Since the ability to distinguish between individual sounds, or phonemes, within words is a prerequisite to association of sounds with letters and manipulating sounds to blend words—a fancy way of saying “reading”—the teaching of phonemic awareness is crucial to emergent literacy (early childhood K-2 reading instruction). Children need a strong background in phonemic awareness in order for phonics instruction (sound-spelling relationships in print) to be effective.
The National Reading Panel (2000) specified six phoneme awareness skills crucial to learning to read:
- Phoneme isolation: recognizing individual sounds ( /g/ and /O/ in “go”)
- Phoneme identification: Recognizing common sounds in different words (/b/ in boy, bike, and bell)
- Phoneme categorization: recognizing sounds in sequence (bus, bun, rug)
- Phoneme blending: hearing a series of individual phonemes, then blending them into a word ( hearing /g/ /O/ and saying “go”)
- Phoneme segmentation: separating and counting out the sounds in a word (given “go” saying /g/ and /O/)
- Phoneme deletion: recognizing what would be left if one phoneme is removed ( hear “flat” and remove the /f/ sound and state that “lat” would be left)
that is, learning to assign discrete phonemes to various letters and letter combinations. Children, who have problems with phonics, learning the letter sound code of English, often have deficits in these phonemic awareness skills. Often, they have not acquired or been exposed to phonemic awareness activities usually fostered at home and in preschool to second grade, such as extensive songs, rhymes and read –alouds. In other cases, the child may have a disability that affects phoneme awareness, and needs more explicit instruction and/or more practice with these skills.
Assessment of Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
These skills can be assessed by having the child listen to the teacher say two words. The child should then be asked to decide if these two words are the same word repeated twice or two different words. When you make this assessment, if you do use two different words, make certain that they only differ by one phoneme, such as /d/ and /g/. Children can be assessed on words that are not real words or that are not familiar to them. The words used can be make-believe.
Teachers can maintain ongoing logs and rubrics for assessment throughout the year of Phonemic Awareness for individual children. Such assessments would identify particular stated reading behaviors or performance standards, the date of observation of the child’s behavior (in this context, phonemic activity or exercise), and comments.
The rubric or legend for assessing these behaviors might include the following descriptors: demonstrates or exhibits reading behavior consistently, making progress/strides toward this reading behavior, and/or has not yet demonstrated or exhibited this behavior.
Depending on the particular phonological task you are modeling, the performance task might include:
- Saying rhyming words in response to an oral prompt
- Segmenting a word spoken by the teacher into its beginning, middle, and ending sounds (phonemic)
- Correctly counting the number of syllables in a spoken word (phonological)
- Changing or rearranging a syllable orally in a word (e.g., “change the first syllable in the word ‘cricket’ to /pak/.”)(phonological)
- Changing the beginning, middle, or ending sound in a word (e.g., “change the sound at the beginning of the word ‘dog’ to the /l/ sound”—phonemic, etc).
