Phonological Awareness

A Sound Beginning is an assessment of phonological awareness at four different levels: Word Level, Syllable Level, Onset-Rime Level, and Phoneme Level. Phonological awareness is the manipulation of sounds in spoken language and is an important building block for reading. The assessment is administered orally that would include the student tapping, deleting, segmenting, and blending different sounds. Felipe’s score for each level is as follows:

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.

On January 30, 2018, at 2:00p.m., my newsletter presentation was given to four teachers in the exceptional children’s department at Douglas Byrd High School. It was important for me to review the newsletter with my coworkers because our work team is currently in the process of gathering new information for the start of the new semester which began on January 26, 2018. The age range of the students in our department range from 15-19 years of age; however, because of their varied learning disabilities and function levels, we use a lot of beginning reader teaching methods in an effort to work more effectively with all of our students.

The contrasting perspectives of the two passages, “CliffsTestPrep” by Jerry Bobrow (2006) and “The Place of Phonics in Learning to Read and Write” by Marie Emmitt (2013), address the issue of the importance of phonemic awareness in reading and writing scores. Bobrow believes that phonemic awareness is important to understand since it affects reading scores. Emmitt however, argues that there is no evidence that phonemic awareness has a major impact on reading achievement.

We chose to assess phonological awareness because it is a crucial component in children’s development of writing, spelling, and reading skills (Paul & Norbury, 2012). Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure or words; it can be characterized by words, syllables, onset/rime, phoneme manipulations, and the ability to rearrange these different levels into various patterns.

1. ELL students need to be familiar with the sounds of English before they can develop phonological awareness. 2. Instruction needs to be explicit, modifications made, and practice needs to be given when needed. 3. Once phonological awareness has developed in any language, then it can be transferred to other languages that are learned.  4. Teachers should frequently model the production of sounds. 5. Beginning readers should get help to learn to identify sounds in short words.

Even though advanced cochlear implant (CI) and hearing aid (HA) technology is making tremendous strides in the DHH community, these hearing devices still cannot completely restore normal hearing or fully represent all aspects of normal speech sounds. Therefore, children within this population are potentially at a higher risk for speech disorders, speech delays, or language difficulties. The acquisition of phonological awareness (PA) and PA abilities is an important developmental step in speech and language. Moreover, PA skills have been shown to significantly affect early literacy abilities in normal hearing children. PA is commonly defined as the conscious ability

This paper is a review of two articles published by Paul Miller in the Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities. The first is entitled, “The role of phonology in the word decoding skills of poor readers: evidence from individuals with prelingual deafness or diagnosed dyslexia,” and was written in 2007. The second, written in 2010, is named, “Phonological, orthographic, and syntactic awareness and their relation to reading comprehension in prelingually deaf individuals: what can we learn from skilled readers?” At their heart, the articles attempt to address what explains good and poor readers in the deaf community, rejecting previous assumptions in the literature in this area. The studies are carefully designed, and attempt to address

To measure children’s phonological awareness, teachers should look at children’s ability with different skills. For example, a child with strong phonological awareness is able to understand and can use, alliteration, the concept of spoken word, rhyme, syllable blending and syllable segmenting. Children start to read by listening others, and then recognizing sound in words, sounding words out for themselves and recognizing familiar words, so it is important for children to learn the phonological awareness because it can help kids to become a successful reader.

The article research topic was a study that analyzed the phonological awareness, naming skill, and visual skill of Hong Kong and United State children, and if there were any similarities on these influences and English word recognition. The hypothesis was that age was linked to the speed of the performance in phonological awareness, naming skill, and visual learning all three models influenced reading skills. The study was conducted on 190 Hong Kong kindergarten children ages 3-6 years and 128 United State kindergarteners and first grade children. Both Hong Kong and American children were given exams by psychology students; the exams were to measure their reading, phonological awareness, naming, and visual-spatial skills. The results were that

This cross-sectional study included 40 normal preschool children of Tehran. Phonological awareness tests have been used to do the assessments. We used descriptive analysis and correlation for analyzing data.

Five studies that fall within the realm of phonemic awareness in early childhood are tier two interventions in response to family income, knowing when and how much to teach, parental involvement, phonemic awareness instruction helping children read, and orthographic influences. Although each of these studies is very different from one another they all have one similar concept, the effect of phonemic awareness on early childhood. Based on these five studies the members of the national reading panel consider children’s ability to perform phonemic awareness tasks easier for those who have already learned to read and write (Ehri et al., 2001). It is thought that phonemic awareness contributes in various ways to a child’s ability to reading words, as the structure of the English writing system is alphabetic (Ehri et al.,

To enhance my content knowledge on phoneme awareness, I chose to read the article, “Tell me about Fred’s Fat Foot Again: Four Tips for Successful PA Lessons,” from the Reading Teacher journal, written by Bruce A. Murray. In the article, Bruce shares four research-based techniques that have been proven to enhance students’ phoneme awareness. The four techniques are: introducing a limited group of phonemes one at a time, making phonemes memorable and helping them learn the phonemes vocal boundaries, providing phenome-finding practice so that children learn to detect the phoneme in spoken-word contexts and applying phoneme knowledge to partial alphabetic decoding equipping students to read words.

Description of strategy- blending of sounds to formulate words, this is most commonly begun in kindergarten through 2nd grade. This will aide in the student’s ability to comprehend certain words or sounds that are being introduced to the classroom. This is done by breaking words into sounds or syllables so to help with the understanding of the word and how to sound out similar words as you go along.