Analyzing the significance of phonological and phonemic awareness in reading acquisition

The National Reading Panel’s report (2000) on learning to read specifically listed phonemic awareness as one of the five critical skills necessary to learning to read. It also discussed the need for overall phonological awareness. As discussed in the previous section, phonological awareness involves recognizing that spoken words are comprised of a set of smaller units—including syllables and sounds, and phonemic awareness is a specific type of phonological awareness that focuses on the ability to distinguish, manipulate, and blend specific sounds or phonemes within a given word. Think of phonological awareness as an umbrella and phonemic awareness as a specific spoke under this umbrella.

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)

Phonics deals with printed words and the learning of sound-spelling correlations;
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).

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Phoneme Awareness Activities

Blevins (1997) describes the earlier work of theorist Marilyn Jager Adams in designing five types of phoneme awareness tasks that can be used in the classroom. These align well with the International Reading Associations’ Reading Panel Report, Teaching Children to Read (2002) and its analysis of phoneme awareness skills.

• Task 1—the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration—for example, the children listen to a poem, rhyming picture book or song and identify the rhyming words heard.
• Task 2—the ability to do oddity tasks (recognize the member of a set that is different [odd] among the group)—for example, the children look at the pictures of a door, a dog, and a cat, and say each word. The teacher asks which starts with a different sound.
• Task 3—the ability to orally blend words and split syllables—for example, the children can say the first sound of a word (e.g., /b/) and then the rest of the word (/at/) and then put it together as a single word (bat), as in onsets and rimes.
• Task 4—the ability to orally segment words—for example, the ability to count sounds. The children would be asked as a group to count the sounds in “sat” (/s/, /a/, /t/--3 sounds).
• Task 5—the ability to do phoneme manipulation tasks—for example, replace the “r” sound in rose with a “n” sound and say “nose.”

Other instructional methods that may be effective for teaching phonemic awareness include:

• Clapping the SOUNDS (not syllables) in words. (e.g., “bat” has three sounds, /b/, /a/, /t/)
• Games where students must identify the beginning, middle, or end sound (not letter) of a word (e.g., “Find something that begins with the /t/ sound”).
• Games with common nursery rhymes where the students change one sound in several words (e.g., “Jack and Jill went up the hill…” Now change Jack and Jill to begin like ‘Mary”)
• Using visual cues and movements to help children understand when the speaker goes from one sound to another. This can also be done with colored blocks, a different color for each sound, and children can move their blocks around as the teacher moves the sound around (e.g. starting with three different colored blocks for “cat” and changing the “word” to “tac.”)
• Singing familiar songs (e.g., Happy Birthday, Knick Knack Paddy Wack) and replacing key words with words with a different ending or middle sound (oral segmentation).
• Dealing children a deck of picture cards and having them sound out the words for the pictures on their cards or calling for a picture by asking for its first and second sound.
• Onset and rhyme games where children are given a beginning sound and told to blend it with a specific series of endings (e.g., “OK, start with /ch/ and add “eep’ then “eet” etc.)
• Games like “I’m going on vacation and I’m taking a (something that begins or ends with a particular phoneme)
• Auditory games and drills during which students recognize and manipulate the sounds of words, separate or segment the sounds of words, take out sounds, blend sounds, add in new sounds, or take apart sound to recombine them in new formations are good ways to foster phonological awareness
• Using kinesthetic feedback, particularly the position of the lips, teeth and tongue, as well as the vibration of the voice box, to identify various phonemes.

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