1. Define phonemic awareness. What skills are important in the instruction of phonemic awareness?
a. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, isolate, identify, and manipulate the discrete sounds of language, this only involves the sounds of speech and not the letters or words.
b. The skills important when instructing phonemic awareness are concepts of print, recognizing/producing rhyme, syllable tasks, blending syllables, phonemic tasks and onset and rime (word families). When instructing phonemic awareness, the reader should emphasize sounds and use visual and oral instruction whenever possible, such as manipulatives.
2. Why is visualization such an important comprehension skill for readers? How can we teach visualization to struggling readers?
a. Visualization, or mental imagery, helps students make a picture of the reading in their minds by relating text to personal experiences from prior knowledge. Visualization is such an important comprehension skill because students cannot remember what they are reading if they cannot picture the story in their head. It would be similar to memorizing text and having no techniques to remember the text. However, by visualizing, the reader is creating a personal connection with the text and activating prior knowledge. Therefore, they are able to picture and recall what they are reading.
b. We can teach visualization to struggling readers, specifically students with disabilities, by having them think about what they see, hear, smell,
The first skill is to recognize if the reader can detect and match the initial sounds in words. When the student can accomplish that task, next she progresses to the final sound then move on to the middle sounds in the word. The second skill is to have the reader segment and produce the initial sound then progress to the final then the middle sounds. The third skill is the blending of sounds in the words. Fourth, the reader segment the phonemes in words and gradually progresses to longer words. The last skill is to manipulate phonemes by adding, subtracting and substituting sounds (Moats, 2009). When a student can accomplish these skills effortlessly than I would consider that reader to have strong phoneme awareness
There are several methods that can be used and have been used to teach phonemic awareness. For example, some whole language teachers feel that using work-sheets and drills is less effective than teaching phonics in meaningful context using real lan-guage. (Griffith & Olsen, 1992; Morrow & Tracey, 1997; Richgels, Poremba, & McGee, 1996). On the other hand some educators differ in their thoughts as they believe that you may leave out some crucial parts of phonics instructions if you are teaching in only natural language settings.One of the more widely used phonics program is Color My World with Phonicsand it is written by Jenny O’Brien and Fran Key. There was also a study conducted to compare the results first grade students who were exposed to this programs explicit phonemic awareness instruction versus those who were instructed using a more traditional reader program. The results con-firmed that students who were exposed to the Color My World with Phonicscurriculum in the first grade achieved higher SAT-9 scores in the second grade than those in the traditional read-er program.The result of this study supports the fact that students who receive reading instruction pro-grams with explicit phonemic awareness instruction tend to be more successful at reading, especially at earlier
When students are in the beginning level of phonic awareness, the most effective method of helping students to remember letter sounds or syllables is to attach a song or rhyme. The method of using songs or rhymes is helpful for students, but the teacher needs to take into consideration the academic component of the lesson. Yopp & Yopp (2000) emphasize on the methods that lessons on phonic awareness should be on, appropriate for the child, must have a purpose, and should be broad to other educational lessons (132). Seeing phonic awareness activity are always engaging for students, because they are thought useful rhymes or song that help them remember the sound of a vowel or consonant. I agree with the statement the authors make regarding teaching
Often when we hear phonemic awareness we think of phonics. Phonemic awareness does not involve phonics or written print, but instead spoken words. Understanding that words we speak are made up of individual sounds called phonemes is the basis of understanding phonemic awareness. Phonemes are the smallest units of spoken language and combine to form syllables and words (Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Dale, Schuster, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan 2001). Phonemic awareness is both a predictor of reading achievement and the beginning of reading acquisition (Warren, Minnick, Warren, Russell, Liqin, & Green, 2013). When children develop phonemic awareness, they can use letter-sound knowledge to understand words (Koutsoftas, Harmon, & Gray, 2009). Children
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:
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.
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.
Chapters 6 through 9 discuss strategies that aid in comprehension. These chapters dive deeper into strategies that will help a reader’s comprehension while thoroughly explaining strategies that should be implemented in a classroom. One main point is that readers should follow their thinking tracks and explore their thinking and be able to notice when they are straying away from the meaning of the reading. It’s important that students are able to make connections while they’re reading. Another main point would be that questions help clarify and unlock a deeper meaning while reading. Visualizing and inferring is an important aspect for reading because it helps aid in understanding. Comprehension strategies allow readers to know a variety of tools that are beneficial.
The booklet, Put Reading First was informative and helpful because of the way it broke each reading component down. It helped me understand the difference between a few gray areas that were confusing or that I previously misinterpret. Therefore, the booklet improved my perception of the true meaning of phonemic awareness, phonics, automatic, and fluency. The fourth paragraph of phonemic awareness provided a simple breakdown as well as explained that I was not the only person misinterpreting the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics. However, my impression of phonemic awareness was the understanding of phonics instead of the individual sounds of spoken words. With this new understanding of phonemic awareness, I believe that phonemic
The first article helps in addressing the how to develop literacy through images. In other words, what elements can one look to in order to assist in encompassing a greater understanding of a piece of art, literature or picture book. Specifically, though the first article discusses specifically the connection between visual literacy and textual literacy in picture books. Visual literacy is a great comprehension strategy for picture books. Picture books offer opportunities for novice readers to develop literacy. I believe that visual literacy is a stepping stone into what is considered the mainstream definition of literacy.
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 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.
When you can quiet your mind and focus -- really focus -- on a specific desire, you're using the power of visualization. Some people say they can't visualize, but everyone with a fully functioning mind can imagine whatever they wish.
Academic skills for reading comprehension are taught using graphic organizers. This is a visual representation of what is happening in the text. These organizers assist the student in processing what is occurring in the story which assists in comprehension. An example of a graphic organizer is a Venn diagram.
When visualizing, the first thing you need to do is relax. Once you've reached a deep level of relaxation, you enable yourself to connect with the Universal Mind or Spirit. Don't let that spook you -- it's an amazing process and once you experience this amazing feeling, you'll want to revisit it again and again.