Early Reading Skills: Teaching Phonemic Awareness

1. Early Reading Skills: Teaching Phonemic Awareness Brandy Clarke CBC 2002

2. The Need for Early Reading Interventions • Poor reading ability correlates with long-term negative outcomes. • Reading is the cornerstone of academic success. • Students with poor reading skills in the beginning are likely to have poor skills in the future.

3. Learning in Steps • Research has demonstrated a need for children to learn to recognize words with speed and accuracy to read with fluency and comprehension. • Progression of learning: • Understanding the concept of words • Alphabetic Awareness • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Word Recognition • Fluency • Comprehension

4. What is Phonemic Awareness? • Phonemic awareness is an understanding that speech is composed of individual sounds. • It is part of the hierarchy of reading skills developed in early reading. • It is not a unitary skill, but is comprised of various components.

5. Five levels of Phonemic Awareness (Adams,1990). • Appreciation of sound in spoken language (recitation of nursery rhymes). • Ability to compare and contrast sounds in words by grouping words with similar or dissimilar sounds (beginning, middle, and end of words). • Ability to blend and split syllables. • Phonemic segmentation or the ability to isolate individual sounds in syllables. • Ability to manipulate phonemes by omitting and deleting phonemes to make new words.

6. Why is it important? • It is necessary in learning to read and spell the English language because English is alphabetic. • Sounds correlate with letters to make words. • Research has demonstrated a strong link between phonemic awareness and beginning reading.

7. Why Phonemic Awareness over Whole-language? • The Whole-language approach • Focuses on teaching reading by immersing students in literature while providing minimal direct skill instruction. • Provides students with ample opportunities to read and write and provides guidance as needed. • Students learn to read through whole-word recognition which creates a guessing game when presented with new words. • Students taught with phonics instruction read 54% of new words correctly, students with whole-language read 3%. • However, balance is necessary.

8. What skills are taught? • Early Reading Skills (Good III, Simmons & Smith, 1998) • Area 1: Phonological Awareness • Awareness of correlation of sounds to words • Area 2: Alphabetic Understanding • Link between a letter and a sound • Area 3: Phonological Recoding • Use of relationship between phonemes and letters to recognize printed words, then read and spell them • Area 4: Accuracy and Fluency with Connected Text • Comprehending what is read

9. How to assess skills • Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), University of Oregon • Dynamic: continuing evaluation of skills • Indicators: representative and correlated with important skill areas • Predictive: future reading performance • Functional: related to reading aquisition

10. DIBELS Assessments: • Target age range: Preschool – Second grade • Onset Recognition Fluency • Late preschool through winter of kindergarten • Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low phonological awareness • Letter Naming Fluency • Fall of kindergarten through fall of first grade • Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low skills in letter naming

11. DIBELS Assessments cont.: • Phoneme Segmentation Fluency • Winter of kindergarten through fall of first grade • Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low phonological awareness • Nonsense Word Fluency • Fall of first grade through summer of first grade • Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low skills in letter-sound correspondence

12. How to teach Phonemic Awareness • 5 Features of effective interventions (Good III et.al., 1998) • Provide instruction at the phoneme level. • Scaffold tasks and examples. • Model skills prior to practice and provide opportunities for students to produce isolated sounds orally. • Provide systematic and strategic instruction for identifying sounds in words, blending and segmenting, and culminate with integration of phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondence instruction. • Use concrete materials to represent sounds .

13. Modeling activities • Teaching vs. practice • The importance of scope and sequence: • Larger units before smaller units (words before syllables) • Continuous before stop sounds (cont.: f, l, m, n, stop: b, c, d, g) • Fewer sounds before more sounds (VC or CV before CVC) • Auditory blending before segmenting (e.g. foooot-baaaall vs. mmm-aaaaa-t) • Blending and segmenting before manipulation (e.g. removing sounds to make new words) • Oral before written language

14. Phonemic Teaching Methods • Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum.(Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998) • The use of language games • Play regularly (15-20 min) • Go in order of sequence • Use both segmenting (analysis) and blending (synthesis) activities • Child should feel as though s/he is playing while learning • Consistently pronounce words slowly and clearly

15. The Language Games: • Listening game: Listening to Sounds • Rhyming: Poetry, Songs, and Jingles • Words and Sentences: Introducing the Idea of sentences • Awareness of Syllables: Clapping Names • Initial and Final Sounds: Guess Who • Phonemes: Two-Sound Words • Introducing Letters and Spellings: Guess Who: Introducing Sounds and Letters

16. Reading Intervention Program • Reading Recovery Program • Goal: Help struggling students catch up to peers • Requires a lot of teacher monitoring (1:1) • Daily sessions last 30-40 minutes per session and run 10-20 weeks

17. Reading Recovery Program Strategies • Reading left to right • Using a return sweep rather than a slow return • Monitoring whether story makes sense • Searching for cues from context • Rereading when unclear • Self-correction

18. Important Resources • http://dibels.uoregon.edu/ • Provides explanation of DIBELS research and application • http://reading.uroegon.edu/ • Big Ideas in Beginning Reading • http://www.nifl.gov • National Institute for Literacy • National Reading Panel Update

19. Application for CBC • It is important to understand what is needed to promote early reading skills so that problems can be identified and treated before negative trajectory is established. • Assessment techniques allow for problem areas to be targeted and monitored throughout interventions. • Teaching techniques can be used across settings to facilitate partnerships in learning. • Consultants can provide consultees with further resources to provide guidance throughout reading development.

20. References Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adams, M.J., Foorman, B.R., Lundberg, I, & Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A classroom curriculum. Baltimore, MD : Paul H. Brooks Publishing Co. Good III, R. H. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) with CBM. Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth and Development. Eugene, OR. Good III, R. H., Simmons, D. C., & Smith, S. B. (1998). Effective academic intervention in the United States: Evaluating and enhancing the acquistion of early reading skills. School Psychology Review. Vol 27, No. 1, pp 45-56.

21. References cont. Grossen, B. & Carnine, D. (1991).Strategies for maximizing reading success in the regular classroom. In Stoner, G., Shinn, M. R., & Walker, H. M. (Eds) Interventions for achievement and behavior problems. Silver Spring, MD: NASP Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Snider, V. E. (1995). A primer on phonemic awareness: What is it, why it’s important, and how to teach it. School Psychology Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, 443-455.