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Auditory Skill Of Phonemic Awareness

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Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill. It is “the understanding that spoken words are made up of separate units of sound that are blended together when words are pronounced” (Learning, 2004). Phonemic awareness is the first step to learning how to read. It is a skill that needs to be taught from a very young age, this is because the more a child’s phonemic awareness is developed the better their development in reading will be (A guide to effective instruction in reading, 2003). The skill of phonemic awareness is essential to a child’s ability to make meaning, as ‘it involves the ability to detect, count, segment, blend and manipulate’ the different sounds in words (Fellowes, & Oakley, 2014). Phonemic awareness is the basis of reading and …show more content…

This can be through singing, rhyming, encouraging oral language, and creating learning experiences, which are fun and enjoyable for students (Ewing, Callow, & Rushton, 2017). School-aged children with developing phonemic awareness achieve better results when the taught using explicit, systematic instruction. Only one or two phonemic awareness skills should be taught at one time, with enough time allocated to phonemic awareness learning. Isolating the different sounds in words can be hard for children to distinguish; this is because sounds slide into each other to create a word. This is to such a degree that if the sounds do not flow together it is very difficult to understand what is being said. When teaching phonemic awareness it is important to “stretch out” the sounds in a word, this will allow the child to hear the sounds more clearly (Learning, 2004). Other activities can include counting the sounds in a word, matching the sounds in words, detecting odd sounds and identifying where a word begins and ends (Fellowes, & Oakley, 2014). Parents a big influence a child’s ability to differentiate sounds, the listening skills of a child are often linked to the quality of conversation and background noise in the home environment (Ofsted,

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