The Importance of Morphological Awareness and Phonological Awareness to Reading

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.

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.

Orthography is the spelling or alphabetical system of a language, and can be broken down into graphemes. There are two main types of orthographies, deep and shallow. Deeper orthographies are languages that don't have a one-to- one correspondence between letters and the sounds (there is more than one sound for every letter in a language. One such example is the English language because letters like "a" can either be pronounced as ā or ȧ. Languages that are shallower orthographies have a one-to- one correspondence between letters and sounds (one letter for every sound). Examples of Shallow Orthographies include Finnish and the International Phonetic Alphabet,

Researchers have shown that lack of preparation in the teaching of phonological awareness hinders the way teachers present phonological awareness when teaching their studnets reading. Researchers suggest interference due to the teacher's perspective, lack of training, values, and background may exist an be detrimental in properly teaching phonological awareness. Flesh’s 1955 publication of Why Johnny can’t Read and What You Can Do About it was influential in exposing the ineffective way how teachers teach their students literacy and reevaluation of reading programs in education and their deficiencies (Smith, 2002). Flesh’s book ignited educators and non-educators to look seriously at this literacy deficiency. A renewed interest

Ehri’s Phases of Word Reading and Spelling Development has four different phases that are used to describe the progressive stages of a reader. The first phase is the Pre-alphabetic phase, in this phase there is no letter to sound consciousness only visual features of a word which the students use as a reminder of how to read the words. Phase two is the Partial Alphabetic. When readers are in this phase they use some of the letters in the word (mainly the first and the last letters) to attempt to pronounce the word. Phase three is the Full Alphabetic Phase. In this phase the readers are now able to use and understand the alphabetic connections in words. The readers are now able to map graphemes to phonemes of words that have been read to them

It is important to bear in mind that the phonological component or awareness is fundamental for the development of verbal, semantic and, above all, reader-writer language. When the sound of the letter is not recognized, it can not learn to read or write correctly. Therefore, it is necessary to do a training in phonological awareness

“Put Reading First” talks about the most important elements of reading such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The article explains the purpose and importance of these concepts, due to the idea of how hard it is for some children to read. It also offers the idea of instructional strategies to use for the concepts. For example, Phonemic awareness is being able to hear, distinguish between the sounds being heard, and make sounds in spoken words. This involves understanding that some words have the same beginning sound or segmenting the beginning and ending sound in the words. The article also goes on about the individual breakdowns of the concept such as graphemes and phonemes. It then goes over the strategies

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.

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 is defined as the ability to distinguish sounds; a skill that allows you to listen for, count sounds, and identify distinct sounds. Letter naming isn’t included in phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness can be taught explicitly or indirectly through games, manipulatives activities, chanting, reading and sing along songs, or poems. Phonemic awareness is more than just recognizing sounds. It also includes the capability to hold on to those sounds, and blend them effectively into words, and take them apart again. Phonemic awareness is important for reading development because it’s the foundation you must overcome in order to get to the next stage of reading, and writing. Research of the NRP (National Reading Panel) says that during the kindergarten year, 18 hours of total of phonemic instruction- just 30 minutes week, six minutes a day- provided maximum advantage.

A child who has a strong phonological awareness is more likely to learn how to read easily in comparison to children who does not have the required phonological awareness needed (www.nefec.org). “In fact, when faced with an alphabetic script, the child’s level of phonemic awareness on entering school is widely held to be the strongest single predictor of the success she or he will experience in learning to read’ as cited by Adams & Bruck (1995). So “before children learn to read, they must understand the sounds that are paired with the letter are the same as the sounds of speech they hear”.

Nonetheless, as a child strengthens their oral language concept through print, and phonemic awareness more reliable predictions of reading abilities in the future can be made. “Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated” (Chard &

We learn literacy through phonological practices prompted in reading development to increase fluency and comprehension (Konza, 2006). Phonological awareness concerns itself with manipulation of sound patterns related to speech and intonation and has a relationship to phonemic awareness, being the smaller components of language such as individual letter sounds (Hill, 2012). Rose recommends that synthetic phonics are needed for ‘letter-sound correspondence’, learning how words are blended and broken up for spelling and finally being able to recognize words in print, as well as singularly (2006, p. 18). Understanding of these literacy components culminate to skills required to read (National Reading Panel, 2000). Oral language is casual and elusive in syntactical meaning, so in order for children to become effective readers they need to have exposure to formal and ‘decontextualized’ language properties (Konza, 2006, p. 35). Students will not be able to associate speech to written language

Deriving lessons from an exhaustive review of research, consultations with experts, and public hearings, the members of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) highlighted five essential components of effective reading instruction, as follows: (1) phonemic awareness – instruction designed to teach children the ability to focus