The Place Of Phonics In Learning To Read

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.

There are a million adults who cannot read, one in six Londoners is functionally illiterate and people who cannot read or write are excluded from opportunities and may eventually become alienated and turn to crime (Johnson 2010, cited by Gross 2010). Gross (2010) expresses her concern and believes it is not where the children live, it is how they were taught to read and how they were properly motivated to learn to read. She endorses the synthetic systematic phonics approach as opposed to that of the whole word approach and believes we must place our focus on reading as it is indispensable.

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

“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

In completing the CAP, I administered the Phonemic Awareness Skills Screener (PASS) to five of my seven students in my summer middle school English class. The results of the assessment are attached in the submission of the document. In looking at the raw data that I collected on my student’s phonemic awareness skills the area that every student needed to work on was phoneme segmentation or phoneme deletion.

Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) believe that the amount of time devoted to phonemic awareness in the classroom is not important but rather the quality and responsiveness of instruction are. Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) believe rich linguistic environments that have a rich vocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextualized language can be implemented in a variety of ways which include, but not limited to, literature sharing, music, and movement experiences. According to Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) phonemic awareness activities should be playful, deliberate in focusing on the sound structure of spoken language, and readily included in a comprehensive reading program.

The ‘early reading debate’ has ensued for decades (Bielby 1998; Graham and Kelly 2000) and contrasts phonics with whole language approaches. However, many literacy experts posit a pluralist approach, synthesising several methods (Dombey et al. 2010). Phonics was integral to a blended approach to reading in National Curriculum (DfEE 1999a), reinforced by the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) (DfEE 1998; DfEE 1999b). However, synthetic phonics, as the exclusive method of teaching early reading emerged in the ‘Rose Report’ (Rose 2006) supported by school inspection evidence (Ofsted 2010: 4).

Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for a child when learning to read an alphabetically written language. A fair amount of confusion among educators, and a lack of knowledge among society, persists about what this skill is and why it is so important. Written for practitioners, this essay describes phonemic awareness and discusses why it is a prerequisite for learning to read, how we have come to understand its importance, why it can be difficult to acquire, and what happens to the would-be reader who fails to acquire it. Our discussion of phonemic awareness is framed within a particular view of reading, to which we turn first. Phonemic awareness is a relatively new focus for educators.

There are also some beliefs that are not valid, such as saying that “poor readers read letter by letter, but skilled readers read entire words and phrases as a unit”. (p. 212), but the true is that skilled readers read letter by letter but they do it fast as well as they use context cue to verify their decoding accuracy not to identify the words. For these reasons, I consider phonic strategy as one of the most important and reliable to adopt in the

“Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes--in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become more aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes (the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in a word 's meaning).” (WriteExpress Corporation, 2015) Phonemic awareness is very important with children learning to read because it helps them learn to sound out words in spelling, identify and categorize sounds, and delete or add sounds to make new words with blending. This skill would often be integrated during reading and spelling activities with working with sight and vocabulary words with allowing students to learn how to recognize more words and break them down found within advancing vocabulary terms. For example, if the word football was given to try to sound out.

Children's phonemic awareness, their understanding that spoken words can be divided into separate sounds, is one of the best predictors of their success in learning to read.

Being literate in today's society demands a myriad of functional abilities, which, when absent, can have dramatic health, economic, and social consequences. Literacy possesses various aspects, such as reading, writing, speaking, and technology. Undoubtedly, language acquisition is a precursor to developing reading, writing, speaking, and technology literacy. Children must learn basic phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes as a basis for reading application. Phonemes are sounds; graphemes are symbols; and morphemes are meaningful word units. Therefore, phonographic (or graphophonic) refers to the sound-symbol system of the English language. In spoken language, sounds blend in what the ancient Greeks called a "river of sound" (Savage, 2007). Hence, this river of sound flourishes during the language acquisition process, thus embedding contextual clues to develop reading comprehension. Savage (2007) posits, "A child's level of phonemic awareness on entering school is widely held to be the strongest single determinant of the success that she or he will experience in learning to read or conversely, the likelihood that she or he will fail." Therefore, research demonstrates that language acquisition with phonemic awareness is highly related to learning to read and an accurate predictor of reading success into adulthood.

The Rose Report of 2006 was based primarily on Gough and Tumner’s 1986 ‘Simple View of Reading’ in which they stated that language comprehension and word recognition were vital components for reading. In his report, Rose suggests that the phonics referred to is Systematic Synthetic Phonics.

Phonological awareness is an important part of learning to read words in a language. It is the sound of the language when writing or speaking, the awareness of and access to the phonology of the language. It has been shown that phonological awareness helps in the development of reading and successful learning of phonological representations requires accurate

The role of the teacher is a critical piece when he or she teaches literacy programming because it is evidence of how a teacher view teaching (Izadinia, 2012). If teachers are prepared to address the diverse, and sometimes complex needs, of their students, teachers much understand phonological awareness and embrace it and work toward understanding the application for a diverse classroom (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). The capacity to understand phonological awareness and its importance in literacy define the role of a reading teacher who produces an environment of learning that is high in quality (Norris, Lucas, & Prudhoe, 2012).