Phonological Awareness Strategies

Phonological awareness involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: (1) syllables, (2) onsets and rimes, and (3) phonemes.

Reading is an acquired skill, developed through explicit teaching and founded upon a child’s innate ability to hear and process sounds from birth. Beginning at birth exposure to oral language, gestures and the functions of communication (Fellows & Oakley, 2010 p.165) allows exploration of sounds and words and their connection to each other, and introduces cue systems that will later assist in decoding complex text as development of reading ability occurs. Cue systems including linguistic rules of speech, such as grammatical, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic structures (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 324), provide readers with strategies and knowledge for comprehension and phonological awareness (Gascoigne, 2005, p. 1). Rich language exchanges

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”

A Sound Beginning is an assessment of phonological awareness at four different levels: Word Level, Syllable Level, Onset-Rime Level, and Phoneme Level. Phonological awareness is the manipulation of sounds in spoken language and is an important building block for reading. The assessment is administered orally that would include the student tapping, deleting, segmenting, and blending different sounds. Felipe’s score for each level is as follows:

1. ELL students need to be familiar with the sounds of English before they can develop phonological awareness. 2. Instruction needs to be explicit, modifications made, and practice needs to be given when needed. 3. Once phonological awareness has developed in any language, then it can be transferred to other languages that are learned.  4. Teachers should frequently model the production of sounds. 5. Beginning readers should get help to learn to identify sounds in short words.

There are plenty of fun activities to do with children when trying to enhance their phonological awareness. Activities that involve using rhyming words, jingles, poems, and syllabus in particular can be very helpful when helping children enhance their phonological awareness.

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 chose to assess phonological awareness because it is a crucial component in children’s development of writing, spelling, and reading skills (Paul & Norbury, 2012). Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure or words; it can be characterized by words, syllables, onset/rime, phoneme manipulations, and the ability to rearrange these different levels into various patterns.

Ehri’s Phases of Word Reading and Spelling Development has four different phases that are used to describe the progressive stages of a reader. The first phase is the Pre-alphabetic phase, in this phase there is no letter to sound consciousness only visual features of a word which the students use as a reminder of how to read the words. Phase two is the Partial Alphabetic. When readers are in this phase they use some of the letters in the word (mainly the first and the last letters) to attempt to pronounce the word. Phase three is the Full Alphabetic Phase. In this phase the readers are now able to use and understand the alphabetic connections in words. The readers are now able to map graphemes to phonemes of words that have been read to them

Phonemic Awareness refers to the knowledge that spoken words can be broken apart into smaller segments of sound known as phonemes. We learned about two levels of PA, one is auditory-you can do this in the dark and the other is matching sounds to letters. Reading to children at home—especially material that rhymes—often develops the basis of phonemic awareness. Not reading to children will probably lead to the need to teach words that can be broken apart into smaller sounds. Correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge as the two best school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during their first 2 years in school. This evidence suggests the potential instructional importance of teaching PA to

The observation began with a review of what phonological awareness means. According to Chard, D.J. & Dickson, S.V. (2018), it is being aware of the fact that oral language is made up of many smaller units, such as words and syllables. In order to be successful at reading and writing language, an individual must develop skills in phonological awareness. Teaching students to rhyme is very important also because it is one of the ways students show that they have an awareness of phonological awareness. An example of rhyming is when a word is broken down by a single letter or combination of letter sounds such as the word chop would be broken into the onset: ch and rime: op. Students must

How did you learn to read? Most of us do not put much thought into this question, but learning to read is a difficult task. According to Cervetti and Hiebert, the National Reading Panel identified five essential components that a teacher should use during reading instruction, which gives the student the highest chance of being an effective reader (2015, p. 548). These five essential components are also called five pillars of reading instruction. They are Phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. This paper will describe each of the five pillars, how they are related, the benefits, as well as give some effective methods of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness. It will continue by addressing the relationship between reading assessment and instruction and end by identifying ways to address the needs and different learning styles of a student. This paper will start by looking at a definition of phonics and phonemic awareness, then move onto the role that each play in learning to read, how they are related, the benefits and effective methods of teaching both.

When phonological awareness is worked on skills of attention, perception and visual amplitude are developed that allow to acquire greater fluency for reading.

There are many components to building a student’s reading skill set. One skill that is introduced in preschool and developed through the primary grades is phonemic awareness. The term phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes – individual sounds. The child becomes aware of how sounds are connected to words prior to reading. This awareness creates the understanding of how phonemes explains how the smallest part of sound creates a difference in sound to the meaning of a word. Therefore, the ability to dismantle words, and reassemble them, and then to alter the word into something different explains the concept behind phonemic awareness. It is the primary foundation in which other reading skill sets are according based.

In order to develop a student’s phonological awareness I would use the following skills and activities to focus on: Sentence segmentation, syllable segmentation, followed by tither onset-rime blending as well as segmentation and finally working on phoneme segmentations themselves. The reason I focused on segmentation it that it teaches the student how to break apart words, as well as differentiate between syllables and phonemes.