Phonological Awarness

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,

The observation began with a review of what phonological awareness means. According to Chard, D.J. & Dickson, S.V. (2018), it is being aware of the fact that oral language is made up of many smaller units, such as words and syllables. In order to be successful at reading and writing language, an individual must develop skills in phonological awareness. Teaching students to rhyme is very important also because it is one of the ways students show that they have an awareness of phonological awareness. An example of rhyming is when a word is broken down by a single letter or combination of letter sounds such as the word chop would be broken into the onset: ch and rime: op. Students must

For example, children are taught to take a single-syllable word such as hot apart into its three individual letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn /h, o, t/, and ‘blend’ the phonemes together to create a word – ‘hot’. Another method of teaching phonics is to use ‘analytic phonics’, which is where early readers are introduced to the whole word, before being taught to analyse them into their component parts (Wyse et. al, 2007). Hall (2006) argues that early readers typically move from discriminating among large units, such as whole words, to smaller units, such as parts of words and individual letters. Putting forward the case that a synthetic only approach would be disadvantageous to some early readers, and that the analytical approach is often accessed first by many readers, she goes on to state that the sensitivity to onset and rime (the initial sound followed by the final group, as in c-at and b-at), which is the focus of an analytic approach, comes first developmentally. It would be important to mention that Hall (2006) also states synthetic phonics is crucial since the beginner reader needs to get to the phoneme, or individual sound (the focus of a synthetic approach). Furthermore, Hall (2006) also states that pattern recognition is

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.

Fluency in reading and writing involves many steps that can be taught at home or in the classroom; however, when a teacher and/or parent focus is primarily on the preparation of a variety of activities that include practice in one particular area, such as a popular activity called Scoop the Pelican. This activity involves cut-up sentences. Scoop the Pelican is a productive activity for children who are having difficulty learning about letters, sounds, and words. When reading continuous print, children seem to forget what they know. When we test in isolation, most students seem to know letter-sound relationships, phonograms, or high-frequency words; however the reader uses both pauses and intonation to parse sentences into meaningful phrases.

In the article, “Teaching rimes with shared reading” written by Sharon Gill, she states that daily practice of shared reading can lead to successful and enjoyable reading experiences for our youngest learners (p. 191). Shared reading is a wonderful vehicle to help young readers with basic skills such as one-to-one correspondence, fluency, and vocabulary. Researcher Richard Allington also concluded the importance of shared reading experiences for our students whose second language is English (p. 191). Gill believes “Teaching onsets and rimes is a better approach to phonics than teaching individual sounds because onsets and rimes are much more consistent than single letters.” (p. 191-192) In the article, “Ways teachers can help children develop phonics knowledge” written by Constance Weaver, she notes the importance of “discussing interesting patterns of onsets and rimes, in the context of shared reading experiences” (p. 3) Unlike Gill, Weaver does not go as far to say that onsets and rimes should be taught first rather than individual sounds.

At this stage, students are aware of letter formation, print knowledge, how to alphabetize and phonological and phoenemic awareness as taught in Level K. New skills include segmenting words into syllables and syllables into sounds (up to 5 sounds), short and long vowels when given letters or sounds, identification of the structure of words such as blends, digraphs, base words, suffixes and syllable types including closed and vowel-consonant-e syllables. Students are expected to read and spell closed and vowel-consonant-e syllable type words, name sounds for r-controlled vowels and for vowel digraphs and vowel diphthongs, how to read and spell compound words and other words with two syllables, how to read and spell words with “s”, “es”, “ed”, and “ing” suffixes, and how to read and spell words with unexpected vowel sounds. Students will learn to read and spell words with CVC, CCVC, CVCC, CCVCC, and CVCe. They will read and spell 100 high frequency words including a list of trick words and they will read and spell targeted high-frequency, non-phonetic words. Students will begin to produce sentences using vocabulary words, will read about 60 words per minute with fluency and comprehension,

When phonological awareness is worked on skills of attention, perception and visual amplitude are developed that allow to acquire greater fluency for reading.

1. The two major independent constructs compared by the authors were onset-rime and phoneme awareness. The dependent constructs were early reading ability and general academic ability. The independent constructs were operationalised using twelve trials of a segmenting and a blending task; which was given at age five. Half of the trials involved blending phonemes and the other half involved blending onset-rime and rhymes; scores for both the tests were combined.

Phonemic Awareness refers to the knowledge that spoken words can be broken apart into smaller segments of sound known as phonemes. We learned about two levels of PA, one is auditory-you can do this in the dark and the other is matching sounds to letters. Reading to children at home—especially material that rhymes—often develops the basis of phonemic awareness. Not reading to children will probably lead to the need to teach words that can be broken apart into smaller sounds. Correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge as the two best school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during their first 2 years in school. This evidence suggests the potential instructional importance of teaching PA to

“For those of us who already know how to read and write, this realization seems very basic, almost transparent” as cited by Adams, Foorman, Lundberg & Beeler (1998). However, research tells us the spoken language is a sequence of little sounds that is not natural to humans. “A strong understanding of phonemic concepts must be solidly in place prior to formal instruction in reading. It is critical that a child make the association that words on the page are simply talk written down” (Tankersley,

Phonological awareness strategies play a vital role in the development of vocabulary and word consciousness. “It is a sound structure of language—that is, that language is made up of words, syllables, rhymes, and sounds (phonemes)” (Phonological Awareness). This awareness of sounds in a spoken language is a strong indicator of future literacy success. Strategies to promote phonological awareness provide opportunities to help students to hear and differentiate and segregate sounds in their oral language. Emergent learns can better discern rhymes and alteration and understand sounds through syllables.

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

Instructional processes for reading instruction have been argued about throughout time, though it has since been studied and determined that success in reading relates to acquisition of phonological awareness and word knowledge (National Reading Panel, 2000, p. 2-1). Word knowledge is the association of sounds and meaning, later transcribed to a symbolic system used to decode reading. Though without phonemes, the written language becomes ‘arbitrary’ (Yopp & Yoop, 2000, p. 131). Whilst these features are detrimental to language and literacy learning in

This article examined phonological sensitivity of preschool-age children by using a variety of phonological sensitivity tasks that are said to be within the capabilities of preschool age children. The phonological sensitivity tasks included measures of rhyme oddity detection, alliteration oddity detection, blending, and elision. In addition, the article investigated SES (socioeconomic status) differences in phonological sensitivity during the children’s preschool years.