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Learning to read begins well before
the first day of school. When Ron and Donna tell nursery rhymes to
their baby, Mia, they are beginning to teach Mia to read. They are
helping her to hear the similarities and differences in the sounds of
words. She will begin to manipulate and understand sounds in spoken
language, and she will practice this understanding by making up rhymes
and new words of her own. She will learn the names of the letters and
she will learn the different sounds each letter represents. As she
gets a little older, Ron and Donna will teach her to write letters and
numbers that she will already recognize by their shapes. Finally, she
will associate the letters of the alphabet with the sounds of the
words she uses when she speaks. At this point, he is on her way to
learning to read!
When she tries to read books with
her parents, at school, and on her own, Mia will learn how to
learn new words by sounding them out. With more practice, she will
begin to recognize familiar words easily and quickly, and she will
know the patterns of spelling that appear in words and the patterns of
words as they appear in sentences. She will be able to pay attention
not just to the letters and words, but to the meanings they represent.
Ultimately, Mia will be able to think about the meaning of the text as
she reads.
WHERE DOES PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
FIT INTO THIS PROCESS?
Key to the process of learning to
read is Mia’s ability to identify the different sounds that make words
and to associate these sounds with written words. In order to
learn to read, Mia must be aware of phonemes. A phoneme is the
smallest functional unit of sound. For example, the word "cat"
contains three distinctly different sounds. There are 44 phonemes in
the English language, including letter combinations such as /th/.
In addition to identifying these
sounds, Mia must also be able to manipulate them. Word play
involving segmenting words into their constituent sounds, rhyming
words, and blending sounds to make words is also essential to the
reading process. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of
language is called phonological awareness. Adams (1990) described five
levels of phonological awareness ranging from an awareness of rhyme to
being able to switch or substitute the components in a word. While
phonological awareness affects early reading ability, the ability to
read also increases phonological awareness.
Many children with learning
disabilities have deficiencies in their ability to process
phonological information. Thus, they do not readily learn how to
relate letters of the alphabet to the sounds of language. For all
students, the processes of phonological awareness, including phonemic
awareness, must be explicitly taught.
Children from culturally diverse
backgrounds may have particular difficulties with phonological
awareness. Exposure to language at home, exposure to reading at an
early age, and dialect all affect the ability of children to
understand the phonological distinctions on which the English language
is built. Teachers must apply sensitive effort and use a variety of
techniques to help children learn these skills when standard English
is not spoken at home.
HOW IS PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS
TAUGHT?
To teach phonological awareness,
begin by demonstrating the relationships of parts to wholes. Then
model and demonstrate how to segment short sentences into individual
words, showing how the sentence is made up of words. Use chips or
other manipulatives to represent the number of words in the sentence.
Once the students understand part-whole relationships at the sentence
level, move on to the word level, introducing multi-syllable words for
segmentation into syllables. Finally, move to phoneme tasks by
modeling a specific sound and asking the students to produce that
sound both in isolation and in a variety of words and syllables.
It is best to begin with easier
words and then move on to more difficult ones.
Five characteristics make a word
easier or more difficult:
- The size of the phonological unit
(e.g., it is easier to break sentences into words and words into
syllables than to break syllables into phonemes).
- The number of phonemes in the word
(e.g., it is easier to break phonemically short words such as no,
see and cap than snort, sleep or scrap).
- Phoneme position in words (e.g.,
initial consonants are easier than final consonants and middle
consonants are most difficult).
- Phonological properties of words
(e.g., continuing such as /s/ and /m/ are easier than very brief
sounds such as /t/).
- Phonological awareness challenges.
(e.g., rhyming and initial phoneme identification are easier than
blending and segmenting.)
Examples of phonological
awareness tasks include:
- phoneme deletion ("What word
would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?");
- word to word matching ("Do
pen and pipe begin with the same sound?");
- blending ("What word would we
have if we blended these sounds together: /m/ /o/ /p/?");
- phoneme segmentation ("What
sounds do you hear in the word hot?");
- phoneme counting ("How many
sounds do you hear in the word cake?");
- and rhyming ("Tell me all of
the words that you know that rhyme with the word cat?").
Beginning readers require more
direct instructional support from teachers in the early stages of
teaching. This is illustrated in the following example: The teacher
models the sound or the strategy for making the sound, and has the
children use the strategy to produce the sound. It is very important
that the teacher model the correct sounds. This is done using several
examples for each dimension and level of difficulty.
The children are prompted to use the
strategy during guided practice and more difficult examples are
introduced. A sequence and schedule of opportunities for children to
apply and develop facility with sounds should be tailored to each
child’s needs, and should be given top priority. Opportunities to
engage in phonological awareness activities should be plentiful,
frequent, and fun.
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and
Gifted Education.
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