Running Head: PHONEMIC AWARENESS INSTRUCTION 1

Long Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness Instruction

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Spring 2018

Carly McDonald
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Introduction

Phonemic awareness is defined as, “the conceptual understanding that spoken language

can be broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words, syllables, onsets, rimes,

and phonemes” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012). This has been of interest to me since we began the

semester by studying it in EDU 344 Teaching Reading. This topic continued to catch my

attention and make me wonder as we learned, which inspired my thought turned research

question about the long term effects of teaching phonemic awareness. In this study, “long term”

should be thought of as the range from kindergarten to 5th grade.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to see what the long term effects of phonemic awareness

instruction are and how they affect a student’s literacy skills. This topic is extremely important

because phonemic awareness is a crucial part of developing reading skills. According to Daffern

(2010), “Successful learning in spelling requires a comprehensive understanding of students’

current knowledge base in spelling, regular and explicit strategy instruction using metalanguage,

and instruction to be embedded within the context of authentic reading and writing experiences”

(p. 432). This leads to the question of what are the long term effects of teaching phonemic

awareness to young children?

The data was collected for this study by a review of literature regarding phonemic

awareness. Also, there were two surveys sent out to current teachers. One of the surveys was for

kindergarten teachers which asked them questions about how they implement phonemic

awareness instruction into their teaching and how important they think it is for kindergarteners to

learn. The other survey was sent to 5th grade teachers which asked them questions about their
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students’ current literacy skills and based on that how much phonemic awareness instruction

they guessed that their students had received in kindergarten.

It is hypothesized in this study that teaching young children to be strong in their

phonemic awareness skills will lead to strong literacy skills as they grow older. It is also

hypothesized that the kindergarten teachers’ value of phonemic awareness affects their drive to

teach it. It is also predicted that 5th grade students have strong literacy skills because of the

foundation of phonemic awareness they had received when they were younger.

Review of Literature

There are many long term effects of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and reading

comprehension interventions. Suggate (2016) analyzed studies of short-term effects to

understand not only whether reading interventions result in longer-term gains but also which

features of reading interventions relate to intervention outcomes. When reviewing the studies,

she found that the most frequently mentioned groups were normal readers, at risk readers

(usually below the 50th percentile or originating from socially or economically disadvantaged

groups), low-performing readers (usually below 25th percentile), and reading disabled students

(either reading below the 10th or diagnosed as having a reading-IQ discrepancy). She followed

certain parameters when searching for studies in order to keep her searches consistent. The

studies were excluded if they had insufficient statistics or the author could not be contacted.

These studies were all analyzed and the data was gathered. It was found that phonemic

awareness interventions appeared better than phonics for obtaining long lasting skills.

Comprehension interventions appeared particularly effective for creating long lasting skills, as

did those given to older students.

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It was very interesting that the author chose to use a meta-analysis strategy which is

making one’s own study out of other people’s studies. I have never read an article like that

before. The author had a procedure she used when searching for articles that she followed

exactly and that kept the research consistent and unbiased. It was very helpful to look at her

sources since she had so many, and use them to go further in my research. However, her topic of

study was very broad and I think if she narrowed it down a little bit, she would have had much

stronger data and results. The layout of the article was difficult to follow. The headings and

subheadings looked almost exactly the same so that made it hard to read and understand easily.

This article was extremely relevant to my topic of research, which is phonemic awareness. It

helped me to think about how to narrow it down and what is important to focus on as I go

forward with my research. In terms of future research and improvement for this article, I think

the author should narrow down her subject matter and dive deeper into it instead of scratching

the surface on a broad topic.

What happens when a teacher uses metalanguage to teach spelling? Daffern (2016)

conducts a study in order to show how teachers can capitalize on their own content and

pedagogical knowledge to teach Standard English spelling and how this translated to student

learning. This study included eight high achieving readers and eight low achieving readers, all

between the ages of three and six. Each of these student’s teachers were also included in the

study. Each student was asked to write a narrative and a persuasive essay and was then asked to

participate in an interview with the researcher. In the interview, the researcher asked questions to

get a sense of their spelling strategies. Then the teachers were interviewed to display their

teaching strategies. The findings of this study indicate that successful learning in spelling
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requires a comprehensive understanding of students’ current knowledge base in spelling, regular

and explicit strategy instruction using metalanguage, and instruction to be embedded within the

context of authentic reading and writing experiences.

This article included two entire interviews that were really helpful to read. There was one

with the researcher and a student and one with the researcher and a teacher. It also included

examples of student work for different types of phonemic awareness activities. I do not think it

was appropriate to test students between the ages of three and six. Although those are crucial

years for learning how to spell, it seems like too much to ask them to write a narrative and a

persuasive essay. That does not seem practical. This article is relevant to my topic of phonemic

awareness because it shows the importance of including it in the curriculum and how it benefits

the students. For future research, I think it would be effective to conduct this study again with

older students. It would be interesting to see if a nine or ten year old’s spelling is high achieving

or low achieving depending on how they were taught when they were younger. Next time, the

researcher could interview the older students and their teachers from kindergarten to see if the

pedagogy works in the long run.

Pre-service teachers’ knowledge of phonemic awareness is crucial for student success.

Martinussen (2015) conducted a study to examine the relations between perceived and actual

knowledge of phonemic awareness, exposure to phonemic awareness during practicum, and

self-efficacy for teaching phonemic awareness. This study sampled 54 teacher candidates

enrolled in a 1-year Bachelor of Education program at a university in Canada. Each candidate

was given a variety of surveys that questioned them about their perceived exposure to phonemic

awareness instruction, self-efficacy for teaching phonemic awareness, and their knowledge of
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phonemic awareness. After this, they were asked to attend a phonemic awareness workshop and

then given the knowledge survey again. The results provide data that show the researchers’

understanding of factors that may contribute to teacher candidates’ perceived knowledge of

phonemic awareness as well as their self-efficacy for teaching phonemic awareness. Since it was

found that phonemic awareness is a crucial foundation skill in reading acquisition, it is

crucial that all teacher candidates understand why this skill is important and how to teach it

effectively.

This article provided a model that showed the relationship between the things being

surveyed. It was a really good visual that showed how prior experience and actual knowledge

lead of phonemic awareness lead to self-efficacy when teaching it. This was very helpful when

reading the article. One thing that was difficult when reading this was that some parts were very

vague. There was hardly any information given about the workshop and what went on there. This

article was very relevant to my topic of phonemic awareness and will help me to further my

research on it. A suggestion for improvement on this article would be to go into further detail

about the workshop. That was a very important part of the study because the candidates did the

same survey before and after it so it would be helpful to know more about what they are learning

in the workshop that would change their answers on the survey.

Methodology

I chose to use two surveys for my methodology. The first survey was sent out via Google

Forms to kindergarten teachers. The survey consisted of two questions that asked the teachers

about the kinds of activities they do to teach phonemic awareness and how important they think

it is for kindergarteners to learn. The second survey was sent out via Google Forms to fifth grade
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teachers. This survey consisted of two questions as well, but these ones asked what they teachers

thought about their students’ current literacy skills and based on that how much phonemic

awareness instruction they guessed that their students had received in kindergarten.

I first selected kindergarten teachers as the participants for the survey because

kindergarten is a year where the students learn a lot of phonemic awareness. I wanted to ask the

teachers what kinds of activities they do to promote this and how much value they think it has for

their students. Then I decided to do a fifth grade survey as well because by that time, most

students are strong readers. I wanted to compare what the fifth grade teachers had to say about

the literacy skills of their students with what the kindergarten teachers said about the importance

of phonemic awareness and what they do to teach it.

Findings

In the kindergarten survey, the teachers indicated a large variety of instructional and

practice tools used for phonemic awareness. However, there was also a lot of repetition and

commonalities among them. The five activities that were most mentioned by teachers were

rhyming activities, phoneme segmentation and blending activities, nursery rhymes and songs,

clapping sounds, and read alouds. This data is displayed in the graph below (Figure 1).

Figure 1:
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Many teachers described general activities that they do with their students every day and

some provided the names of phonics programs that they use in their classrooms such as Reading

Horizons, Letterland, and Wilson Fundations. All of the teachers used a multitude of different

activities which displays a wide use of phonemic awareness instruction in their classrooms.

The results of the second question of the survey found that the majority of the teachers

rated teaching phonemic awareness in kindergarten as 10/10 for importance. 17 teachers chose

10, but two of them added a caveat with their answer. One person wrote, “if they are ready to

learn it” and the other person wrote, “with the caveat that nothing stands alone and all instruction

should be done in context so kids understand the purpose and connection.” The other survey

respondents for this question included one teacher each selecting 9, 8, 7, and 5 out of 10, as

shown in Figure 2. This indicated that the majority of kindergarten teachers value phonemic

awareness instruction.

Figure 2:
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Of the four participants surveyed for fifth grade, two of them chose 6/10 for how well

they thought their students were taught phonemic awareness in kindergarten based on their

current literacy skills. One participant chose 8 and one participant wrote in this answer, “ I

imagine that kindergarten was where my students began to learn basic language skills. I feel that

they were taught quite well.” These results demonstrate the lack of phonemic awareness

instruction these teachers think their students are getting previous to being in their classroom.

Three of these teachers talked about how their students have generally good phonemic

awareness skills. One teacher mentioned how her students “seem to have a very good grasp of

letter sounds, syllables, and words and they attempt to learn new words and relate them to other

words or parts of words they already know.” These results demonstrate a strong sense of

phonemic awareness considering the definition given of “the conceptual understanding that

spoken language can be broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words,

syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012).

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However, there are always going to be students who are behind. One teacher mentioned

how he or she has some students who struggle to find the differences between sounds and cannot

identify rhyming words. One participant of this survey identified himself or herself as a “reading

specialist and licensed disability teacher” and mentioned that he or she thought that “many

educators jump too soon into phonics with connecting symbols (letters) with sounds before

identifying the sounds first. Reading is taught out of developmental sequence and kids have gaps,

especially those without literacy exposure before entering school.” This response shows that it is

important for students to develop oral phonemic awareness before written phonemic awareness.

Overall, the kindergarten teachers generally do use a variety of instructional techniques

and do value the education of phonemic awareness. The 5th grade teachers generally thought

their students have good current literacy skills because of the foundation of phonemic awareness

the students received before having them as teachers. However, they did indicate that more

should be done so that there are not any children falling through the cracks. This study paired

with the literature reviews demonstrates that phonemic awareness instruction in kindergarten

lays a strong foundation for literacy skills as the students move on further with their education.

Recommendations

This study could be used to offer insight of the importance into teaching phonemic

awareness to young children because it will help them with their literacy skills long term. It

shows the most used instruction strategies used in kindergarten as well as the thoughts of 5th

grade teachers and their students’ performance levels. Both of these can be taken into thought for

future planning of lessons.

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There were a few limitations to the research. One of the main ones is that there were only

four participants for the survey sent out to 5th grade teachers. This definitely could have skewed

the results. It is unknown where these teachers are from or what kind of school they teach at and

that may have been helpful to know as to get an idea of what kind of schools run what kind of

curriculums. Another limitation is that some of the survey participants did not answer the

questions that were asked, but just wrote something different about phonemic awareness. The

results could have been different if all participants correctly answered the questions.

For further research on this subject, I would make this a district wide study. If one district

used the same curriculum, it would be really helpful for this study. I would give the same

surveys out to the kindergarten and 5th grade teachers as I did for this study. The data from the

surveys within the same district would be more accurate in showing how the instruction affects

the students because hypothetically, the students who the questions are being asked about for the

5th grade teacher survey would have gone through the programs that the kindergarten teachers

listed in their surveys, therefore showing the true long term results of the phonemic awareness

instruction they received in kindergarten.

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References

Cooter, R. & Reutzel, D. (2012). ​Teaching children to read. ​Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Daffern, T. (2016). What happens when a teacher uses metalanguage to teacher spelling? ​The

Reading Teacher, 70​, 423-434. ​https://franciscan.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/

Harris, D. (2016). ​Kindergarten teacher knowledge of phonemic awareness and instruction:

​ etrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Developing proficient early readers. R

(AAT10123801)

Kenner, B. (2017). Phonemic awareness development in 2.5- and 3.5-year old children: An

examination of emergent, receptive, knowledge and skills.​ Reading and Writing:

An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30. ​Retrieved from

https://journals.ohiolink.edu/pg_99?215935721510381

Martinussen, R. (2015). Pre-service teachers' knowledge of phonemic awareness: Relationship to

perceived knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and exposure to a multimedia-enhanced

lecture. ​Annals of Dyslexia, 65,​ 142-158. Retrieved from

​http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11881-015-0104-0

Pieretti, R. (2105). Using a multimodal approach to facilitate articulation, phonemic awareness,

and literacy in young children. ​Communication Disorders Quarterly, 36, ​131-141.

Retrieved from https://journals-ohiolink-edu.fr.opal-libraries.org/pg_99

Suggate, S. (2016). A meta-analysis of the long-term effects of phonemic awareness, phonics,

fluency, and reading comprehension interventions. ​Journal of Learning Disabilities, 49,

77-96. Retrieved from ​http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022219414528540

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Appendix

Kindergarten Teacher Survey Questions:

1. Phonemic awareness is defined as “the conceptual understanding that spoken language

can be broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words, syllables,

onsets, rimes, and phonemes” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012). What types of activities do you

do to teach this to your students?

2. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most, how important do you think teaching

phonemic awareness to kindergarteners is?

5th Grade Teacher Survey Questions:

1. Phonemic awareness is defined as “the conceptual understanding that spoken language

can be broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words, syllables,

onsets, rimes, and phonemes" (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012). On a scale of 1-10, with 10

being the highest, how well do you think your students were taught phonemic awareness

in kindergarten based on their current literacy skills?

2. Based on your answer to the previous question, why do you think that?
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Raw Data

Kindergarten Survey:

Phonemic awareness is defined as “the conceptual understanding that spoken language can be

broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words, syllables, onsets, rimes, and

phonemes” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012). What types of activities do you do to teach this to your

students?

Nonsense word practice, phonics games, sentence and word build, word sorts, sound sorts,
syllable games, visuals, rhyming games, rhyme sorts, first sound fluency practice, phoneme
segmentation practice

So many! Nursery rhymes, rhyme matching, songs (like the name game), clapping sounds,
moving stones for sounds, touching items for sounds, blending sounds, segmenting sounds

We use a program called Reading Horizons as a district. In my room, I use songs, chants,
hands-on activities (like word / sentence hospital to “dissect” and “repair” words, etc. And,
most of my reteach every moment I have within our read aloud books, so there is an authentic
setting to see the rule/syllable/word in action.

Rhyming matching puzzles, rhyming manipulative, use nursery rhymes daily, songs and
dance, clapping syllables just to name a few!

We have an amazing phonics program, Letterland! Letterland.com will give you an overview.
It is amazing! We have embraced it K-2 district wide!

Rebuild rhymes by sentences, match words to sentence then by word.

Morning greetings
Morning meetings activities (find the person whose picture rhymes with yours, find the people
with the other letters to make your word, etc)
Songs
Games (roll dice to make words/sentences, Go Fish, memory, push and say, bean bag toss,
Twister, puzzles, tweezers and alphabet beads, write in table tops)
Shared writing and reading
Tapping out words on fingers

I always call the letters by their sounds. So when I introduce a new letter I call it by its sound..
We do say the letter but the most important thing is its sound so they can stretch out words.
I use morning meeting to help with phonemic awareness and reading workshop. Writing
workshop also pulls all of this together.
But the key for any student reading is naming the letters by their sound. I did this with my 2
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girls when they were 16 months and by 2.5 they knew all their letters and by 3.5 were reading
and now at 4 and 5 yrs can both read. It is due to sounds.

Most significantly, lots of writing with support stretching for sounds. Also incorporate into
concept of word work using words from the poem we do each week and playing games orally.
It is also incorporated into word study by doing writing activities when studying beginning
sounds and also as the kids begin learning word families and CVC words. Kids also do
independent word work with picture cards and dry erase boards or letter manipulatives. **any
time they are attaching the letters, it is of course also phonics, but by doing the oral component
first we are also doing phonemic awareness, and letters aren’t added til kids are ready

“Word games” where we play with words and phones (rhyming, deletion, identification of
beginning and ending sounds, segmentation, etc); reading aloud poems and rhyming books

Read alouds, movement games using letter sounds, singing songs

Word sorts with word families, segmenting and blending of the words.

Many oral games, use a ton of Yvette Zgonc’s games, assess regularly in area of PA

Penny push - segmenting and blending

Word building Cvc words
Cvc egg hunt - building words
Unscrambling words to make sentences
Roll a cube - onset rime

Michael Heggery Phonemic Awareness book; segmenting, blending, addition/deletion of

sounds and syllables, identifying and producing rhymes

I use lessons from Wilson Fundations, McCracken and Making Words.

picture sorts (rhyming/syllables/first sound/last sound/medial sound); writer's workshop

(learning to encode/break words apart prior to linking letters to sounds); chopping
words/sound beads/elkonin boxes; clapping syllables; orally blending sounds/multi-syllable
words; letter/syllable deletions;

A lot of time is devoted to phonics each day. Each day I start with an essential question. Then
we focus syllables for about a week. Once the eeek it up, I go over onset. Next, I do a mini
lesson such as making predictions. Then I do a read aloud and practice what we just discussed.
Then I focus on a letter for the week. Finally, I introduce sight words.
Later in the day I do guided reading groups and focus on everything mentioned above but in a
small group setting.
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On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most, how important do you think teaching phonemic

awareness to kindergarteners is?

10 Phonemic Awareness is important for the

child's success is reading and spelling in the
future.

10 10

8 5

10 10

10 10, if they are ready to learn it

10. You must teach sounds in order to be able 10–with the caveat that nothing stands alone
to read. My daughters montessori school does and all instruction should be done in context
major work on sounds and all the kids come so kids understand the purpose and
out so high in reading. I have learned from connection
them and teach sounds like crazy. This
includes blends, digraphs, and sounds like oo,
ee, ar etc. Our class always has the highest
readers out of 5 classes

10 10

10 10, I know that this is one of the biggest

factors in reading success

10 9

I would say 7. It is very important but not all 10

k kids are ready to learn to read and some kids
will not be successful w phonons and need a
curriculum that is well rounded to meet those
needs.

10 10

5th Grade Survey:

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Phonemic awareness is defined as “the conceptual understanding that spoken language can be

broken down into smaller units such as sentences, phrases, words, syllables, onsets, rimes, and

phonemes" (Reutzel & Cooter, 2012). On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, how well do

you think your students were taught phonemic awareness in kindergarten based on their current

literacy skills?

I imagine that kindergarten was where my students began to learn basic language skills. I feel
that they were taught quite well.

Based on your answer to the previous question, why do you think that?

Most of my 5th grade students seem to have a very good grasp of letter sounds, syllables, and
words as they attempt to learn new word and relate them to other words or parts of words they
already know.

Most of my student have good phonemic awareness skills, but I always have a few who can't
seem to discern differences between sounds and can't identify rhyming words.

Disclaimer: I'm a reading specialist and licensed learning disability teacher, so I am

hyper-aware of this issue. Short answer: many educators jump too soon into phonics with
connecting symbols (letters) with sounds before identifying sounds first. Reading is taught out
of developmental sequence and kids have gaps, especially those without literacy exposure
before entering school.

I think that based on my student’s abilities to communicate through speaking, writing, and
sharing their thoughts based on what they’ve read. I believe that in order to do these things
effectively, they need to apply the skills in the definition given for phonemic awareness. I
can’t say that it was kindergarten, but more likely in all of the classrooms they were in before
this year.