Phonemic Awareness

Do You Hear What I Hear?

A Presentation on Phonemic & Phonological Awareness

By Diane Lewis, SLP and Linda Mercer, SLP

November 4, 2009

WELCOME!

•Opening ActivitiesIntroductionsA Gift For You: Badoogles

Major Components of Reading Instruction

Phonological/Phonemic Awareness Phonics Vocabulary development Reading fluency Reading comprehension

This presentation will focus only on one aspect of reading development - Phonological/Phonemic Awareness.

What is Phonological Awareness?

• Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Sentences into words Words into syllables Onset and rime Individual phonemes

Phonological Awareness Tasks Include:

• Initial rhyming and rhyming songs• Sentence segmentation• Segmenting words into syllables• Blending syllables into words• Segmenting words into onsets and rimes• Blending onsets and rimes into words

• This represents the continuum of complexity, moving from less complex to most complex

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

• Phonemic awareness is the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness

• It involves the ability to auditorally notice that the spoken word contains a ‘sub-level’ of smaller sounds or ‘phonemes’

• The smallest unit of sound in spoken language is a phoneme

What’s Involved in Phonemic Awareness?

• Phonemic Awareness involves the ability to : Segment, or separate, words into sounds Blend, or put those sounds together to make

a word Manipulate sounds, or change sounds within

words to make new words

How Do They Fit Together

• The recent National Research Council report on reading distinguishes phonological awareness from phonemic awareness in this way:

The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness.

Fascinating Facts & Startling Statistics

• 68% of 4th grade students in the U.S. are reading below the proficient level (1)

• Children who fall behind at an early age (kindergarten & 1st grade) fall farther behind over time (2)

Startling Statistics

• Only 29% of 8th graders meet the national standard of reading proficiency

• Currently one-fourth of our students in grades 4 - 12 read below the minimum or “basic” standard for their grade level

• Only 15% of urban 8th graders read at, or above, a proficient level


• About two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts and one-third of all juvenile offenders read below the 4th grade level

• Roughly one-third of high school graduates are not ready to succeed in an introductory-level college writing class


• About 40% of high school graduates lack the literacy skills employers seek

• The 25 fastest-growing professions have far greater-than-average literacy demands, while the fastest declining professions have lower-than-average literacy demands (2)

Facts & Statistics

• Longitudinal studies show that of those children who are reading disabled in 3rd grade, 74% continue to read significantly below grade level in the 9th grade, indicating a persistent deficit rather than developmental lag(3)3)

• Adults with reading problems exhibit the same Adults with reading problems exhibit the same characteristics as children with reading difficultiescharacteristics as children with reading difficulties

Facts & Statistics

• The ability to read and comprehend depends upon rapid and automatic recognition and decoding of single words.

• Slow and inaccurate decoding are the best predictors of deficits in reading

• The significant link between a child’s phonemic awareness skills & ultimate success in reading is an internationally recognized phenomenon(2)

Facts & Statistics

• The ability to decode single words accurately and fluently is dependent upon the ability to segment words and syllables into phonemes.

• Deficits in phonological and phonemic awareness reflect the core deficit in reading disabilities

Final Facts & Statistics

• Research indicates that without direct instructional support, phonemic awareness eludes roughly 25% of middle class 1st graders Impact is substantially greater for children

from less literacy-rich backgrounds

• Evidenced in serious difficulty learning to read, write, and spell

First Things First

• Before children can make sense of the alphabetic principle, they must first understand that those sounds that are paired up with letters are “one and the same” as the sounds of speech (4)

• Children must therefore have solid phonemic awareness skills before undertaking phonics instruction

• We must begin with the sounds of language

The Challenge and The Good News

• The Challenge: Get children to notice phonemes, to discover their existence and separability, and to hear these differences Early intervention (kindergarten) is exponentially more

successful than later remediation

• The Good News: Many of the activities involving rhythm, rhyme, listening, and sound that have long been enjoyed by preschool-aged children are ideally suited for this purpose

More Good News

• Research indicates that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (5)

How Can I Help?

• First of all, continue what you’re already doing in class and at home: Having fun with language Songs, poetry Creating rhyming words Playing with nonsense words, and so on

• Here are a few more things you can to your bag of tricks…

1. LISTENING SKILLS

• Focus the child’s attention on sounds of interest (a pre-phonemic awareness skill)

Tapes of birds CarsWind BreathingFootsteps Door closingSink running DoorbellSilverware being placed in a drawer

For older students also try listening for specific musical instruments in classical music pieces; try to recognize familiar voices on a tape

Listening

• Develop the memory and attention skills for thinking about sequences of sounds and the language for discussing them Series of sounds

• Begin with simple rhythms and easily distinguishable sounds

• Increase the complexity, eventually adding rhymes to the series (clap clap snap “fall” - clap clap snap “ball”)

Listening

• Locate and localize to sounds Find a hidden clock

• Develop the ability to attend to differences between what they expect to hear and what they actually hear (oddity or absurdity tasks) Twinkle twinkle little car Humpty Dumpty wall on a sat

Listening

• Exercise the ability to overcome distractions, pronunciation differences while listening to language Whispering Game or Telephone: whisper one

word to a student and have them pass it on around the circle; build to phrases and eventually sentences

• Engage in favorite listening activities for M&M’s

2. RHYMING

• Teach children to use meaning and meter to notice and predict rhyming words Read rhyming books; What am I?

• Teach children to depend more strongly on phonological cues to generate rhyme A cat wearing a ___(hat) A mouse that lives in a ___(house) A goat that is sailing a ___(boat)

Rhyming

• Match rhyming words Monster Rhyming Cards - LinguiSystems

• Introduce new rhymes weekly Rhyme a Week Lessons - Webbing Into Literacy

• Favorite rhyming games for M&M’s Rhyming Word Sit Down Scavenger Hunt Erase the Rhyme

3. WORDS IN SENTENCES

• NOTE: Segmenting begins at the sentence level, with the eventual goal being segmenting at the phoneme level

• Introduce the idea that sentences are made up of strings of words and that a sentence is like a short story. It tells something and has to name who or what it is telling about

Words in Sentences

• Recognize complete sentences Thumbs UP or DOWN:

• “has blue eyes”; “the children”

• Count by Clapping Clap for each word in the sentence Begin with one syllable words; later introduce

two syllable words, etc. Begin with short sentences and gradually

lengthen

Words in Sentences

• Represent the number of words in sentences by placing colored squares/ blocks/or counting chips on the table Repeat the sentence while touching each

counter• Great for language, sequencing, and memory

Also a useful method in later grades for sentence dictation/spelling; use finger-tapping method or drawing lines on paper

4. AWARENESS OF SYLLABLES

• Introduce the concept that words are made up of parts called ‘syllables’

• Start with compound words Segment into single syllables by clapping or

using colored squares/blocks to show the two components

snowman, airport, sailboat, cattail

Awareness of Syllables

Blend two one-syllable words to form a compound word • snow + man flash + light

Syllable Deletion with compound words• Say goldfish. Now say it again but don’t say

fish• Say mailbox. Now say it again but don’t say

mail


• Introduce children to the nature of syllables by modeling• Begin by clapping and counting the number of

syllables in their names• Play ‘Clap It’ or ‘Whisper It’• Use colored blocks to represent the number of

syllables in everyone’s names; compare the number of syllables


• Other Games: Box of Objects or Pictures of Objects

• Reach into the box and feel an object; say its name; clap out the number of syllables

Mother May I• Take the number of steps to match the number of

syllables in the given words


Feed the Animals• One box or basket marked for each animal:

lion, octopus, alligator• Picture cards of foods with two, three, four

syllables• The animals are fed the food with correct

number of corresponding syllables (cracker for the lion; potato for the octopus; cauliflower for the alligator)

5. INITIAL AND FINAL SOUNDS

• NOTE: Now working at the phoneme level• First, lead children to discover that words

contain phonemes

• Second, help them begin to learn about the phonemes’ separate identities so they can recognize them & distinguish them from one another

Initial and Final Sounds

• The identities and distinguishing characteristics of the phonemes are easier to feel in one’s mouth than to hear in one’s ear Direct children’s attention to the articulation of

phonemes and how they sound


• Phonemes are easier to recognize in the initial positions of words Move from beginning sound to final sound;

sounds in the middle of words comes last as they are hardest

• Be sure to use “pure” sounds when modeling /b/ the sound stops on your lips; be careful not

to add “uh” as an extra sound


• Play “Guess Who” to teach how phonemes sound in isolation and that phonemes are parts of words: Guess who’s name I’m going to say: “b,b,b” or

“sss, sss, sss”. Guess all the possibilities for each of the sounds

Eventually the students initiate names


• Different Words, Same Initial Phoneme: Show pictures of objects; say their names; determine

if they begin with the same sound or not Sort pictures by initial sounds into separate piles

• Soundtration (Concentration Game) Place picture cards face down; turn over two cards;

keep pairs that have same initial sounds; turn is over if the cards have different beginning sounds


• “I Spy” I spy something that starts with /s/

• Note: use sound, not letter name

• “I’m Thinking” I’m thinking of something that starts with /s/. It

has two legs and can fly. It’s bird by the ocean.

• “Dudsberry Phoneme Postcards” from LinguiSystems

6. SEGMENTING WORDS

• Segmenting words into phonemes Use colored squares to represent each sound

in the word What sounds do you hear in the word “hot”

• Counting phonemes in words How many sounds do you hear in the

word “man”; “hat”; “cake”; “bike”

Segmenting Words

• Use words that have easily distinguishable and separable sounds (The ability to distinguish

blends/consonant clusters, dipthongs, etc. develops much later)

• Use counters or finger tapping methods

7. BLENDING PHONEMES INTO WORDS

• What word would you have if you put these sounds together /s/ /a/ /t/

• Begin with initial sound plus end of word /c/ at /p/ en

• Move to final phoneme blending coa /t/ hou /se/

• Increase complexity by blending individual sounds

8. DELETION OF PHONEMES

• Say “cat”

• Say “cat” again without the /k/

• What sound do you hear in “meat” that is missing in “eat”

9. MATCHING

• Word to word matching Do pen and pipe start with the same letter

• Odd word out What word starts with a different sound:

bag, nine, beach, bike

• Sound-to-sound matching Is there a /k/ in bike

ADDING LETTERS TO SOUNDS

• The relationship between phonological awareness and reading is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature (Stanovich, 1986). Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading.

• However, instruction in early reading-specifically, explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondence appears to strengthen phonological awareness, and in particular the more sophisticated phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

CONCLUSION

• Phonemic awareness is one of the necessary building blocks to reading and spelling success

• The strategies we discussed also help with general listening skills and vocabulary development

• Continue the wonderful work you do and have fun with language!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) "Educational CyberPlayGround" Internet. Database available online. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com

2) NICHD Research on Reading. http://www.ksagroup.com/thecenter/

3) www.all4ed.org/files/AdolescentLiteracyFactSheet.pdf

4) Adams, Marilyn (1990). Beginning To Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

5) Ball, E.W., & Blachman, B.A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26 (1), 49-66

Stanovich, K.E., (1986), Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research

Quarterly, 21, 360-407

Websites & Books

Sequences of Sounds• http://www.readingrockets.org/article/377

Rhyming Games• http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bll/reggie/index.htm• http://www.gamequarium.com/rhymes.html• http://www.teachers.cr.k12.de.us/~galgano/dibelrhyme.htm• http://ezinearticles.com/?Rhyming-Games-For-Kids&id=924334• http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/rhyming-games.html• http://prekinders.com/rhyme/

Segmenting Words in Sentences• http://www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Counting_words_in_a_sentence• Scaffolding with Storybooks: A Guide for Enhancing Young Children's Language by

Laura M. Justice, Khara L. Pence, Angela Beckman

Websites Continued

Segmenting Words into Syllables

• burrton.k12.ks.us/.../Segmentation,%20syllables,%20onset%20and%20rime.pdf

• http://www.proteacher.com/070171.shtml

Initial - Final - Medial Sound Discrimination

• http://www.readingrockets.org/article/377

• http://www.free-reading.net/index.php?title=Catch_a_Sound-final_sounds

• http://www.proteacher.com/070011.shtml