Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

1. Phonological and Phonemic Awareness EDC424 Dr. Deeney

2. Phonemic Awareness Note: A letter(s) in between slash marks means the sound that the letter makes. /m/ = “mmmmmm” Terminology: • Phoneme – the smallest unit of sound in a language. The word “cat” has three phonemes, /c/-/a/-/t/. • Grapheme – the written representation of a phoneme. A grapheme could be one letter (e.g. m) or more than one letter (e.g. igh). • Onset: The sound(s) that come(s) before a vowel in a syllable. In the word “cat,” /c/ is the onset. • Rime: The vowel and any sound that come after it in a syllable. In the word “cat,” /at/ is the rime.

3. Do You Speak Ubbie Dubbie?

4. What is Phonemic Awareness? • The ability to attend to, identify, and mentally manipulate the individual phonemes (sounds) in spoken words and syllables.

5. Phonological awareness • Phonemic awareness • Are they the same thing??

6. “Phunnel-ogical Awareness”Moving down the phunnel • Puzzle in pairs

7. Word, Rhyme, & Syllable Awareness Initial consonant sounds Alliteration Segmenting onset/rime Phoneme segmentation, blending, manipulation

8. Developmental Levels of Phonological Awareness Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3

9. Phonological Awareness The understanding that the stream of speech can be divided into smaller segments (words, syllables, onset/rime, phonemes) Phonemic Awareness A subset of phonological awareness; the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes) and the ability to manipulate these sounds (matching, segmenting, blending, changing) Phonological vs. Phonemic Awareness

10. Why is Phonemic Awareness Important? • One of two best predictors (the other predictor is letter knowledge) of how well children will learn to read during the first two years (Share, Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984) • Level of PA in kindergarten and Grade 1 correlates with reading ability in Grade 4 - poor PA ~ poor reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Juel, 1988)

11. Robust Correlational Research • “Faced with an alphabetic script, the child’s level of phonemic awareness on entering school may be the single most powerful determinant of the success she or he will experience in learning to read and of the likelihood that she or he will fail” (Adams, 1991, p. 305)

12. Why is Phonemic Awareness hard?The Pledge of Allegiance • Oral language is based on meaning • Child must shift attention from the meanings of words to the sounds in words • Although young children have implicit understanding of phoneme distinctions (e.g. wet/went), they now need to develop conscious versus implicit knowledge • Development of metalinguistic awareness • thinking about language structure

13. Assess your phonemic awareness How many phonemes?

14. Assessing Phonemic Awareness • Rhyme • Recognition (“Do these words rhyme?”) • Generation (“What rhymes with ball?”) • Beginning sound matching • “Which word starts like ball: sat, big, can?” • Blending phonemes • “What word do these sounds make: /i/-/t/?” • Segmenting phonemes • “Tell me all the sounds in the word cat”? • Phoneme deletion • “Say ball without saying /b/.”

15. Can We Teach PA? • Young children can be made more phonologically aware prior to typical formal reading instruction (Olofsson & Lundberg, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993) • Training in PA has a positive effect on reading and spelling (Ball & Blachman, 1984; Bradley & Bryant, 1984; Cunningham, 1990; Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988; Treiman & Baron, 1983; Williams, 1980)

16. Kindergarten Teachers Make a Difference!! • Structured PA instruction provided by kindergarten teachers in inner-city classrooms • Small groups (4-5 students per group) • 15-20 minutes per day, 4 days per week • 11 weeks (41 lessons total) • PA trained children outperformed control children on tasks of • phonemic awareness • letter sounds • word reading • non-word reading (Blachman, Ball, Black, & Tangel, 1994)

17. Say-it-and-move-it