measures is to monitor students' progress. Unlike the screening measures, progress-monitoring measures must be sensitive to growth and require multiple forms. The Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy (Kaminski & Good, 1996) fit this requirement and are appropriate for kindergarten and first grade. After the first semester of first grade, teachers may also be interested in monitoring their students' progress in generalizing phonemic awareness to reading and spelling. Two other measures of reading that are sensitive to growth and have alternative forms are oral reading fluency (tasks) and nonsense word reading fluency (Tindal & Marston, 1990). As with screening measures, teachers must establish decision rules about how to gauge the progress of their students. One way is to establish a baseline by graphing three measurement points before the start of instruction, adding each subsequent data point to the graph, and checking the slope of students' progress. If many students are making slower progress than necessary to reach the level of their average-achieving peers, the teacher can modify the instruction by increasing one or more of the elements in the instructional guidelines. For example, if students are not acquiring segmenting, the teacher may decide to add more scaffolds, such as cards that the students can move as they segment words, thereby making segmenting instruction more explicit, or provide students with more guided practice. If most students successfully respond to instruction but a few respond poorly or not at all, the teacher may decide to place these students in a flexible group to receive more intense instruction. The teacher could also choose to provide some individuals with more intense instruction throughout the day to keep them up with their peers. If the progress-monitoring measures indicate that the first-grade students receiving instruction in phonological awareness lag behind their peers in reading or spelling, the teacher may choose to increase the integrated instruction in letter- sound correspondence and to make stronger the links between segmenting and blending skills and reading. Brief descriptions of the screening and monitoring measures that have demonstrated validity and reliability through research follow. For each measure, we indicate the grade and purpose for which the measure is appropriate. Note that some measures are appropriate for more than one grade level and for both screening and monitoring progress.
Test of phonological awareness- kindergarten

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure of phonemic sensitivity strongly predicts which students will demonstrate high segmenting ability following small-group instruction in phonemic awareness (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). The measure consists of one form with 10 items requiring students to indicate which of three words (represented by pictures) have the same first sound as a target word and 10 items that require students to indicate which of four words (represented by pictures) begins with a different first sound than the other three. The measure is

administered to small groups of 6 to 10 children and is untimed. Students receive raw scores that are normed.
Nonword spelling

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students will demonstrate growth in blending and segmenting after small-group phonological awareness instruction. Five nonwords (feg, rit, mub, gof, pid) comprise the measure. Students receive one point for each phoneme that they represent correctly in the spelling.
Digit naming rate

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students are likely to demonstrate growth in blending after small-group phonological awareness instruction. The measure consists of six rows with five single digits per row on an 8 " x 11 " card. The students are timed as they name the digits as fast as they can, beginning at the top and continuing to the bottom. Students complete two trials using cards with differently arranged numbers. The score is based on the average time for the two series.
Yopp-SingerTest of phoneme segmentation

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). This test (Yopp, 1995) consists of 22 items and requires students to separately articulate each phoneme in the presented words. The student receives credit only if all sounds in a word are presented correctly. The student does not receive partial credit for saying /c/ or /c/ /at/ for cat. One feature that differentiates this screening measure from others is that students receive feedback after each response. If the child's response is correct, the test administrator says, "That's right." If the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner tells the student the correct response. Moreover, if the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner writes the error. Recording the errors helps the teacher decide what remediation the student requires. The student's score is the number of items correctly segmented into individual phonemes. The test is administered individually and requires about 5 to 10 minutes per child.
Bruce test of phoneme deletion

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). The Bruce (1964) test assesses phoneme deletion, a more difficult and compound skill than segmenting (Yopp, 1995). The measure consists of 30 one- to three-syllable words drawn from words familiar to children between the ages of 5 and 61/2. The examiner asks students to delete one phoneme from the beginning, middle, or end of a word and to say the word that remains. The positions of deleted phonemes are randomly ordered throughout the test. The test is individually administered and requires 10 minutes to administer.
Auditory analysis test

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure (Rosner & Simon, 1971, cited in MacDonald & Cornwall, 1995) consists of 40 items arranged in order of difficulty from deletion

of syllables in compound words to deletion of syllables in multisyllabic words to deletion of phonemes in beginning, middle, and end positions. The teacher asks the student to delete a syllable or phoneme and say the word that is left. The measure is administered individually.
Rapid letter naming, dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). The Rapid Letter Naming, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is another of many measures used to assess the rapid letter-naming ability of students. The measure has 18 alternate forms and consists of 104 randomly selected upper- and lowercase letters presented on one page. The measure is given individually, and students have 1 minute to name as many letters as possible in the order that they appear on the page.
Phoneme segmentation fluency, DIBELS

(End of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen, Monitor Progress). The Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is one of many segmenting measures. The measure has 18 alternate forms. Each form consists of 10 words, each with two or three phonemes, randomly selected from words in the pre-primer and primer levels of the Scribner basal reading series. The measure is administered individually and is timed. Unlike the Yopp-Singer Test, students do not receive feedback on their responses but do receive scores for partially correct answers. In other words, for cat, a student receives a score of 1 for saying /c/, a score of 2 for saying /c/ /at/, or a score of 3 for saying /c/ /a/ /t/. Because this measure assesses the number of correct phonemes per minute, it is sensitive to growth and is, therefore, appropriate for both screening and monitoring progress.

Conclusion
As we noted at the outset of this article, efforts to understand the role of phonological awareness have far exceeded the efforts to relate research findings to classroom practice regarding phonological awareness. This article is an attempt to pull together the valuable information available on the role that phonological awareness plays in early reading development, the research-based teaching strategies that address the needs of all children, the instructional design principles that address the needs of children experiencing delays in early reading development, and the validated instruments available for screening and monitoring students' progress in phonological awareness. Our description of the role that phonological awareness plays in reading development conspicuously fails to address the connection of phonological awareness and spelling. This failure is not an oversight, nor should it be perceived as a statement of our beliefs regarding the importance of spelling. We firmly believe that findings from spelling research (e.g., Ehri, 1998; Templeton, 1995; Treiman, 1993) represent such a significant part of our knowledge base about reading that they would go far beyond the length and scope of this article. Recent research on phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, including how to teach and assess them, has made an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of how to

teach reading to children with learning disabilities or delays in early reading. It is not, however, a cure for reading disabilities, but a significant advance in preventing and correcting reading difficulties so that more children are prepared to learn how to read in our alphabetic writing system.

About the authors

David J. Chard, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at The University of Texas at Austin. His current interests include research in professional developmental in early reading and analysis of children's discourse in mathematics classrooms. Shirley V Dickson, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at Northern Illinois University. Her interests are in research on phonological awareness and reading instruction and collaboration models in special education. Address: David J. Chard, University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of Special Education, SZB 408, Austin, TX 78712.

Appendix
Table A. Technical Adequacy of Screening and Monitoring Measures Measure Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993) Validity Concurrent validity with segmenting and sound isolation(.50-.55); Concurrent validity with word identification and word analysis of Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (.60.66); Predictive validity (.59-.75) Reliability Internal consistency (.90-.91); Total score reliability (Cronbach's Alpha = .91)

Nonword Spelling (Torgesen & Davis, 1996) Digit Naming Rate (Torgesen & Davis, 1996) Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Construct validity with subtests of California Achievement Test (.38-.78); Predictive of Segmentation (Yopp, 1995) reading and spelling in Grades 1-6 (-.05-.55; 16 of the 25 correlations were positive and significant) Bruce Phoneme Deletion Test Predictive validity to learning to read novel

Internal consistency (.88) Split-half reliability (.91) Cronbach's Alpha (.95)

Cronbach's Alpha (.92)

(Bruce, 1964) Auditory Analysis Test (Rosner & Simon, 1971, cited in MacDonald & Cornwall, 1995; Yopp,1988) Rapid Letter Naming (DIBELS)

words (.67) Predictive validity (accounted for 25% of the variance in word identification and spelling skills at age 17); Construct validity for compound phonemic awareness Concurrent criterion-related with the Standard Diagnostic Reading Test (.50) and oral reading fluency (.45) Cronbach's Alpha (.78)

Spearman-Brown Prophecy formula (.83 for first grade) Alternate form reliability (.60 Spearman Prophecy formula)

Segmenting Fluency (DIBELS)

Oral Reading Fluency (Children's Educational Services, 1987)

Coefficient with Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, Woodcock Reading Mastery TestRevised, and Peabody Individual Achievement Test (.52-.91) Criterion reliability with curriculum-based reading measures (.80)

Alternate form reliability (.97)

Nonsense Word Fluency (DIBELS; R. H. Good, August 3, 1998, personal communication)

Alternate form reliability (high .80s)

This technique is recommended by research

Phonological Awareness has been recommended as a practice with solid research evidence of effectiveness for individuals with Learning Disabilities by Council for Exceptional Children-the Division for Learning Disabilities (DLD) and the Division for Research (DR). To learn more, please read Current Practice Alert: Phonological Awareness. If you have students in your classroom who are English Language Learners, pay special attention to the section titled "What Questions Remain." References May 1999 Intervention in School and Clinic Volume 34, Number 5 pp. 261-270 Copyright 1999 by PRO-Ed, Inc.

Phonemic awareness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia See also: Phonics, and Synthetic_phonics Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, /k/, //, and /t/, requires phonemic awareness. The National Reading Panel has found that phonemic awareness improves children's word reading and reading comprehension, as well as helping children learn to spell.[1] Phonemic awareness is the basis for learning phonics. This relationship is explained in the What Works Reports and illustrated in the Reading Skills Pyramid. Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are often confused since they are interdependent. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes. Phonological awareness includes this ability, but it also includes the ability to hear and manipulate larger units of sound, such as onsets and rimes and syllables. Studies by Vickie Snider from The Journal of Educational Research [2] have shown that phonemic awareness has a direct correlation with students ability to read as they get older. Phonemic awareness builds a foundation for students to understand the rules of the English language. This in turn allows each student to apply these skills and increase his or her oral reading fluency and understanding of the text. Phonemic awareness relates to the ability to distinguish and manipulate individual sounds, such as /f/, //, and /t/ in the case of foot. The following are common phonemic awareness skills practiced with students:

Phoneme isolation: which requires recognizing the individual sounds in words, for example, "Tell me the first sound you hear in the word paste" (/p/). Phoneme identity: which requires recognizing the common sound in different words, for example, "Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy and bell" (/b/). Phoneme substitution: in which one can turn a word (such as "cat") into another (such as "hat") by substituting one phoneme (such as /h/) for another (/k/). Phoneme substitution can take place for initial sounds (cat-hat), middle sounds (cat-cut) or ending sounds (catcan). Oral segmenting: The teacher says a word, for example, "ball," and students say the individual sounds, /b/, //, and /l/. Oral blending: The teacher says each sound, for example, "/b/, //, /l/" and students respond with the word, "ball." Sound deletion: The teacher says word, for example, "bill," has students repeat it, and then instructs students to repeat the word without a sound.

Onset-rime manipulation: which requires isolation, identification, segmentation, blending, or deletion of onsets (the single consonant or blend that precedes the vowel and following consonants), for example, j-ump, st-op, str-ong.

For example, the teacher might say, now say bill without the /b/." Students should respond with /l/. There are other phonemic awareness activities, such as sound substitution, where students are instructed to replace one sound with another, sound addition, where students add sounds to words, and sound switching, where students manipulate the order of the phonemes. These are more complex but research supports the use of the three listed above, particularly oral segmenting and oral blending.[citation needed] Phoneme Awareness Awareness at the level of the phoneme has particular significance for the acquisition of reading because of its role in the development of the alphabetic principle - that the written word is simply a means of codifying the sound properties of the spoken word. In order to decode the written word, the child needs to appreciate the logic of the writing system and, as a prerequisite, the logic of oral word production. There are two requirements of beginning reading for which phonemic awareness becomes immediately relevant: phonemic analysis (segmentation) and phonemic synthesis (blending). For most children, the ability to produce the finer discrimination of phonemes begins in about Year I of their schooling (Ball, 1993). Individual phonemes are more difficult to specify because their acoustic values vary with the phonemes that precede and follow them in a word (a phenomenon called co-articulation); whereas, syllables have relatively constant values in a word and hence should be more readily recognised. The fact that consonants are "folded" into vowels can be understood by noting the different tongue positions for the beginning /d/ sound when it is followed by /oo/ and by /i/. In most children the ability to synthesise (blend) sounds into words occurs earlier than analytic (segmentation) skills (Bryen & Gerber, 1987; Caravolas & Bruck, 1993; Solomons, 1992; Torgesen et al., 1992; Yopp, 1992). Thus, it is easier to respond with the word cat when presented with the sounds c - at or c-a-t , than it is to supply c-a-t when asked to tell what sounds you hear in cat . Tasks used to assess beginning (or shallow) phonemic awareness tend to emphasise sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration; for example, finding a word that begins or ends with the same sound as the stimulus word. A more complex task would involve the manipulation, or separation of sounds in a word, for example, What is the first sound you hear in cat ? What word is left if you remove the /t/ from "stand"? (Torgesen et al., 1994). Other tasks used for assessment may include counting the sounds in words, adding, deleting or manipulating sounds, and categorising sounds at the beginning, middle, or end of words. There are now numerous normed and unnnormed tests available. Some are available from publishers, such as the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) whilst some are free from the Net, such as Dynamic Indicators of

Basic Early Literacy Skills ( DIBELS) (University of Oregon, 2002a) or the Abecedarian Reading Assessment ( Wren & Watts, 2002). A useful resource in making decisions about which test to employ is an extensive and thorough review by Kame'enui (2002). As indicated above, deeper levels of awareness (i.e., at the phoneme level) tend to develop during first grade upon exposure to reading instruction. Some have argued then that phonemic awareness may be a consequence of learning to read rather than a causal factor in its development (Morais et al., 1987; Morais, 1991). There is increasing consensus that the data are best explained by considering the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading development as a reciprocal one (Stanovich, 1992). A threshold phonemic awareness level may be necessary (though not sufficient) for beginning reading development, but as reading develops - increasingly the student becomes more sensitive and better able to manipulate sounds at the phoneme level. The acquisition of phonemic awareness is not guaranteed simply through maturation; in fact, about a third of students require varying degrees of assistance to promote its development (Adams, 1990). So, what do you teach? Do you purchase one of the many available texts such as the classroom curriculum by Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, and Beeler (1998), and work your way through the oral activities or do you contrive your own? Is the developmental sequence important? Should you gently guide students through the sequence, using only activities related to that level, or can you provide students with a richer range of activities at any one time? Should you focus directly on phoneme awareness (rather than on less sophisticated phonological processes like rhymes) from the beginning (Foorman et al., 2003)? Should you include letters (graphemes) in your otherwise oral curriculum (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993; National Reading Panel, 2000)? If so, when? Perhaps you should bypass the oral phonemic awareness activities, and move directly to the phonic processes of segmenting and blending (using letters) because they are activities more directly salient to reading? Maybe phonemic awareness is best considered as a consequence of reading development? And what about the student who is resistant to the activity-based curriculum, perhaps with other phonological problems such as slow naming speed ( Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002)? Do you introduce more formal direct instruction procedures over an extended period of time (Lyon, 2001; Wright & Jacobs, 2003)? There are many questions not entirely resolved, but for a detailed and helpful resource the University of Oregon (2002b) site Big Ideas in Beginning Reading should be examined. The National Reading Panel Report (2000) indicated that large effect sizes were possible when instruction was directed systematically and explicitly at one or two types of phonemic awareness activities provided to small groups, and involved associating phonemes with letters (such as segmenting and blending). As to who might require more intensive and extended assistance, Torgesen (1998) recommends an identification procedure involving administration of a test of knowledge of letter names or sounds and a measure of phonemic awareness. Students who do not do well on these tests are likely to struggle with reading unless additional support is provided. The Panels view was that this focus was so important that all students should have the opportunity to benefit from phonemic awareness activities in their first year of school. Those studies that provided activities for less than a half hour per day to a total of about 20 hours were effective and efficient.

The issue of when to introduce phonemic awareness activities/instruction has also been investigated. Byrne, Fielding-Barnsley, and Ashley (2000) report that it is not only the attainment of phonemic awareness that is important in learning to read, but also its speed of acquisition. In a longitudinal study, they noted that poor readers in grade 5 were those who, though they eventually achieved reasonable levels of phonemic awareness, were slow to grasp it. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity when phonological processes can become the driving force behind initial reading development. If reading development is not phonologically informed then students may adopt less viable strategies, such as guessing and memorisation of shapes. If that occurs, phonemic awareness may subsequently develop, but will not necessarily be employed by the student whose strategies have become entrenched. Perhaps this is the reason why it can take four times as much intervention to improve a child's reading skills if help is delayed until grade 4 than if it is begun in the first year of school (Hall & Moats, 1999). The role of fluency in promoting reading comprehension was brought to the attention of many because of its status in the report of the National Reading Panel (2000). Less well known is an increasing interest in promoting fluency across a range of curriculum areas ( Binder , Haughton, & Bateman, 2002; Lindsley, 1996). Binder et al. suggest that while mastery is important, real expertise in phonemic awareness skills is not present until students can effortlessly and quickly perform the tasks. Thus, they suggest students should aim to be able to blend sounds to form words at a minimum of 10 per minute, segment words into sounds by moving colored blocks to indicate the sounds at a rate of at least 40 per minute, and construct new words through substituting one phoneme for another at a minimum rate of 15 per minute. This suggestion certainly offers another dimension for teachers wishing to ensure all their students develop a strong phonological basis for literacy. Of course, a classroom emphasis on phonological processes assumes that teachers already have the necessary deep understanding of phonemic awareness required to teach it effectively. This assumption may not be warranted, as research has indicated that many teachers do not themselves have a solid foundation in their own phonemic awareness, and few have received the level of training that produces the supra-skill level important in awakening children's finegrained sensitivity to the sound structure of words (Lindamood, 1994; Mather, Bos, & Babur, 2001; Moats, 1994). For example, in one study (Mather et al.) only 2% of teachers-in-training and 19% of working teachers knew that the word box is constructed from four speech sounds. It is not easy for adults to ignore entrenched spelling patterns when confronted with phonemic tasks (Labov, 2003). Students whose teacher themselves have phonological deficiencies display lower levels of reading skills as a consequence (Lindamood, 1994). In many teacher-training facilities, pre-service instruction in these areas is not among the priorities in developing a teacher education curriculum on literacy. Hence, many teachers are likely to need retraining if the results of phonemic awareness research into beginning reading are to be put into practice successfully.

Conclusion
Phonological awareness seems to be language independent. Once it has been acquired, it is likely transferable to any new languages learned. This is not to say that language specific phonology, including phoneme discrimination is not important, simply that it is not part of the construct known as phonological awareness and may not be crucial for understanding the alphabetic principle. Furthermore,

it seems that, for students who lack phonological awareness, there is no need to delay teaching it. In fact, there is a strong feeling that it should be taught as soon as possible. Lastly, in assessing and teaching students, teachers and researchers need to remember that some language specific aspects of phonology may still be relevant considerations. Phonemic Awareness (PA) is: 1. the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References). 2. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense. 3. fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word. 4. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. 5. a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.

An important distinction:

Phonemic awareness is NOT phonics. Phonemic awareness is AUDITORY and does not involve words in print.

Phonemic Awareness is important ...

It requires readers to notice how letters represent sounds. It primes readers for print. It gives readers a way to approach sounding out and reading new words. It helps readers understand the alphabetic principle (that the letters in words are systematically represented by sounds).

...but difficult:

Although there are 26 letters in the English language, there are approximately 40 phonemes, or sound units, in the English language. (NOTE: the number of phonemes varies across sources.) Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings (e.g., /f/ as in ph, f, gh, ff). The sound units (phonemes) are not inherently obvious and must be taught. The sounds that make up words are "coarticulated;" that is, they are not distinctly separate from each other.
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Definitions of key PA terminology:

Phoneme: A phoneme is a speech sound. It is the smallest unit of language and has no inherent meaning. Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words, and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References). Phonemic awareness involves hearing language at the phoneme level. Phonics: use of the code (sound-symbol relationships to recognize words. Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of language. 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.g., r, s, a, m). 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.
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Examples of Phonemes

The word "sun" has three phonemes: /s/ /u/ /n/. The table below shows different linguistic units from largest (sentence) to smallest (phoneme).
Sentence Word Syllable Onset-Rime Phoneme The sun shone brightly. sun sun, sun-shine, sun-ny s-un, s-unshine, s-unny s-u-n

The word "shut" also has three phonemes: /sh/ /u/ /t/.

Examples of Phonemic Awareness Skills

Blending: What word am I trying to say? Mmmmm...oooooo...p. Segmentation (first sound isolation): What is the first sound in mop? /m/ Segmentation (last sound isolation): What is the last sound in mop? /p/ Segmentation (complete): What are all the sounds you hear in mop? /m/ /o/ /p/

What Teachers Should Know

What Teachers Should Be Able to Do

Definition of phonemic awareness (PA). 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. Terminology (phoneme, PA, continuous sound, onset-rime, segmentation).

Assess PA and diagnose difficulties. Produce speech sounds accurately. Use a developmental continuum to select/design PA instruction. Select examples according to complexity of skills, phonemes, word types, and learner experience. Model and deliver PA lessons. Link PA to reading and spelling. Evaluate the design of instructional materials.

(modified from Moats, 1999; see References)

What Does the Lack of Phonemic Awareness Look Like?

Children lacking phonemic awareness skills cannot:

group words with similar and dissimilar sounds (mat, mug, sun) blend and split syllables (f oot) blend sounds into words (m_a_n) segment a word as a sequence of sounds (e.g., fish is made up of three phonemes, /f/ , /i/, /sh/) detect and manipulate sounds within words (change r in run to s).

(Kame'enui, et. al., 1997; see References)

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Phonemic Awareness Research Says:

"The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness)" (Lyon, 1995; see References).

The ability to hear and manipulate phonemes plays a causal role in the acquisition of beginning reading skills (Smith, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 1998; see References).

There is considerable evidence that the primary difference between good and poor readers lies in the good reader's phonological processing ability.

The effects of training phonological awareness and learning to read are mutually supportive. "Reading and phonemic awareness are mutually reinforcing: Phonemic awareness is necessary for reading, and reading, in turn, improves phonemic awareness still further." (Shaywitz, 2003, see References)

Phonological awareness is teachable and promoted by attention to instructional variables (Smith, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 1998; see References).

Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read

Author: Roger Sensenbaugh

Credits

Source

ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication,

With little or no direct instruction, almost all young children develop the ability to understand spoken language. While most kindergarten children have mastered the complexities of speech, they do not know that spoken language is made up of discrete words, which are made up of syllables, which themselves are made up of the smallest units of sound, called "phonemes." This awareness that spoken language is made up of discrete sounds appears to be a crucial factor in children learning to read. This Digest discusses the concept of the awareness that spoken language is made up of discrete sounds, why this concept is so important to early

Bloomington, IN.

childhood educators, its relation to the debate on the best type of reading instruction, and finally, teaching methods that may help children in developing such an awareness.

Contents What Is Phonological/Phoneme Awareness? What Is Phonological/Phoneme Stanovich (1993-94) defines "phonological awareness" as the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the Awareness?

syllable. He also notes that researchers "argue intensely" about the meaning of the term and about the nature of the tasks used to measure it. Why Is It So Harris and Hodges (1995) present a brief essay on phonemic awareness. Important? Another oft-cited source (Adams, 1990) uses "phonemic awareness" almost exclusively. Phonological awareness sometimes refers to an Relation To The "Great awareness that words consist of syllables, "onsets and rimes," and Reading Wars" phonemes, and so can be considered as a broader notion than phonemic awareness. Each term is widely used and perhaps (if incorrectly) used Teaching Methods interchangeably. In preparing this Digest, both terms were used to search the ERIC database. For the purposes of this Digest, each author's use will be followed. References Adams (1990) describes 5 levels of phonemic awareness in terms of abilities:
Forums Education and Kids

to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes to do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration) to blend and split syllables to perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of phonemes in a word) to perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder).

Related Articles Beginning Reading And Phonological Awareness For Students With Learning Disabilities Phonics in Whole Language Classrooms

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Why Is It So Important?

Educators are always looking for valid and reliable predictors of educational achievement. One reason why educators are so interested in

phonemic awareness is that research indicates that it is the best predictor of the ease of early reading acquisition (Stanovich, 1993-94), better even than IQ, vocabulary, and listening comprehension. Phonological awareness is not only correlated with learning to read, but research indicates a stronger statement is true: phonological awareness appears to play a causal role in reading acquisition. Phonological awareness is a foundational ability underlying the learning of spellingsound correspondences (Stanovich, 1993-94). Although phonological awareness appears to be a necessary condition for learning to read (children who do not develop phonological awareness do not go on to learn how to read), it is not a sufficient condition. Adams (1990) reviews the research that suggests that it is critical for children to be able to link phoneme awareness to a knowledge of letters. Once beginning readers have some awareness of phonemes and their corresponding graphic representations, research has indicated that further reading instruction heightens their awareness of language, assisting then in developing the later stages of phonemic awareness mentioned above. Phonemic awareness is both a prerequisite for and a consequence of learning to read (Yopp, 1992). Instruments to test for a child's phonemic awareness tend to be short, easy to administer, reliable, and valid. Stanovich also provides a quick (7-minute) and easy-to-administer phonological awareness test in an article in which he discusses his career as a researcher. Yopp (1995) presents a similarly brief assessment instrument and offers detailed evidence for its validity and reliability.
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Relation To The "Great Reading Wars"

Phonological awareness and its role in beginning reading has the potential to confound supporters at both extremes of the whole language vs. phonics "debate" over reading instruction. Regardless of instructional technique, phonological awareness is an essential element for reading progress (Griffith and Olson, 1992). In another study, Griffith et al. (1992) found that children with high phonemic awareness outperformed those with low phonemic awareness on all literacy measures, whether they were taught using a whole language approach or traditional basal instruction. Whole language advocates need to admit that not all children develop this necessary ability simply through immersion in a print-rich

environment, and that some children will need direct instruction in phonological awareness. "Phonics first" supporters (and perhaps even "phonics only" supporters) need to admit that teaching students letter-sound correspondences is meaningless if the students do not have a solid visual familiarity with the individual letters and if they do not understand that the sounds (which can be complex, shifting, and notoriously rule-breaking) paired with those letters are what make up words (Adams, 1990). What is needed, and what many practitioners probably already actually implement, is a balanced approach to reading instruction--an approach that combines the language- and literature-rich activities associated with whole language activities aimed at enhancing meaning, understanding, and the love of language with explicit teaching of skills as needed to develop fluency associated with proficient readers. Honig (1996) offers a review of reading research supporting such a balanced approach and presents detailed guidelines on how to integrate whole language principles with the necessary foundation reading skills.
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Teaching Methods

Research indicates that phonological awareness can be taught and that students who increased their awareness of phonemes facilitated their subsequent reading acquisition (Lundberg et al, 1988). Teachers need to be aware of instructional activities that can help their students become aware of phonemes before they receive formal reading instruction, and they need to realize that phonemic awareness will become more sophisticated as students' reading skills develop. The following recommendations for instruction in phonemic awareness are derived from Spector (1995):

At the preschool level, engage children in activities that direct their attention to the sounds in words, such as rhyming and alliteration games. Teach students to segment and blend. Combine training in segmentation and blending with instruction in letter-sound relationships. Teach segmentation and blending as complementary processes. Systematically sequence examples when teaching segmentation and blending. Teach for transfer to novel tasks and contexts.

Yopp (1992) offers the following general recommendations for phonemic awareness activities:
a. Keep a sense of playfulness and fun, avoid drill and rote memorization. b. Use group settings that encourage interaction among children. c. Encourage children's curiosity about language and their experimentation with it. d. Allow for and be prepared for individual differences. e. Make sure the tone of the activity is not evaluative but rather fun and informal.

Spending a few minutes daily engaging preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children in oral activities that emphasize the sounds of language may go a long way in helping them become successful readers and learners.