what teachers can do to help children develop phonological awareness

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Written by Dr. Jody Chong, Assistant Professor, Jackman Found of Child Study at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto/ Special Didactics Instructor, TDSB

Phonological awareness is a crucial foundational skill in the journey of learning to read. All oral languages accept a phonology, or system of sounds, and for a language such every bit English, where the alphabetic writing organisation was designed in large role to represent the spoken communication organization, existence aware of the relationship betwixt speech communication sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) is essential (Juel, 1988). Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that encompasses the way oral language can be broken down into diverse-sized units; larger ones such every bit words and syllables, and smaller ones, such every bit onsets and rimes (e.yard., 'pat' tin can exist cleaved down into the onset "p" and the rime "at" and slip would be cleaved down into "sl" and "ip"). The sub-skill that is nearly closely related to reading and writing development is being enlightened of how words tin exist segmented into their smallest units of sounds – phonemes.

Phonemic awareness is a sub-category of phonological awareness, and pedagogy in this specific expanse helps children identify, isolate, blend, segment and dispense the individual phonemes in spoken words. Phonemic sensation is an important cornerstone of literacy programs for both early-stage readers and those with written linguistic communication disabilities. Research shows that challenges in phonemic awareness and other phonological skills both predict and cause poor reading and spelling development (Bryant et al., 2014; Ehri et al., 2001) and that decoding education may be ineffective unless children can kickoff hear the sounds in spoken language (Juel, 1988; Perfetti et al., 1987). These challenges cut across IQ, race, and socio-economical status.

Decades of research on this topic signal that this skill is highly teachable (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Coach & van Ijzendoom, 1999; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Lundberg et al., 1988); and when washed early, tin help prevent reading difficulties. Hither are 10 tips to assist teachers, parents, and clinicians back up its evolution:

Tip #one Exercise Regularly

Yous don't need to spend hours a day developing phonological awareness. It should exist introduced in kindergarten and grade 1. Devoting around 15 minutes, a few days a week, to whole course activities, with possibly 10 minutes more in differentiated small groups for those who need additional practice, is ample. In their meta-assay of enquiry related to this topic, The National Reading Panel (2000) plant that just 18 hours of instruction in total is sufficient for most learners, and this tin exist easily achieved over the course of several months.

Tip #two Make it Playful

Starting in kindergarten or even pre-school, educators and parents can introduce games, songs, and activities in playful and developmentally appropriate ways. Phonemic sensation instruction should be engaging, and at that place are many first-class resources and ideas out there to inspire your practice (see Tip #10).

Tip #3 Seek out Professional person Learning Opportunities

Louisa Moats (1999/2020) believes that instruction reading really is rocket science, and so information technology is important for teachers to accept a deep agreement of what phonemic awareness is, why it is important, and to self-assess their own power to perform phonological awareness tasks. Click hither to test your knowledge and access further learning resources from Reading Rockets. If this is an area that is new to you, there are many splendid resource to help deepen your understanding and comfort level (e.g., Kilpatrick, 2015).

Tip #4 Employ Assessment to Guide your Teaching

Using an assessment tool tin can aid y'all screen your students and identify those who may need extra support, monitor their progress, and tailor your teaching to institute instructional priorities. As your students become practiced at working with larger units of oral communication such as identifying individual words in sentences, clapping syllables within words, or dividing words into onset-rime, you can so progress to tasks that involve working with the phonemes in individual words.

A few tools to consider:

• Comprehensive Examination of Phonological Processing (C-TOPP);
• Examination of Auditory Analysis (Rosner, 1993);
• Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS-half dozen; Skilful & Kaminiski, 2001); and the
• Phonological Awareness Screening Test (By; Kilpatrick, 2015).

Tip #five Focus your Instruction

For typically developing children, it may exist more useful to focus on 1 or two types of phoneme manipulation (e.k., blending and segmenting), as studies have indicated that children who were taught only one or two types of manipulation, instead of iii or more, learned faster. And in some cases, students made stronger gains in reading and spelling (NRP, 2000; Ryder et al., 2008).  Kilpatrick (2015), however, advises that children who struggle with phonemic awareness, or who may exist at risk for developing literacy difficulties; may benefit from programming that is more comprehensive and that includes a larger multifariousness of tasks (i.due east., programs that railroad train students to dispense, delete, and substitute phonemes rather than only to alloy and segment phonemes).

Tip #6 Brand it Multi-Modal

There are many means to incorporate more than than one modality into your pedagogy: incorporating manipulatives such as bingo chips or counters that students tin "push" every bit they segment or manipulate phonemes; using toy cars or slinkies every bit they stretch and alloy sounds; using Elkonin boxes (audio boxes); providing picture supports for targeted words; augmenting sound play activities with pictures of rima oris movements (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998); and having students tap with their hands, fingers, small wands, or pencils as they segment words.

Tip #vii Connect it to Letter-Sounds

Research tells us that phonemic sensation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for skilled decoding and spelling and that educational activity that combines phonemic awareness with letter of the alphabet-sound instruction (phonics) produces steeper gains/superior outcomes than phonemic awareness pedagogy in isolation (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Schneider et al., 2000).

Tip #8 Connect information technology to the learning of irregular words

A meaning percent of the most common words in English contain irregular spelling patterns (e.g., was, some, of) and many educators once believed that, because of this, high-frequency words were best learned through whole-word memorization. We now know that in order to acquire these words efficiently and to exist able to transfer some of this learning to other words, students need to understand the relationship betwixt the sounds they hear in the spoken word and the letters they see in the written word, even when these are irregular or unexpected. When nosotros teach children to look at every letter of the alphabet in a word and think about which letter of the alphabet patterns are expected or unexpected, their brains acquire these relationships and retain them through a process chosen orthographic mapping. This mapping ability helps to "bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" (Ehri, 2014, p. five).

A helpful process for teaching children irregular words:

1. Say the word out loud and have them repeat it (e.g., "said"),
2. Ask the pupil to segment the give-and-take into phonemes (eastward.g., /southward/ - /e/ - /d/),
3. Draw three lines on a blackboard or piece of paper to show that nosotros need to choose three graphemes to represent the three phonemes,
4. Discuss which letters nosotros might expect to run across given our knowledge of audio-letter (phoneme-grapheme) associations,
5. Highlight the part of the word that is irregular or unexpected.

A few ways to frame this process for the students are to highlight the alphabetic character(s) that "aren't playing by the rules", or to call them "middle words" and to highlight the irregular letter of the alphabet(s) by drawing a pocket-sized heart above, as this is the role(s) of the word that needs to be learned "by heart".

Click hither to lookout a iii-minute video demonstrating this arroyo.

Tip #9 Don't go overboard

Phonemic awareness is a means to an end – to help children read and spell – and information technology is possible to get overboard. Students just need to consistently demonstrate their awareness that spoken words are composed of phonemes, that these phonemes can exist manipulated in different ways, and that they can apply this noesis to decode and encode words (SEDL, 2008 equally cited in Ehri et al., 2001).

Tip #10 Last but not least, build your toolkit of evidence-based (and engaging!) instructional resources

This list is far from exhaustive, only here are a few online favourites:

Balanced Literacy Diet Website – here are a few videos and lesson programme ideas from its drove. To admission more similar this, use the site search option or get to the phonemic sensation food group.

• Pound and Sound
• Push that Sound
• Where'south the Audio?

Florida Centre for Reading Research –- lesson ideas are organized by class

• Pre-K Phonological Awareness Student Centre Activities
• K-1 Phonological Awareness Pupil Middle Activities
• Grades 2-3 Phonemic Awareness Educatee Center Activities

Reading Rockets - At that place are many resources on this website related to phonemic awareness. Hither are a few to get you started:

• Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
• How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities

University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI)

• Phonological Awareness Activities

UFLI Virtual Educational activity Resource Hub

• Instructional Activities for Phonemic Awareness

Understood

• Elkonin Boxes
• Alter a Letter
• 8 Ways to Build PA in Course-Schoolers
• 8 Means to Build PA in Centre-Schoolers

References

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., Osborn, J., National Institute for Literacy (U.Southward.), & National Found of Child Health and Human Development (U.South.). (2001).Put reading first: The research edifice blocks for educational activity children to read: kindergarten through form 3. Washington, D.C.: National Institute for Literacy, National Institute of Kid Health and Homo Development, U.Due south. Dept. of Education.

Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does Phoneme Awareness Training in Kindergarten Make a Difference in Early Word Recognition and Developmental Spelling?Reading Research Quarterly,26(1), 49-66.

Bradley, 50., & Bryant, P.Due east. (1985). Rhyme and reason in reading and spelling (International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities Monograph Series No. 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Printing.

Bryant, P., Nunes, T., & Barros, R. (2014). The connection betwixt children'southward knowledge and use of grapho‐phonic and morphemic units in written text and their learning at school. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84 (2), 211-225.

Bus, A. G., & van IJzendoorn, Chiliad. H. (1999). Phonological sensation and early reading: A meta-analysis of experimental training studies.Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(three), 403–414. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.403

Ehri, Fifty. (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:one, 5-21, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z. and Shanahan, T. (2001), Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Console's Meta-Assay.Reading Research Quarterly, 36,250–287. doi:x.1598/RRQ.36.3.2

Proficient, R. H. Three, & Kaminski, R. A. (Eds.). (2003). Dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (6th ed.). Colorado: Sopris West

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to Read and Write: A Longitudinal Report of Fifty-4 Children from Showtime through Fourth Grade.Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Hoboken NJ: Wiley.

Kilpatrick, D.A. (2016). Equipped for Reading Success, Casey & Kirch.

Lindamood, P., & Lindamood, P. (1998). The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech, Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Petersen, O.-P. (1988). Effects of an extensive plan for stimulating phonological sensation in preschool children.Reading Enquiry Quarterly, 23(three), 263–284. https://doi.org/x.1598/RRQ.23.iii.i

Moats, L. C. (1999/ 2020). Didactics reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to practise. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers - https://world wide web.aft.org/sites/default/files/moats.pdf

National Reading Console & National Constitute of Child Health and Homo Evolution (U.South.). (2000).Report of the National Reading Panel: Education children to read: an bear witness-based cess of the scientific inquiry literature on reading and its implications for reading teaching: reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Wellness.

Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L. C., & Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic noesis and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of commencement grade children.Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33(3), 283–319.

Rosner, J. (1993). Helping children overcome learning disabilities, three^rd Ed. NY: Walker & Visitor.

Ryder, J.F., Tunmer, Westward.East., & Greaney, Yard.T. (2008). Explicit teaching in phoneme awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms. Reading and Writing, 21, 349-369.

Schneider, West., Roth, E., & Ennemoser, M. (2000). Training phonological skills and letter knowledge in children at adventure for dyslexia: A comparison of three kindergarten intervention programs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(2), 284-295.  doi:http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1037/0022-0663.92.two.284

Wagner, R., Torgesen, J., Rashotte, C., & Pearson, N. (2013). Comprehensive test of phonological processing – second Edition (C-TOPP-two). Austin, Texas: Pro-Ed.

Dr. Jody Chong is an assistant professor at the Jackman Found of Child Report at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the Academy of Toronto. She is also a Special Educational activity Teacher with the Toronto Commune Schoolhouse Lath. Jody has been a fellow member of the LD@school/TA@l'école Advisory Committee, providing input to back up the planning and implementation of the LD@schoolhouse and TA@l'école projects since 2019.

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