Established by Gracie, Dana Faris, and Nicole Harned

                        Phonics and   Phonemic  Awareness         

 

 

Phonics is the relationship between the sounds of spoken language and letters in written language, (McCormick, 2007,p6)

 

Phonemic Awareness is the student's awareness of sounds in spoken words, (Stahl,Hester,Stahl,1998). For example, you would hear three sounds in the word bat: /b/, /a/, and /t/.

 

 

Phonemic Awareness	Phonics
Main focus is on phonemes / sounds	Main focus is on graphemes / letters and their corresponding sounds
Deals with spoken language	Deals with written language / print
Mostly auditory	Both visual and auditory
Students work with manipulating sounds and sounds in words	Students work with reading and writing letters according to their sounds, spelling patterns, and phonological structure

Today, researchers are in agreement that phonics and phonemic awareness instructions is an important and critical component in reading instruction. But, it is only one component. The pyramid below shows where and how phonics and phonemic instruction affects reading success.

 

  This website vt the International Reading Association answers many questions about phonemic awareness.

    http://www.reading.org/downloads/positions/ps1025_phonemic.pdf

 

 

http://www.reading-skills-pyramid.org/   (Please click on the link if you are having problems seeing this pyramid clearly).

     

 

 

Importance of Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Instruction:

 

This video explains the difference between Phonics and Phonemic Awareness and stresses the importance of both to the whole learning to read process.

Dr. Lyon has taught children with learning disabilities, served as a third grade classroom teacher, and as a school psychologist for  twelve years in the public schools. He has authored, co-authored and edited over 100 journal articles, books, and book chapters addressing learning differences and disabilities in children

 

                                                

 

According to McCormick, “A lack of phonemic awareness is a cause of reading delays in a large portion of students whose difficulties lie with word recognition."

 

McCormick identifies two levels of phonemic awareness:

1. Simple phonemic awareness
2.  Compound phonemic awareness

 

Simple phonemic tasks-phonemic awareness processes that involve a single operation:

• Isolation of sound (giving the first sound in camel after hearing the word pronounced)
• Blending – combining in oral language, separate sounds into a word (when giving the sounds /h/ /a/ /m/ being able to produce ham)
• Segmentation – recognizing the sounds heard in a word (after hearing the word bat pronounced, identify the three sounds heard in the word)

 

Compound Phonemic Awareness-phonemic awareness processes involving more than one operation:

• Phoneme deletion – isolating a sound in a word and blending the remaining sounds (the student responds correctly when asked, “what word would be left if the /r/ were taken away from the middle of brake?”
• Word-to-word matching – entails isolating a sound in a certain position in two words and comparing the sounds (the student responds correctly when asked “do dog and dime begin the same?” (McCormick 2007, p125).

 

“Phonemic awareness is now viewed as a critical variable in emergent literacy and beginning reading acquisition. Recognizing that words can be broken into phonemes and syllables and being able to manipulate these, has a high correlation with reading achievement,” (McCormick, 2007,p265).

 

According to Stahl and Duffy-Hester, (1998), “being able to decode words is necessary for children to become independent word learners and thus be able to develop as readers without teacher assistant.” But, they also point out that phonics instruction needs to be taught right and gave several points on what is “good phonics instruction”:

 

• develop the alphabetic principle - which is the basic level that letters and words stand for specific sounds
• develop phonological awareness  - awareness of sounds in spoken words
• provide a thorough grounding in the letters - recosgnizing letters automatically
• not teach rules, need not use worksheets, should not dominate instruction, and does not have to be boring -direct teacher instruction in a brisk, to the point, using connected text, and not spend too much time.
• provide sufficient practice in reading and writing words -word patterns and invented spelling
• lead to automatic word recognition - repeated readings for fluency
• should be a part of reading instruction  - remember, children should enjoy learning to read and reading

 

 

Can children learn to read without phonics instruction?

 

      Whole Language vs. Phonics Instruction: This video is explaining the great importance of phonics instruction and of it being a neccessity in learning to read. It is completely against the whole language theory of learning to read. It's an interestng video, except for comparing it to "child abuse", and be warry of what it says about dyslexia. I included this video mainly because of the picture of the child looking frustrated. We don't want children to feel this way, so it is important to look at both sides of the issue on reading instruction and use what is best for the child.

 

                                           

 

          When phonics instruction was first used, it was criticized by some researchers who believed that teaching letters and words in isolation was not teaching reading. Some researchers felt that a whole word, or whole language concept was best. Students did not need to learn phonics or instruction in phonics to learn how to read,(Smith, 1999). In his article, Smith puts a great deal of blame on the current research based programs for phonics instruction for the problems many emergent readers are having with learning to read and reading comprehension. His beliefs are that “words in meaningful sequences are the most important elements in reading, not letters or sounds, and to learn to read, you must become familiar with written words, not as inadequate representations of sounds, but as significant elements of meaningful language,” (Smith 1999).

          Smith also affirms that it is the teacher that needs to assess the students stregnths and area of need. Some students are frequently read to at home before entering school and already have the phonemic awareness.  But, many students need may need instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness. Smith does point that the teacher is the one who should be in charge of what best will help a child with learning to read, in that we do have a diverse culture of children in our classrooms, and phonics instruction may work for some but how and when it should be taught should vary with the childs' needs. He also stresses that teachers should know when would be the right time to teach it to the child.  I also agree with him that “children learn to read when conditions are right, and these conditions include their own unique personalities, their self-image, mood, interest, expectations, and comprehension.”

 

          Another article on phonics instruction is by Gerald Coles, (2000), who states that research done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) contradicts what the research claims to have found to what it actually shows. In his article, Coles believes that “direct, explicit, and systematic” reading instruction is actually harming emergent readers. A couple of his important findings are that:

• Kindergartners trained in phonological awareness do not show superior reading in later grades
• Training in narrow skills has helped children do better on tests of phonological and related skills but has not improved reading comprehension of sentences, paragraphs or stories, or made a difference in later reading achievement.

 

          There is still much ongoing research and debate on how important is phonics instruction and when and how it should be taught. Important to know at this time is that a teacher needs to know their students home knowledge and use that to find the best way not only to teach reading using phonemic awareness, but to know when and how to teach it so that the student will be successful in reading. Teaching phonemic awareness using student relevant text to practice the phonics skills being learned I beleive is the best way to teach phonics. Students should enjoy learning.

 

                                                               

 

Michael Wayne Rosen (born 7 May 1946), is a broadcaster, children's novelist and poet and the author of 140 books. He was appointed as the fifth Children's Laureate in June 2007, succeeding Jacqueline Wilson, and held this honour till 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

      To Blend or not to Blend    

      

 

 

 When is blending an appropriate activity for an early childhood classroom?

 

 

 

                         

 

     Blending is appropriate in the early development of readers. Wiith that being said, the activity of blending is many times tested or focused on way too early. Children should first be able to identify all of their letters and sounds before they are required to do blending activities. Testing a child in the first weeks of kindergarten blending when they have never been in school isn't fair. Blending is part of the main approach that teaches children how to read. In order for phonics instruction to be effective, blending must be taught with regards to the importance of sound and training students to be able to detect those sounds. A program that backs this belief is a program called Synthetic Phonics. Synthetic Phonics is about learning the sounds of letters in the English language and how to use those sounds for reading and writing. Phonics is so much more than just learning the name of the letter. The very crucial, beginning part of phonics is learning the sounds of the letters then learning how to blend them into the word.

 

                    

                      What strategies are most effective when teaching blending?

     

 

                                   

 

 

          Some strategies that are most effective when teaching blending in the early childhood classroom are puppets who talk slowly to model word segmenting and majic bridges that are crossed when the sounds are put together correctly.The highly interactive activity keeps the students attention and puts a fun twist on learning an important skill. The hands on aspect is especially helpful because it helps the student connect more to what they are doing instead of a teacher simply just asking them to blend a word. Another fun strategy to use in the classroom with early childhood learners is "snail talk". Put many familair words such as sun, ball, flag, dog, cat on index cards and tell your student you are going to "snail talk", sound out the words very, very slowly. For example you say "ffffflllllaaaag" and tell the student to try to guess the word. 

 

Also, another critical aspect of blending is for the students to understand how component sounds in words work together.The skill of sound-blending has been shown to improve the basic phonics skills of a beginning reader according to the article The Relationship of Sound Blending to Reading Achievment. This skill is important in helping to advance students to more critical phonics instruction. It will also help them to become better, fluent readers. An example of an effective lesson would be a lesson in final blending. An example of this would be using a word such as "car" and identifying and pronouncing each letter sound before you say the word. You would point to each letter and say each letter sound then slowly drag your finger under the letters and say the sounds slowly then drag your finger under the letters and say the sounds fast. Another technique in teaching blending, especially to early readers is to have them clap or count the number of sounds they hear. This will be helpful in teaching them to listen for different sounds at an early stage, thus preparing them to be able to identify those sounds on their own sooner!

 

With the inclusion of phonics in the classroom,the emphasis on word attack skills such as blending is focused on rather than just having the students memorize word after word. According to Synthetic Phonics: Cracking the Code of English once a student learns letter sounds and how to blend them together they will then be able to read approximately 80% of the words in the English language. When blending is used as a reading strategy is has been proven to be very effective as seen when the researchers visited kindergarden classrooms in other countries.

 

References

 

Blevins,M. (1990). Blending boosters: techniques and activities to enliven phonics lessons. Instructor. Retrived from  

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-53649871/blending-boosters-techniques-and.html

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                            

 

   A website for interactive rhyming activities:

  http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bll/reggie/home/index.htm

http://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games/words-that-rhyme-with-op.html

 

 

 

                                       To Rhyme or not to Rhyme

 

   Is rhyming neccesary for literacy development in early childhood classes?

 

      Learning to read is fun, exciting, scary, intimidating, and confusing all at the same time for a young child. It could also be all of those things for the teacher of the young child too. There are many techniques going around in the education field that swear to be the best way to teach reading. Many of the techniques say pretty much the same thing, that phonological awareness is the key to success. Phonological awareness involves rhyming, syllable blending, word or syllable segmenting or deleting, and phoneme-counting tasks (Phillips, 2008).  Studies have been done in the recent years to determine if all the activities involved with phonological awareness is developmentally appropriate for early childhood aged children and if the activity is really necessary for the development of reading.

 

     I stumbled upon studies done on the rhyming activity and was quite surprised at the results. In a study done by Lonigan and Woods, evidence shows that rhyming is not necessarily the most evidence based of the pedagogical choices or the simplest phonological awareness skill to master (Lonigan, 2007; Woods, 1998). To understand why this is the case, consider that rhyming activities might involve identifying which two or three words rhyme in a matching task or identifying which word in a trio does not rhyme with the others (Phillips, Clancy-Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008). In order to accomplish this task successfully the child must look at all the letters to all the words carefully. If two words have the same onset, the child may pick those words as the “rhyming” words instead of the correct choice. A good example of this would be; a child is given cat, rat, and cup. If the child does not completely understand rhyme they may choice cat and cup because of the onset “c”. In order to do the first rhyming task:

 

          * The child must know what it means to rhyme.

          * The child must attend to the sound structure of all three words.

          * The child has to compare the ending vowel-consonant rime.

          * The child needs to conclude that cat and rat share a rime, where

             as cup has a different rime.

             (Phillips, Clancy-Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008).

 

     Another rhyming task is rhyme production. Here the child is asked to come up with a word that rhymes with a word that is said to them. A good example of this task is I say coat, you say ___. The child has to come up with a word that rhymes with coat. In a study done by Jason Anthony and Christopher Lonigan in 2004 they found that 3 year olds to 6 year old children found this task to be hard to say the least. In one case the task of producing rhyming words brought tears instead of scorable results. In another case the children became frustrated and stated that it was too difficult. One 3-year old refused to finish the task (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004). Many of the assessments that are given in early childhood classes have this exact activity. I feel that by doing this it sets the child up for a feeling of failure at this young age. 

 

Teachers who mistakenly consider rhyme manipulations or productions to be entry-level skills that children can master readily may find themselves frustrated and bewildered by the confusion and poor performance demonstrated by their students. If teachers are to include a focus on rhyming in their instructional plans, then the expectation likely needs to be that children would benefit from repeated exposure, explicit teaching of what it means to rhyme, and a high degree of scaffolding (Phillips, Clancy-Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008). Teachers of early childhood development may feel that they are helping their students become readers by using rhyme as a beginning approach but the studies have shown that children may not be ready to completely understand the concept. Children that have learning disabilities or those that have behavioral issues may find rhyming very difficult (Phillips, Clancy-Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008). Those students will need a great deal of guidance and scaffolding. Visional and hands-on activities would probably be the best way to help these children if the teacher must teach the concept of rhyme.

 

     There was a study done in 2007 by Stuart Yeh and David Connell. In there study they wanted to find what was the most effective strategy for developing phonological awareness. They looked at phoneme segmentation, blending and rhyming/vocabulary strategies. They found other studies that showed that phoneme segmentation and blending had positive effects on reading comprehension in kindergarten (Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1998) and first grade students ( Schneider, Kuspert, Roth & Vise, 1997). For their study the results indicated that instruction emphasising phoneme segmentation and blending was more effective in developing phoneme segmentation and blending ability than instruction emphasising either rhyming or vocabulary ( Yeh & Connell, 2007).

 

What else can be done instead of rhyming?

 

                           

Some activities that teachers can do with their students to help with phoneme segmentation instead of rhyming:

 

·        making words

·        letter-sound recognition

·        games that involve the children’s names

·        Elkonin Boxes

·        Rubber band stretching (The teacher shows how the word stretches with each sound.)

·        Letter cards (Students lay down the letters that they hear in a word.)

 

 A good website that teachers can use for some of the ideas mentioned above is:

http://www.pcboe.net/les/elderweb/phoneme%20segmentation/phoneme%20segmentation%20games-1.pdf

                    A website from the Phoenix City Public Schools on Phoneme segmentation activities

 

 

 

This video is a good teaching strategy with Dr. Louisa Moats, University of Texas

 

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid26618250001?bclid=26524393001&bctid=7239592001

 

 

 

 

     These are  fun learning interactive websites that children can use to learn letters, words and reading. The child listens to the letter or word and matches them to beginning, middle or ending  letter sounds and matches word families, rimes, and can listen to stories read. Some stories use the cloze strategy where the child chooses which word goes best with the sentence.

 

    http://teacher.scholastic.com/clifford1/flash/phonics/index.htm

    http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/picturematch/

 

 

   This website provides a list of books that can be used to teach phonemic awareness. It is important to remember, teaching phonic and phonemes should not be a drill and skill lesson, but should be fun and taught using rich literature.

 

    http://www.edb.utexas.edu/readstrong/phonemicaware.pdf

 

  The WiKi Diversity site also has strategies that work well with children that are learning English as a second language and may need more direct instruction.

 

Always important to remember, we need to know our students needs and find what works best. No one program fits all.

 

                           

 

                    

 

 

 References 

 

Richgels, D.J., Poremba, L.J., & McGee, L.M. (1996). Kindergartners talk about print: Phonemic awareness in

meaningful contexts. The Reading Teacher, 49i(8): 632-642

 

Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester, A.M., Dougherty-Stahl, K.A. (1998). Everything you wanted to know about phonics

(but were afraid to ask). Reading Research Quarterly 33(3): 338-354.

 

Coles, G. (2000). “Direct, Explicit, and Systematic”---Bad Reading Science. Language Arts, 77(6).

 

Smith, F. (1999). Why systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction constitute and educational

hazard. Language Arts, 77(2).

 

McCormick, S. (2007, 5^th edition). Instructing Students Who Have Literacy Problems. Pearson Merrill Prentice

Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, Columbus, Ohio 

 

Anthony, J. L. &  Lonigan, C. J. (2004). The Nature of Phonological Awareness: Converging Evidence From Four

          Studies of Preschool and Early Grade School Children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, No. 1, 43-55.

 

Lonigan, C. J. (2007a). Development of the components of phonological awareness across the preschool year.

          Unpublished manuscript

 

Lundberg, I., Frost, J. & Peterson, O.P. (1998). Effects of an extensive Program for stimulating phonological

          awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 269-284.  

 

        Phillips, B., Clancy-Menchetti, J., & Lonigan, C.. (2008). Successful Phonological Awareness Instruction With

                    Preschool Children: Lessons From the Classroom. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 28(1), 3-17. 

                    Retrieved October 10, 2009, from Research Library. (Document ID: 1492997441).

 

Sc     Schneider, W., Kuspert, P. Roth, E. & Vise, M. (1997). Short- and long-term Effects of training phonological awareness

                    in kindergarten:Evidence from two German studies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 66(3), 311-340.

 

Woods, C. S. (1998). The role of Rhyme. Montessori Life, 10, 34-36.

 

Yeh, S., & Connell, D. (2008). Effects of Rhyming, Vocabulary and Phonemic Awareness Instruction on Phoneme

            Awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 31(2), 243-256. http://search.ebscohost.com