Teaching Phonemic Awareness.
(Para 1.) Phonemic Awareness: Modest investment, important returns. It is not unusual to find high school students failing reading because they lack the phonemic awareness skills that could, and should, have been taught in the first three months of kindergarten. Indeed, this instructional time investment, for the average student, requires approximately 15-18 hours. This modest investment of instructional time has major life-long implications. While all good readers have phonemic awareness skills, not all are explicitly taught. Some fortunate students work out the phoneme code themselves. Some students, left to their own devices, develop damaging bad habits. Many of these students, with the bad habits, show up at the end of grade two dependent on frantic whole word guessing and poorly prepared to master the explosive growth in written vocabulary that occurs in grade 3.
(Para 2.) What are the phonemic awareness skills? The research findings list at least twelve skills sometimes discussed as phonemic awareness skills. Of these, only four skills, are significantly predictive of success in later research-based reading instruction. By limiting the emphasis to four skills we make the instructional intervention more focused and more manageable for both assessment and instruction. The four skills are:
1. Combining or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word, e.g., blending the sounds /m/, /a/, /t/, to say “mat.”
2. Segmenting a word into its separate sounds, e.g., saying the word “Sam” slowly so that each sound can be heard, e.g., “Ssssaaaammmm.” It is best if there are no pauses between the sounds.
3. Isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word, e.g., the beginning sound in “man” is “mmmmm”. It is easiest for the student if, initially, continuous sounds are used, such as /m/, /s/, /a/, and /e/, rather than non-continuous sounds such as /p/, /t/, and /d/. Non-continuous or “plosive” sounds are more difficult to blend, and blending sounds is the most important phonemic awareness skill. When the non-continuous sounds are first introduced, the sounds should be used at the end of a word. This makes the sound blending much easier.
4. Recognizing which words begin with a given sound, e.g., when shown pictures of a mat, a rat, and a cat pointing to the picture that begins with the sound, “rrrrr.”
(Para 3.) Assessing phonemic awareness skills. The four skills listed above should form the diagnostic test of phonemic awareness. The most valid and predictive measure of phonemic awareness is the ability to blend the sounds in nonsense or unfamiliar words. Blending nonsense words is more predictive of later reading achievement because these are words that have not been rote memorized. The most important word attack skill is the ability to decode and blend the sounds in a new word. Students cannot become successful readers if they can only read words they previously rote memorized.
(Para 4,) A practical phonemic awareness diagnostic test. One of the best ways to assess phonemic awareness is to combine the assessment with a series of teaching activities. Assessment should generate information to systematically and successfully teach the specific skills the student needs. Too often assessment only serves to classify the student as successful or unsuccessful. Effective teaching is all about helping students, not classifying them. The Phonemic Awareness Assessment and Teaching Package can be downloaded at no charge, reproduced, and used for both assessment and teaching. The teaching materials address the phonemic awareness skills discussed above. Phonemic awareness instruction requires extensive oral modeling by the teacher and oral responding by the students. The teaching materials listed above include some “worksheets.” These are teacher worksheets for recording student responses. The research recommends intensive, small group instruction for teaching phonemic awareness. Small group instruction with 3-5 students reduces instructional costs and allows for the extensive use of peer modeling of oral student responses. For diagnostic purposes, teach until students are achieving at least 80% correct. The above-listed teaching package can be reproduced for nonprofit purposes by teacher and parents. The package is a part of a larger program by the author, Alan Hofmeister. For information on the larger package on phonemic awareness see .
(Para 5.) Who can benefit from phonemic awareness Instruction? The above-listed Phonemic Awareness Assessment and Teaching Package has been successfully used by high school students failing in reading and lacking phonemic awareness skills. Typically, these students remained at second and third-grade achievement levels since elementary school. The program has also been used successfully to instruct students with Autism in k-3 grades. For students with severe learning problems early, intensive phonemic awareness instruction will increase in importance. Every instructional minute will be important. Perhaps the biggest, instructional error, will be teaching the names of letters at the expense of learning the sounds of letters. Phonemic awareness requires understanding the role of letter sounds, not letter names.
Comprehension Check – What was I thinking?
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Al :: Dec.01.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 3 Comments »
[...] spelling and beginning reading depends on competency in phonemic awareness. See the posting “Teaching Phonemic Awareness” for more information on phonemic awareness instruction. Spelling and reading skills are very [...]
[...] to teach blending as demonstrated on page 7 of the resource manual. See previous posting on phonemic awareness for more information on blending and related [...]
Al has touched on another important topic for teachers. As I taught both significant and mild moderate students who were included in regular education classes, the problem of being able to read non-aligned text was of major concern. It left the children out of the loop with other students and prevented them from learning much that other were expected to gain from the text.
I bookmarked the text tools site – this a great resource. A teacher can either replace difficult words and phrases or teach the new vocabulary needed. The major problem for teachers will be finding the time to do this – always the challenge. Advances in technology may diminish the problem. One of the major makers of “text to speech” software is making the program available for free this fall. Craig Boogaard at the Utah Center for Assistive Technology has more information on this. I copied the text from the brochure and pasted it onto a “stickie note” on my Mac. I could then select “speech on” from the edit menu and it read it to me – quite clearly.
The information on the bullying brochure is very useful. I especially appreciate that it tackles the problem from the victims viewpoint – what can the child do – How valuable to teach these important skills. But reading the brochure will not be enough for our students. They will need explicit instruction on the techniques outlines. Does that already exist? If not, we need to create a curriculum that deals with this. For our students on the autism spectrum – the chances of being bullied are almost 100%.
Cathy