Early Literacy Assessment : Phonemic Awareness

Phonological awareness is being able to distinguish the assembly of isolated sounds that make up words and experiment with adjusting the distinct sounds known as Phonemes to form new words (Emmit, Hornsby & Wilson, 2013). Elements of phonological awareness include practice with separating, manipulating and grouping together sounds of words, in addition to exploring words and sounds in an enjoyable way using rhymes (Matheson, 2005). Phonological awareness provides innovative processes for a broader vocabulary and the ability to sound out new words (University of Oregon, 2009). The decoding process that occurs allows readers the ability to then concentrate on the meaning of what they read and improve their reading development (Reid Lyon, 1998). When teaching phonological awareness to children, teachers should work in small groups that explore only a couple of concepts at a time for instance how the mouth moves when saying a variety of isolated sounds in comparison to these phoneme sounds blended to assemble a word (Learning Point Associates, 2004). In conjunction with the familiarity of phonemes and words in phonological awareness, it is imperative to integrate this fundamental feature of reading development with understanding graphemes, and the link to letters in print to their phonemes sounds with phonics (Fellows & Oatley,

Phonemic awareness is a vital role in literacy instruction. Many schools and districts adopt a commercially published basal reading program and it becomes the cornerstone of their instruction ( (David Chard, n.d.). We also know that through investigation and research it has shown us that word-recognition instruction and instruction in oral language skills related to word recognition were inadequately represented. (David Chard, n.d.) The same researchers have found that the reading passages that students are reading didn’t relate to the words they were learning. In order for students to read at grade level or above a supplemental program should be implemented. I have found that at my school we are lacking a phonics program that will reach different students abilities and make them successful in reading. My goal for this paper is to show my district that using a supplemental phonics program aside from our basal phonics program will prove beneficial to strategic readers who fall below grade level.

Bobrow discusses the importance of phonemic awareness. Bobrow states that phonemic awareness is important for reading achievement and learning how to read. According to Bobrow, students need to be able to “grasp printed words”(para.3) and know how words “work together”

We will assess this skill using The Phonological Awareness Profile by Robertson and Salter, a criterion-referenced assessment (1995). Criterion-referenced assessments are not used to compare students’ performance with each other, but rather to evaluate the student’s mastery in a specified subject. Such tests are designed to provide information for instruction as well. Only the phonological awareness subtest will be administered to Chloe. This subtest has the following tasks: rhyming, segmentation, isolation, deletion, substitution, and blending. The tasks are composed of the following:

As you stated, phonemic awareness is very important to a child's later achievement in reading and also spelling. Rhyming and poetry are great ways in promoting phonemic awareness. In my post, I also mentioned a similar activity, and I think rhyming is very effective when working with children which is why many class incorporate these types of activities in their classroom. Great

Emergent literacy is important because the literacy development begins earlier than formal schooling. Phonological awareness, letter names, and letter-sound knowledge are essential for beginning reading instruction. Phonemic awareness is a strong predictor of success in the first two years of schooling. Additionally, letter knowledge is the first step to learn the alphabetic principle and one of the most important early reading skills. Several studies investigated Visual Phonics with preschoolers and revealed significant improvements during these fundamental early years.

Phonological awareness is when children learn to associate sounds with symbols and create links to word recognition and decoding skills. It consists of skills that develop through the preschool period. Phonological awareness is an important part of learning to read and write, children who have a broad range of phonics are able to identify and make oral rhymes, are able to clap out the syllables in a word and can recognise words with the same initial sounds. Phonological awareness is a good indicator whether your student will have a potential reading difficulty and with the many activities and resources available to us you can develop a child’s awareness early on in a child’s education.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate the sounds in words orally (can be done in the dark; ORALLY). Words are made up of discrete set of sounds and it is important to be able to manipulate these sounds which is what phonemic awareness is. Sound isolation activities are good to help students gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can say a word and then have students identify the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of the word. Sound-blending are also helpful for students to gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can provide a clue and then sound out each sound in a word and the student then has to pronounce the word.

Thank you for joining me today to discuss your daughters recent assessment scores. We do Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills assessment or DIBELS 3 times per year. This information tells us where Suzie is in her reading skills and where we would like her to be. We gave her three very short assessment only consisting of 1-2 minutes each assessment. The three assessments that we gave her where Letter Naming Fluency or LNF for short, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF).

Phonological awareness is the learning of different sounds, words and syllables learnt through listening and speaking (Gillon, 2004). Phonological awareness is important for children in early childhood to learn to establish their reading and writing skills (Hill, 2012, 160). The way children learn phonological awareness is through word play, stretching sounds, repeat ion, rhymes and song (Hill, 2012, p. 134; Roger Scenter, 2013).Phoneme awareness is a smaller area considered as part of phonological awareness, phoneme awareness focuses on individual sounds that effect understanding (Hill, 2012, p. 134). An example of phoneme awareness would be the word cat sound it out as c/, a/ and t/ or the ch sound. Hill (2012, p. 134) states phonological

According to the article, Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom, educators are displaying difficulties defining the word phonemic awareness. At times, educators would confuse the word phonemic awareness with phonetics, phonics or auditory discrimination. “Phonemic awareness is the awareness that the speech stream consists of a sequence of sounds—specifically phonemes, the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in communication.” A slight change of a phoneme in a word can change the thought and meaning behind the sentence. To gain a better understanding of the term phonemic awareness, the articles break it up into two superordinate constructs: phonological awareness and meta linguistics. Phonemic awareness is a sub skill of the word phonological awareness, which refers to the ability to control each phoneme. Meta linguistic refers to the thinking of one's language and “phonological awareness refers to a sensitivity to any size unit of sound.” Examples of phonological awareness are the ability to recognize rhyming words, identify each phoneme in a word, count syllables, and separate the beginning of a word from its ending. Overall, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness and meta linguistic awareness are all connected to one another.

Phonic awareness helps to build a strong reading foundation for students because it is the child’s ability to understand that words are created with different sounds such as can. The word can is the blended sounds of /c/, /a/, and /n/. There are many strategies available that teachers can use to teach phonemic awareness to students which include the following:

1.Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners can hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words. The English writing system is alphabetic. It consists of 26 letters that are used singly and in combination to represent about 41 different sounds, or phonemes. In relation to reading, breaking the code entails figuring out how graphemes represent phonemes. There were several reasons why phonemic awareness instruction was selected for review and analysis by the National Reading Panel. In particular, correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge

Phonemic awareness instruction is part of the classroom’s typical everyday routine. It is required for preschoolers and kindergarteners to have certain skills acquired before moving on. Preschoolers are expected to be aware of individual phonemes and kindergarteners are expected to be able to break down a small word into phonemes. This benchmark must be obtained by these students and if they do not acquire these skills it will be found by the DIBELS test. When children do not meet the requirements they get put into tiers according to the level that they are at. This would mean that the child will still receive classroom instruction but they will also receive additional instruction. Treatment intensity for phonemic awareness has not been a

According to the video Word Study, and Fluency, it was mentioned that one of the elements of phonemic awareness is using poems that rhyme. One of the teachers in the video was able to introduce a poem of the week and would have their students read the poem for the entire week. It was learned that the students read the poem for the whole week so that the students become familiar with the poem. Also, the repetition of the poem helped the students out a lot because they were able to remember some of the words from the poem. Another element that was covered in the video was the use of word study. Students were able to use the classroom as a resource especially a word web. The teacher would let the students look around the classroom and point to words on the web to help them say a sentence or word. This is very useful because it helps students to use words. Last another element that can help with phonemic awareness is when students are able to sort similar words and identify phonemic patterns. From the video it was shown how a teacher would write out a word and students would have to say the words that were similar to the word the teacher put on the paper. This helped students to look for rhyming words as well as unknown