Early Literacy Assessment : Phonemic Awareness

As you stated, phonemic awareness is very important to a child's later achievement in reading and also spelling. Rhyming and poetry are great ways in promoting phonemic awareness. In my post, I also mentioned a similar activity, and I think rhyming is very effective when working with children which is why many class incorporate these types of activities in their classroom. Great

Bobrow discusses the importance of phonemic awareness. Bobrow states that phonemic awareness is important for reading achievement and learning how to read. According to Bobrow, students need to be able to “grasp printed words”(para.3) and know how words “work together”

Phonemic awareness is a vital role in literacy instruction. Many schools and districts adopt a commercially published basal reading program and it becomes the cornerstone of their instruction ( (David Chard, n.d.). We also know that through investigation and research it has shown us that word-recognition instruction and instruction in oral language skills related to word recognition were inadequately represented. (David Chard, n.d.) The same researchers have found that the reading passages that students are reading didn’t relate to the words they were learning. In order for students to read at grade level or above a supplemental program should be implemented. I have found that at my school we are lacking a phonics program that will reach different students abilities and make them successful in reading. My goal for this paper is to show my district that using a supplemental phonics program aside from our basal phonics program will prove beneficial to strategic readers who fall below grade level.

We will assess this skill using The Phonological Awareness Profile by Robertson and Salter, a criterion-referenced assessment (1995). Criterion-referenced assessments are not used to compare students’ performance with each other, but rather to evaluate the student’s mastery in a specified subject. Such tests are designed to provide information for instruction as well. Only the phonological awareness subtest will be administered to Chloe. This subtest has the following tasks: rhyming, segmentation, isolation, deletion, substitution, and blending. The tasks are composed of the following:

Phonological awareness is when children learn to associate sounds with symbols and create links to word recognition and decoding skills. It consists of skills that develop through the preschool period. Phonological awareness is an important part of learning to read and write, children who have a broad range of phonics are able to identify and make oral rhymes, are able to clap out the syllables in a word and can recognise words with the same initial sounds. Phonological awareness is a good indicator whether your student will have a potential reading difficulty and with the many activities and resources available to us you can develop a child’s awareness early on in a child’s education.

Phonological awareness is the learning of different sounds, words and syllables learnt through listening and speaking (Gillon, 2004). Phonological awareness is important for children in early childhood to learn to establish their reading and writing skills (Hill, 2012, 160). The way children learn phonological awareness is through word play, stretching sounds, repeat ion, rhymes and song (Hill, 2012, p. 134; Roger Scenter, 2013).Phoneme awareness is a smaller area considered as part of phonological awareness, phoneme awareness focuses on individual sounds that effect understanding (Hill, 2012, p. 134). An example of phoneme awareness would be the word cat sound it out as c/, a/ and t/ or the ch sound. Hill (2012, p. 134) states phonological

Emergent literacy is important because the literacy development begins earlier than formal schooling. Phonological awareness, letter names, and letter-sound knowledge are essential for beginning reading instruction. Phonemic awareness is a strong predictor of success in the first two years of schooling. Additionally, letter knowledge is the first step to learn the alphabetic principle and one of the most important early reading skills. Several studies investigated Visual Phonics with preschoolers and revealed significant improvements during these fundamental early years.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate the sounds in words orally (can be done in the dark; ORALLY). Words are made up of discrete set of sounds and it is important to be able to manipulate these sounds which is what phonemic awareness is. Sound isolation activities are good to help students gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can say a word and then have students identify the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of the word. Sound-blending are also helpful for students to gain phonemic awareness. Teachers can provide a clue and then sound out each sound in a word and the student then has to pronounce the word.

Thank you for joining me today to discuss your daughters recent assessment scores. We do Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills assessment or DIBELS 3 times per year. This information tells us where Suzie is in her reading skills and where we would like her to be. We gave her three very short assessment only consisting of 1-2 minutes each assessment. The three assessments that we gave her where Letter Naming Fluency or LNF for short, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF).

Each page in the books provided contained no more than two to five words total. Once the two readings were complete, the student would then participate for 30 minutes in various phonological awareness, letter name/sound, and sight-word practice and play activities. Once that was completed, at the end of the session the student and instructor would read a third book. At the end of the study, all students with room for improvement showed growth in letter name identification and letter sound identification. Results also showcased students developing the ability to identify as well as isolate initial sounds.

The typical attainment level in literacy are low in children with hearing loss in comparison with their typically hearing counterparts (Harris & Beech, 1998; Kuntz, Golos, & Enns, 2014; Golos & Moses, 2013; Leybaert, 1998; Salmon, 2014). Specific to the foundation of literacy skills, phonological awareness is the understanding that words are broken up into syllables (a beat of sound), that are broken up into further individual sounds; it is the understanding that these sounds are noticed, thought about, and can be manipulated, and is general awareness of phonemes (Kamhi & Catts, 2012). A typically hearing child associates sound with meaning and within various contexts, and a child with hearing loss only associates visually what letters and

Phonemic awareness instruction is part of the classroom’s typical everyday routine. It is required for preschoolers and kindergarteners to have certain skills acquired before moving on. Preschoolers are expected to be aware of individual phonemes and kindergarteners are expected to be able to break down a small word into phonemes. This benchmark must be obtained by these students and if they do not acquire these skills it will be found by the DIBELS test. When children do not meet the requirements they get put into tiers according to the level that they are at. This would mean that the child will still receive classroom instruction but they will also receive additional instruction. Treatment intensity for phonemic awareness has not been a

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:

According to the video Word Study, and Fluency, it was mentioned that one of the elements of phonemic awareness is using poems that rhyme. One of the teachers in the video was able to introduce a poem of the week and would have their students read the poem for the entire week. It was learned that the students read the poem for the whole week so that the students become familiar with the poem. Also, the repetition of the poem helped the students out a lot because they were able to remember some of the words from the poem. Another element that was covered in the video was the use of word study. Students were able to use the classroom as a resource especially a word web. The teacher would let the students look around the classroom and point to words on the web to help them say a sentence or word. This is very useful because it helps students to use words. Last another element that can help with phonemic awareness is when students are able to sort similar words and identify phonemic patterns. From the video it was shown how a teacher would write out a word and students would have to say the words that were similar to the word the teacher put on the paper. This helped students to look for rhyming words as well as unknown

Phonemic awareness instruction is generally taught from preschool to the first grade (Armbruster, 2009). By the fifth grade most students are expected to be fluent readers. The problem lies in that some students struggle with fluency and may have missed key components of phonemic awareness instruction at the primary school age. There are also an increased number of English Language Learners (ELL) who did not receive phonemic awareness instruction. While phonemic awareness instruction is not necessary for all students in the fifth grade, it should be a small part of the instruction for students who are struggling with fluency. A study by Ashby, Dix, Bonrager, Dey and Archer (2013) supports the teaching of phonemic awareness at higher grade levels to help increase fluency levels among struggling students. “…interventions that attempt to circumvent the development of phonological coding by sight word memorization are likely to produce inferior ling-term results for struggling readers” (p. 168). Phonemic awareness lessons would be done in a small group setting with