Introduction
We are now getting to the section of the class that focuses on what to teach and how to teach. This week we will focus on phonological skills with a special emphasis on phonemic awareness. We will also briefly look at the alphabetic principle.
Phonological awareness is related to the sounds in spoken language. It is an umbrella term that includes: words awareness and memory; syllable counting and manipulating, rhyme recognition, word pronunciation, onset and rime (bl- ack), alliteration (Sally sells seashells…) and phonemic awareness. The above picture captures the developmental levels of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is important to learning to read. Children who are better at manipulating syllables, rhymes, phonemes are quicker at learning to read. Furthermore, a significant number of children (15 to 20%) do not learn to read successfully unless they receive direct instruction in phonological awareness. At any age, poor readers can show weak PA skills, word recognition skills and accuracy. The most important phonological skill is phoneme awareness.
Helping students with PA deficits
There are a few ways we can scaffold PA activities. We can add multisensory cues such as visual or spatial cues to the oral exercises (e.g. the Elkonin boxes seen in the chapter or blocks to represent each sound/syllable). We can also use tapping motions as we say the sounds. We can emphasize the sound through stretching the sound (ffff) or, when the sound doesn’t stretch, repeating the sound that you want students to notice /t/ /t/ /tap/). These scaffolds make it easier for the learner. However, it is important, that we take those scaffolds away once the students are able to do it without help Our ultimate goal is they can do the task orally.. Another way we can help students is working on skills at their developmental level. For instance, if a child is not able to fully segment a word, perhaps we work on isolating the first sound in a word. Your book will do a great job presenting various activities at different developmental levels.
Relationship between PA and other reading skills
While we already saw how phonemic awareness was connected to decoding in our Shaywitz “dyslexia” article, it is related to other skill areas as well. Sight word reading is also dependent on the phoneme (sound) grapheme (symbol) connection. In order to read words automatically our brain makes a connect forming process between the sound, letters and meaning. Thus those who are still developing their phonemic awareness skills will have trouble decoding unknown words and place words in an automatic sight word bank in their brain. Spelling at the earliest levels requires a phoneme grapheme connection – you have to hear a word and break it into its known phoneme grapheme patterns; we will see how it connects at higher levels in our spelling unit as well. Vocabulary is about gaining an understanding to the word’s meaning and it’s phonological representation. For instance escalator and elevator. The words have subtle phoneme-grapheme distinction and your brain needs to be able to know the distinction to connect to the correct meaning. Fluency is the reading of letters, words, and text with that automaticity and accuracy. Being able to quickly connect the phoneme and grapheme is required to read fluently. And of course, the simple view of reading has taught us that comprehension is built on both language comprehension and word recognition (which implies a need for phonology).
Are PA activities just for little kids?
No! Phonemes difficulties affects reading at any age. Once students understand that a word breaks down into its sound we want to provide activities that integrate letters with phonemic awareness. Chapter three – the alphabetic principle – provide a nice example of how to integrate letters with your PA practice. You will see more about this in the generalist materials.
Further, phonological awareness not only impacts basic decoding but other areas such as sight words as we stated above. Kilpatrick (2015) meta-analysis of programs states that ‘treatment resistors’ often has extreme phonological deficits and struggle in programs who do not go beyond segmenting and blending. They need to be able to manipulate phoneme- add a phoneme, delete a phoneme, substitute phonemes. Kilpatrick states: “The highly successful category of studies strongly suggests that training advanced phonological awareness skills was instrumental in the large word level reading gains those students made. These studies collectively resulted in an average of approximately 1 standard deviation of progress…In some of these studies, older students made more reading progress than the younger students” (p.313). While many students develop this phonological manipulation in a reciprocal fashion with their reading, this doesn’t naturally occur for those with weaker phonological abilities. Kilpatrick’s discussion of phonological manipulation still needs a strong research based behind it but the theory is one worth delving into. For those who teach older kids, please pay special attention to the discussion of both phonological manipulation in this unit and the role of letters within our instruction of phonemic awareness.
How much time to spend on PA activties?
PA activities are meant to be brief some times they are 10 -15 minutes of a lesson every day generally focusing on one or two activities in that small time. This is a general rule of thumb. ECSE teachers add in PA throughout the day because it is so important at that age. Our generalist teachers can do this to by adding in games to line up at the door (e.g. If I say your name in a funny way you can line up at the door /m/ pause /i/ pause /k/ pause or for older student we can greet them as they walk in the door with Pig Latin “ello-hay ike-may”.) Some programs add less than 10 minutes a day into the instructional routine. (This shorten time maybe more appropriate for those providing tier 2 or tier 3 instruction for only 30-40 minutes a day.) The Equipped for Reading Success program provides more advanced manipulation drills (see programs section of this unit) which are 1 minute drills. You can add 2 one minute drills at the beginning of the lesson and 2 minute drills at the end of the lesson.
Controversies around PA
Is it necessary to teach lower levels of phonological sensitivity before teaching phoneme awareness?
- The five levels of phonological awareness in the image at the top of this page are often considered a developmental sequence, where children begin with the least complex level and move to the most complex level. As a result, many PA programs teach the skills in that order. However, there is growing evidence that students do not need to master easier skills before receiving instruction in phonemic awareness. For example, in a study in Portugal, kindergarteners who were taught to blend/segment syllables could not blend/segment phonemes. However, students who were taught to blend/segment phonemes could also blend/segment syllables. Programs like “Road to the Code” and “LiPS” focus exclusively on phonemic awareness (even with kindergarteners), and have been shown to be very effective in increasing students’ PA. This suggests that students do not need to show mastery of one level before moving on to a more complex level.
You can find more in this article: Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf Download Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf
Module information
Readings: O’Connor: Chapter 2 (Phonemic Awareness) & Chapter 3 (Alphabetic Principle). These chapters provide activities to advance students’ phonemic awareness (chapter 2) and their ability to understand that specific sounds (phonemes) are connected to specific letter or letter patterns (graphemes)(chapter 3).
In addition to the chapters, there are a lot of resources that I would like you to check out. Then you will have a chance to complete a unit activity based on these resources. If your focus happens to be students with significant intellectual disabilities, you might choose to look at ELSB in the programs section. You will notice several different phonological skills within this curriculum.
After you finish these activities, there will be a unit activity to complete. You can view that here –> Unit Activity 1
Finally, I want to draw your attention to the lesson plan that is due in a few weeks. Ideally this would be taught. If you have the ability to teach it (possibly online or to your own children) please do. However, if you can’t teach it to someone please communicate with me as soon as possible. –>Lesson Plan 1 Rubric
References
Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing and overcoming reading difficulties. Danvers, MA: Wiley Publications.
Are you ready to teach PA?
Teachers need to know the difference between the sounds in a word and the letters in the word. Sounds simple, right? It’s not as simple as you would think. To find out if you are ready to teach PA, please watch the narrated PowerPoint that I created with my colleague, Dr. Jackie Davis. If you have questions about the questions please let me know on the “HAVE QUESTIONS?” discussion board.
You can also download the slides or watch the video with closed captions (Links to an external site.).
eacher Knowledge: Why do students have trouble discriminating between sounds?
PA and visual input
There are 44 sounds in the English Language. That’s a lot of sounds, and many sounds can be easily confused if you have phonological difficulties. As a teacher, you need to be aware of what sounds are similar in the production of the sound and how you can help students with sounds they confuse. The video below (with closed captioning available) suggests one way to help students with phoneme difficulties is to feel/ see how your mouth moves when making specific sounds.
PA in the English language
Please see the PowerPoint below discussing how we articulate the sounds and how we can use this as a tool in the classroom.
As you watch the video, please fill in these guided notes Download these guided notes. (Note that king, feather, treasure, and fox do not have the target sounds at the beginning of the words.) The notes will help you complete the unit activity. We will later discuss how you can use these resources directly with students.
You can also download the slides or watch the video with closed captions (Links to an external site.).
Optional: Sample Lesson for Building A Sound Wall
In the PowerPoint on the 44 sounds, you saw samples of pre-built sound walls. These are examples of teaching students to be aware of the sounds in your mouth and how they feel and are made to enhance students’ phonemic awareness abilities but because they also connect the sound to print they get at the alphabetic principle.
Here is a sample lesson from one of my previous students on building her own sound wall with students. I have modified it a little. This is not the first sound she was teaching – instead I think it was the 4-5th sound. I feel it gives you a good example of how you can build your own sound wall if you choose.
Your guided notes Download guided notesfrom this module can provide a starting point to build your own sound wall. We will expand on this further in the next module, which covers phonics.
Generalist Materials
While chapter 2 of O’Connor focused on pure phonemic awareness when students are able to understand a word can be broken up into its sounds it can be important integrate letters within your work. This will help students understand the alphabetic principle (see chapter 3). One important point I want to make is that you are “integrating” letters. This is really well explained within O’Connor chapter 3. If you look at pages 45-50. You will see how they teach a variety of phoneme awareness activities (isolating a sound to fully segmenting a word) followed by instruction using the corresponding letters for each sound. O’Connor provides several studies showing how the combination of the two can have a powerful effect on learning. When using letters, make sure you are not just mimicking phonemic awareness activities but are actually integrating. Tapping out sounds before identifying the letter combination. Ask students to isolate a sound before adding the letter are all ways of integrating phonemic awareness with your letter-sound knowledge.
Furthermore, I want to go beyond thinking about simply blending and segmenting phonemic awareness activities to manipulation tasks. Below I have listed 3 webinars. I would like you to watch the last webinar. This webinar gives strong reasons why we need to move beyond simply segmenting and blending phoneme activities. It argues that some struggling readers need to be taught to manipulate phonemes. This idea at this point is based what we know the brain does to store sight words (orthographic mapping) and still needs to be researched in an in-depth manner. In the last few months there have been several arguments on the issue. Kilpatrick is not saying all students need this level of work rather than some people. In addition, he and others still believe a research based still need to be built to support the need for these manipulation tasks. You can read more here–> https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/rip-to-advanced-phonemic-awareness#sthash.0RGJVHPr.dpbs (Links to an external site.)
There are 3 webinars that you can access on this link https://www.95percentgroup.com/kilpatrick-webinars
Webinar 1. Rethinking Phonological Awareness. (optional)
Webinar 2. Orthographic mapping (optional)
Webinar 3. PA for older students (Please watch)
The link below gives you more information on advance phoneme substitution and a screener for more advanced phoneme manipulation tasks. –>https://www.95percentgroup.com/blog/details/95percentgroup.com/blog/details/mastering-phoneme-substitution (Links to an external site.)Links to an external s
Kilpatrick’s PAST Screener was mentioned in the PowerPoint above. It was listed in the assessment unit. For those who are interested, here it is again. –>https://www.thepasttest.com/ (Links to an external site.)
Please Explore 1 Additional Resources-
| Explanation of Resource-Please Read | Resource |
| Resource 1 Here’s a good example of how to teach oral phoneme manipulation. This is a deletion task. While we want the student to be able to eventually do this fairly quickly (under 3 seconds) and orally without the visual. The visual can be used to support the student at first. Dr. Kilpatrick suggest one minute drills where the student eventually has to complete these manipulation tasks all orally be supplemented to your curriculum if they are not already part of the program. (closed captioning available) | |
| Resource 2 Phoneme segmenting and blending are critical tasks for younger students and even older students who haven’t mastered these skills. These were discussed in O’Connor. Here is visual of segmenting and then connecting it to letter. As you can see in webinar 3, It is very important that once we introduce letters we still keep the phonemic awareness piece. While the National Reading Panel says to connect to letters they mean that it shouldn’t be an isolated skill all the time. If the teacher simply says replace the letter that makes the /s/ sound in sun with a /b/ sound you don’t actually need phonemic awareness to complete this activity. Thus the orthographic mapping activity in the webinar and in this video here provide the a way to integrate both phonemic awareness and phonics in the spirit of the National Reading Panel’s actual message. You will see other programs having students tap the sounds before they spell. Again, this is in the spirit of the National Reading Panel. Just replacing a letter and knowing the sound of that letter is not the same thing | Click here for closed captioning (Links to an external site.) |
| Resource 3 REWARDS Program – Close Approximation -Dealing with the schwa sound in multisyllabic words. In multisyllable words there is usually at least one vowel sound that is schwa’d or doesn’t say the sound it is supposed to say (for instance we don’t say soda with a long “a’ sound but with a schwa /u/). Therefore, students need to be able to think flexibly about the sounds in the word. This a an exercise found within the Rewards program. I think this brief PA activity can be used with all students when they get to reading multisyllabic words. It only takes a few minutes to add it to the beginning of your lesson. | REWARDS Correcting Close Approximation Download REWARDS Correcting Close Approximation |
| Resource 4 While phonological awareness skills transfer from one language to another, ELLs may have difficulty with specific sounds that are not in their language. This link talks about some of the phoneme differences between Spanish and English. So what are some tips when teaching ELL students? (1) Accept oral approximations. Students often borrow the closest sound from their native language when pronouncing words in English. For example, many Spanish speaking students substitute the /ch/ for /sh/ sound in words like shoe. Talk about differences between the languages. (2) Focus on words students already know. Teach phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle in a meaningful context when working with English language learners. (3) Continue instruction even though a student may struggle with pronunciation. This does not indicate a lack of understanding. Frequently monitor understanding through alternative responses like matching or pointing to a picture. | Teacher Knowledge: English Language Learners and PA (Links to an external site.) |
| Resource 5 How do I do this online? Here are some resources from the University of Florida on online lessons. (The first 13 minutes of the video is PA work before the decoding lesson.) The other links are some of their PPT you can use for the online lessons. (Closed captioning available) | Click here for Sample PA Virtual Activities (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.) |
Programs
Sample Reading Programs that include PA
These are some sample programs that either focus only on phonemic awareness or where phonemic awareness is a part of the program. Pick one or two to look at.
| Program Description | Program Samples |
| 1. The Early Literacy Skills Builder is a research based program based of the National Reading Panel’s work plus evidence based practices for students with significant support needs. Unlike many programs for students with significant support needs, this program embeds phonemic awareness and phonics within its program. Click on the attached document. Go to page 8 to see the phonological skills embedded in the program. Then look at the scope and sequence starting on page 11. You can see that objectives 6, 12 include several PA activities (such as matching pictures with the same first and last sound/segmenting a word into sounds) and also some alphabetic principle ideas (Please note – There is also an ELBS for older students.) | Early Literacy Skill Builders (For students with Significant Support Needs) http://donjohnston.com/wp-content/downloads/extras/elsb_product_brochure.pdf (Links to an external site.) |
| 2. This is often praised as a good supplement for young children.. Please look under the tab excerpt to find more about what it includes. | Phonemic Awareness in Young Children- http://products.brookespublishing.com/Phonemic-Awareness-in-Young-Children-P317.aspx (Links to an external site.) |
| 3. This is often praised supplemental phonological awareness program for struggling Kindergarten and first graders. Review the tab “excerpts’ to see some of the lesson activities. | Road to the Code- http://products.brookespublishing.com/Road-to-the-Code-P322.aspx (Links to an external site.) |
| 4. SIPPS (Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics and Sight Words) k-3. This is a video of a lesson from SIPPS and it has a variety of skills within the video. I would just like you to look at the phonological skills. From second 51 to 1 minute 50 seconds you will see oral blending and segmenting of words. This is a purely phonological skill because no letters are involved in this activity. (Closed captioning is available.) | SIPPS Sample lesson SIPPS Beginning lesson 15 (Links to an external site.) |
| 5. Lindamood Bell introduces a systematic process that introduces two (sometimes three) sounds at time. These sounds are always very similar and –because of the similarity– students often mistakenly use one instead of the other. Lindamood Bell uses the similarity to their advantage by specifically addressing how the sounds are alike and different. They use the concepts of “brothers” and “cousins” to help with this. For instance, brothers are alike in some ways but not in other ways. As we discover the brother sounds, we find out they are alike because your mouth moves the same way for each sound but one is voiced (noisy) and one is quiet (unvoiced). This helps helps students discriminate between sounds in a multi-sensory way (talking about the sound, hearing the sound, feeling your mouth sounds, and looking at the sound picture). The cousins are not as alike in as the brothers are but share some of the same characteristics. In the attachment in this folder, you are introduced to the /m/ /n/ and /ng/ sounds…these are called nose sounds because the noise goes through your nose but the position of your tongue is very different in all of these sounds. This folder contains ‘scripts’ extracted from a Lindamood Bell book. This is to help you see the dialogue that goes on and the discovery of the sounds and the related mouth movements. Reminder: This is just one aspect of the program. | LiPS- Intense PA Program Discovering the brothers.doc Download Discovering the brothers.doc Introducing the cousins LiPS.doc Download Introducing the cousins LiPS.doc Mouth Pictures Key 9-13-07.pdf Download Mouth Pictures Key 9-13-07.pdf Website https://lindamoodbell.com/our-approach-for-schools#OurPrograms (Links to an external site.) |
| 6. This book provides one minute oral manipulation tasks to go along with Kilpatrick’s theory. There aren’t any “excerpts” but the activities are similar to the manipulation tasks on the phonemic awareness screener on the generalist page. They are provided at various levels. An easier one minute drill would focus on syllables “Say November without /er/” and more advanced would focus on phonemes “Say slip without the /l/.” These are deletions but the tasks also include substitutions and additions. | Equipped For Reading Success –http://equippedforreadingsuccess.com/ (Links to an external site.) |
