Describe considerations for directly assessing students’ oral language and phonemic awareness skills. How can you use performance data to identify students who are demonstrating below level
literacy skills? Support your response with research.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, be able to think about and work with individual sounds in a spoken word. To work with the sounds of a particular word/s on will manipulate the sound of the word by blending it with another phrasing, stretching out the word, or changing the word completely (Chard, D. J., & Dickson, S. V., n.d.). It is important not to confuse phonemic awareness with phonics which is the alphabetical principle of a word. The distinction should be made clear when teaching phonemic awareness that students can do this with their eyes close since it’s all about what they hear and not what they can see. When assessing a student’s performance to determine if they are performing below the level, you want to see who can point out exactly how many syllables are in a word and segment the word or phrase/sentence (Phonological and Phonemic Awareness., 2020). A system named Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) provides two forms of measurement that can be used to access phonetic segmentation skills (Chard, n.d.). Depending on the outcome, the educator/administer will allow the educator/administer to know whether the child needs more exposure to grant better, more accurate reading fluency in the future or if the child will need extra support to bring them up to level.
References
Chard, D. J., & Dickson, S. V. (n.d.). Phonological awareness: Instructional and assessment guidelines. Retrieved March 20, 2021, from http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness. (2020, October 16). Retrieved March 20, 2021, from https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading-basics/phonemic
