Phonemic and phonological
awareness is an essential competency for emergent literacy (Moats, 1999; Yopp,
1992). Phonemic and phonological awareness is now typically
introduced during Pre-kindergarten programs. This emphasizes the
need for universal Pre-K, since
foundational concepts in emergent literacy are being introduced and then
reinforced during the Kindergarten year. When such learning
opportunities are missed or ineffective, a child might find him or herself in
First Grade and in need of a Tier 2 or 3 reading intervention to develop the
phonemic and phonological awareness exhibited by same-age/grade peers.
Why do we need teachers proficient in developmental reading
skills? Samantha
Coppola's TED Talk provides a powerful response. Effective
teachers are the great equalizer with the potential to positively change a
child's destiny.
Phonemic
awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken
words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of
sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992). Phonemic awareness is essential to
learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent
sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little
sense. Phonemic awareness is fundamental to mapping speech to
print. For instance, if a child cannot hear that "man" and
"moon“ begin with the same sound or is unable to blend the sounds
/rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", then he or she may
have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending
sounds to make a word.
A phoneme is a speech sound. A phoneme is the smallest
unit of spoken language and has no inherent meaning (National Reading Panel,
2000). Phonemic
awareness involves hearing language at the phoneme level.
Phonemic
awareness is not phonics. Phonemic awareness is auditory and
does not involve words in print. Phonemic awareness is important
because it teaches students to attend to sounds. Phonemic awareness primes the
connection of sound to print. Phonemic awareness gives students a
way to approach reading new words. Phonemic awareness helps students
understand the alphabetic principle whereby letters in words are systematically
represented by sounds.
Phonics, is the use of the code (sound-symbol relationships to
recognize words. Phonological
awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of
language. This is an encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of
language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level.
Phonemic and phonological awareness is difficult because although
the English language includes 26 letters, there are approximately 40
phonemes. Sounds are represented in 250 different
spellings. For instance, /f/ as in ph, f, gh, ff. Research
has established that children lacking phonemic and phonological awareness
skills exhibit difficulty grouping words with similar and dissimilar sounds
(mat, mug, sun), blending and splitting syllables (sun-ny), blending sounds
into words (m_a_n), segmenting a word as a sequence of sounds (e.g., fish is
made up of three phonemes, /f/ ,/i/, /sh/), detecting and manipulating sounds
within words (change “r” in “run” to “s” to make “sun”), (Kame'enui, et. al.,
1997).
Teacher preparation programs need to strengthen their training in
this regard and develop better partnerships with early childhood programs and
elementary schools to ensure optimal training of teachers in the implementation
of intervention programs that utilize a phonemic and phonological
awareness approach. Acceptance of the need for this awareness will
increase the likelihood of effective action planning for students
identified as at-risk learners during the emergent literacy stage of learning.
Vacca & Padak (1990) find at-risk learners are seldom more academically vulnerable
than during instructional situations that require them to engage in acts of
literacy. Kletzien & Bednar (1990)
view at-risk readers as students who see themselves “as poor learners who have
limited aptitude to benefit from educational opportunities. They are at risk by being constantly
discouraged and by having an inadequate understanding of their own learning
abilities and potential” (p 528).
Most research-based reading
intervention programs utilize a phonemic and phonological awareness approach as
the foundation for their model of reading intervention. The most effective reading programs for at-risk students
utilize a multisensory and systematic approach (Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, Yaghoub-Zadeh, &
Shanahan, 2001; Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, 2012; Kruidenier, MacArthur, Wrigley,
2010). Research by Slavin,
Lake, Davis, and Madden, (2009)
found one-to-one intervention effective for students at-risk for reading
failure. As
noted above, effective teachers are the great equalizer with the potential to positively
change a child's destiny. Developing phonemic and
phonological awareness skills as a teacher of reading
simply makes a teacher more effective.
To cite:
Anderson, C.J. (August 31, 2017) The
benefits of increased phonemic and phonological awareness
References;
Big
Ideas in Beginning Reading (2009) University of Oregon Center on Teaching and
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