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Learning to read begins well
before the first day of school. When Ronand Donna tell nursery rhymes to
their baby, Mia, they are beginning to teach Mia to read. They are helping
her to hear the similarities and differences in the sounds of words. She
will begin to manipulate and understand sounds in spoken language, and she
will practice this understanding by making up rhymes and new words of her
own. She will learn the names of the letters and she will learn the
different sounds each letter represents. As she gets a little older, Ron and
Donna will teach her to write letters and numbers that she will already
recognize by their shapes. Finally, she will associate the letters of the
alphabet with the sounds of the words she uses when she speaks. At this
point, she is on her way to learning to read!
When she tries to read books with her parents, at school, and on her own,
Mia will learn how to learn new words by sounding them out. With more
practice, she will begin to recognize familiar words easily and quickly, and
she will know the patterns of spelling that appear in words and the patterns
of words as they appear in sentences. She will be able to pay attention not
just to the letters and words, but to the meanings they represent.
Ultimately, Mia will be able to think about the meaning of the text as she
reads.
Where does phonological awareness fit into this process?
Key to the process of learning to read is Mia's ability to identify the
different sounds that make words and to associate these sounds with written
words. In order to learn to read, Mia must be aware of phonemes. A phoneme
is the smallest functional unit of sound. For example, the word cat contains
three distinctly different sounds. There are 44 phonemes in the English
language, including letter combinations such as /th/.
In addition to identifying these sounds, Mia must also be able to manipulate
them. Word play involving segmenting words into their constituent sounds,
rhyming words, and blending sounds to make words is also essential to the
reading process. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of
language is called phonological awareness.
Adams (1990) described five levels of phonological awareness ranging from an
awareness of rhyme to being able to switch or substitute the components in a
word. While phonological awareness affects early reading ability, the
ability to read also increases phonological awareness (Smith, Simmons, &
Kameenui, 1995).
Many children with learning disabilities have deficiencies in their ability
to process phonological information. Thus, they do not readily learn how to
relate letters of the alphabet to the sounds of language (Lyon, 1995). For
all students, the processes of phonological awareness, including phonemic
awareness, must be explicitly taught.
Children from culturally diverse backgrounds may have particular
difficulties with phonological awareness. Exposure to language at home,
exposure to reading at an early age, and dialect all affect the ability of
children to understand the phonological distinctions on which the English
language is built. Teachers must apply sensitive effort and use a variety of
techniques to help children learn these skills when standard English is not
spoken at home (Lyon, 1994).
How is phonological awareness taught?
To teach phonological awareness, begin by demonstrating the relationships of
parts to wholes. Then model and demonstrate how to segment short sentences
into individual words, showing how the sentence is made up of words. Use
chips or other manipulatives to represent the number of words in the
sentence. Once the students understand part-whole relationships at the
sentence level, move on to the word level, introducing multisyllable words
for segmentation into syllables. Finally, move to phoneme tasks by modeling
a specific sound and asking the students to produce that sound both in
isolation and in a variety of words and syllables.
It is best to begin with easier words and then move on to more difficult
ones. Five characteristics make a word easier or more difficult (Kameenui,
1995):
1. The size of the phonological unit (e.g., it is easier to break sentences
into words and words into syllables than to break syllables into phonemes).
2. The number of phonemes in the word (e.g., it is easier to break
phonemically short words such as no, see and cap than snort, sleep or
scrap).
3. Phoneme position in words (e.g., initial consonants are easier than final
consonants and middle consonants are most difficult).
4. Phonological properties of words (e.g., continuant such as /s/ and /m/
are easier than very brief sounds such as /t/).
5. Phonological awareness challenges. (e.g., rhyming and initial phoneme
identification are easier than blending and segmenting.)
Examples of phonological awareness tasks include phoneme deletion (\"What
word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?\"); Word to
word matching (\"Do pen and pipe begin with the same sound?\"); Blending
(\"What word would we have if we blended these sounds together: /m/ /o/
/p/?\"); phoneme segmentation (\"What sounds do you hear in the word
hot?\"); phoneme counting (\"How many sounds do you hear in the word
cake?\"); and rhyming (\"Tell me all of the words that you know that rhyme
with the word cat?\") (Stanovich, 1994).
Beginning readers require more direct instructional support from teachers in
the early stages of teaching. This is illustrated in the following example:
The teacher models the sound or the strategy for making the sound, and has
the children use the strategy to produce the sound. It is very important
that the teacher model the correct sounds. This is done using several
examples for each dimension and level of difficulty. The children are
prompted to use the strategy during guided practice and more difficult
examples are introduced. A sequence and schedule of opportunities for
children to apply and develop facility with sounds should be tailored to
each child\'s needs, and should be given top priority. Opportunities to
engage in phonological awareness activities should be plentiful, frequent,
and fun (Kameenui, 1995).
References
Adams, M.J. (1990) Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kameenui, E.J. (Winter, 1996). Shakespeare and beginning reading: The
readiness is all. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 27 (2).
Lyon, G. R. (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45,
3-27.
Lyon, G.R. (1994). Research In Learning Disabilities at the NICHD. Technical
document. Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, National Institutes of Health.
Smith, S.B., Simmons, D.C., & Kameenui, E.J. (February, 1995). Synthesis of
research on phonological awareness: Principles and implications for reading
acquisition. (Technical Report no. 21, National Center to Improve the Tools
of Education). Eugene: University of Oregon.
Stanovich, K.E. (1994). Romance and reality. The Reading Teacher, 47,
280-291.
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