|
|
"Classroom Implications" Implications for Instruction |
Children need opportunities to understand and manipulate the building blocks of spoken language. Children's ability to think about individual words as a sequence of sounds (phonemes) is important to their learning how to read an alphabetic language. Children's phonemic awareness, their understanding that spoken words can be divided into separate sounds, is one of the best predictors of their success in learning to read.
Griffith and Olson (1992) and Yopp (1995) recommend using read-aloud books to draw children’s attention to the sound structure of language. Many children’s books emphasize speech sounds through rhyme, alliteration, assonance, phoneme substitution, or segmentation and offer play with language as a dominant feature.
Yopp (1995) suggests that such books can be read and reread, their language can be enjoyed and explored in class discussions, predictions that focus on language can be encouraged, and additional verses or alternate texts can be created using the language patterns provided.
Children need opportunities to learn about and manipulate the building blocks of written language. Knowledge of letters (graphemes) leads to success with learning to read. This includes the use, purpose, and function of letters.
Children need opportunities to learn the relationships between the sounds of spoken language and the letters of written language. Increasing children's awareness of the sounds of spoken language and their familiarity with the letters of written language prepares them to understand the alphabetic principle - that written words are composed of patterns of letters that represent the sounds of spoken words. Effective instruction provides children with explicit and systematic teaching of sound-letter relationships in a sequence that permits the children to assimilate and apply what they are learning.
Children need opportunities to learn decoding strategies. Efficient decoding strategies permit readers to quickly and automatically translate the letters or spelling patterns of written words into speech sounds so that they can identify words and gain rapid access to their meanings. Children must learn to identify words quickly and effortlessly, so that they can focus on the meaning of what they are reading. It is important that children learn effective sounding-out strategies that will allow them to decode words they have never seen in print. Some strategies of decoding instruction focus primarily on the relationships between sounds and letters; others combine letter-sound practice with word families, with word parts (e.g. onsets and rimes), and with blending activities. More advanced decoding strategies focus on structural analysis, the identification of root words, and prefixes and suffixes. Instruction should introduce "irregular" words in a reasonable sequence and use these words in the program's reading materials.
Children need opportunities to practice accurate and fluent reading in decodable stories. The words in decodable stories do emphasize the sound-letter relationships the children are learning. While many predictable and patterned books provide children with engaging language and print experiences, these books may not be based on the sound-letter relationships the children are learning. Decodable stories provide children with the opportunity to practice what they are learning about letters and sounds.
Research-based criteria are used to select the instructional materials that provide the structure for the classroom reading program. These criteria establish the need for systematic and sufficient practice in a number of beginning reading aspects. These aspects include the following:
phonemic awareness: Children learn how to divide spoken words into individual sounds and to blend spoken sounds into words.
alphabetic knowledge: Children learn to recognize, name, and write letters.
alphabetic principle: Children learn that sounds can be represented by letters, and to recognize the most useful sound-letter relationships.
decoding strategies: Children learn blending and other decoding strategies that permit them to sound out new words and identify them quickly.
spelling and writing: Children write using their knowledge of printed letters and the sounds they represent. Because knowledge of letter-sound patterns contributes to reading success, spelling instruction is coordinated with the programs of reading instruction. Knowledge of and practice in correct spellings also contributes to more effective writing.
manageable, decodable text: Children read words, sentences, and stories that contain the sound-letter relationships they are learning, as well as some "sight" words. Because fluent reading is essential to comprehension, children should practice both oral and silent reading. Children should have easy access to an array of story books and other reading materials that they can read on their own and with others.
screening assessments: During kindergarten and first grade, every student is screened for phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge and understanding of basic language concepts.
Begin teaching phonemic awareness directing at an early age (kindergarten). Phonemic awareness can be taught with listening and oral reproduction tasks similar to those listed below. When concurrent instruction in sound-spelling relationships occurs, growth in the development of phonemic awareness seems to accelerate. Teachers should initiate instruction in phonemic awareness before beginning instruction in sound-spelling relationships and continue phonemic awareness activities while teaching the sound-spelling relationships.
There is little correlation between developmental stages and phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness and other important reading skills are learned and do not develop naturally.
Teach each sound-spelling correspondence explicitly. Explicit instruction means that a phoneme is isolated for the children. E.g. This letter says /mmm/. A brief practise of phonemes each day for about 5 minutes should precede these phonemes in context of words and stories.
Teach frequent, highly regular sound-spelling relationships systematically. (m, t, s, f, d, r, ch, g, l, h, c (k), b, n, k, v, p, w, j, y, z, kn, ph, qu, sh, th, and vowels and vowel combinations)
Show children exactly how to sound out words.
Use connected, decodable text for children to practice the sound-spelling relationships they learn. Children need extensive practice applying their knowledge of sound-spelling relationships to the task of reading as they are learning them. This integration of phonics and reading can only occur with the use of decodable text. Predictable text gives a motivating success, but children need to practice the sound-spellings they have learned as well.
Use interesting stories to develop language comprehension. Children benefit from stories that the teacher reads to them by building the children's oral language comprehension which ultimately affects their reading comprehension. These story-based activities should be structured to build comprehension skills, not decoding skills.
Balance, but don't mix. The comprehension instruction and the decoding instruction should be separate from each other while children are learning to decode, but both types of instructional activities should occur. In other words, comprehension and decoding instruction should be balanced.
A final guideline concerns the use of visual cues. Written words or letters may be used if appropriate. There is evidence that attaching the visual symbols to the oral stimulus results in greater gains in phonemic awareness in second semester kindergartners who knew the alphabetic letters (Hohn & Ehri, 1983). However, the activities presented here are intended to stimulate phonemic awareness in younger children as well. Since many preschoolers or beginning kindergartners will not have been exposed to the alphabet, the use of written letters may distract students from the intent of the activity. Teachers are encouraged to strictly use oral activities with these younger children. Hallie Kay Yopp, 1992
Phonemic awareness is strongly related to success in beginning reading and can be developed in children as early as their preschool years through a variety of stimulating language activities. These activities, however, are not intended to replace children’s interaction with meaningful language and print. Reading aloud, developing language experience charts, using big books, using predictable books, and the like are invaluable reading experiences. The activities presented here are intended to supplement such experiences and to provide a means of drawing children’s attention to a critical aspect of their language – its phonemic base. Teachers of young children should recognize the important role they can play in contributing to their students’ phonemic awareness by spending a few minutes daily engaging in oral activities that emphasize the sounds of language. Research suggests that such activities can maximize their students’ potential to have a successful experience learning to read. Hallie Kay Yopp, 1992.
| The
following recommendations regarding the use of phonemic awareness activities with young
children are based on current understanding of developmentally appropriate activities for
young children (NAEYC, 1986) The experiences should help develop positive feelings toward learning. There should be a sense of playfulness and fun as children engage in these phonemic awareness activities. The teacher should avoid drill and rote memorization activities. The activities should be conducted in group settings that encourage interaction among children. Children enjoy the social aspect of learning and often learn from one another. Language play is most appropriate in a social setting. The teacher should encourage children’s curiosity about language and their experimentation with it. Children’s attempts at manipulating language should be responded to positively and enthusiastically. The teacher should allow for and be prepared for individual differences. Research on phonemic awareness reveals tremendous variation among children. Some young children will catch on quickly to the activities; others will show an emerging understanding of the relationship between the sounds in the activities and their use in running speech; and still others will find the activities completely nonsensical but delightful. The teacher should avoid making rigid judgments about individual children based upon their ability to respond to these activities. These activities are not intended to serve as diagnostic tools, although they will provide information about your students. Make sure the tone of the activities is not evaluative but rather fun and informal.
|
Phonemic Awareness and the Teaching of Reading – a position statement from the International Reading Association
http://www.readingonline.org/critical/phonemic/phonemic.html
Instructional Priorities and Curriculum Design in Phonological Awareness
Conspicuous Strategies: are sequences of teaching events and teacher actions that make explicit the steps required to hear and manipulate the sounds. Research findings recommend that phonological awareness instruction be explicit. Firstly, phonemes are not easy to isolate because we seldom hear pure phonemes. Rather, phonemes are coarticulated (merged) and subject to distortion (like /duh/ instead of /d/) when produced orally and so detection of phonemes requires an artificial analysis rather than discrimination of a naturally perceived acoustical unit. Similarly, developmental work in phonological awareness suggests that detection of phonemes is neither natural nor acquired in the absence of instruction for many children. Secondly, in normal speech development, infants articulate single phonemes and small groups of phonemes. Over time, children learn to pay attention to meaning, not individual sounds. In contrast, reading acquisition involves moving from translating letters to sounds and combining those sounds to form meanings in the child's listening vocabulary. Features of conspicuous strategies includes direct teaching of phonological detection and manipulation (teacher modeling, student producing specific sounds).
Concrete representation: involves using a neutral object to stand for a sound, such as a blank tile. For example, cat would have three tiles, one standing for the /k/, another for the /a/, and the third for the /t/. Letter-sound correspondences are a type of concrete representation of sound - letters represent sounds via visual symbols. Incorporating letter-sound correspondence and phonological awareness activities facilitated students' understanding of the relation between sounds and written symbols.
Mediated scaffolding: is external support provided by the teacher, tasks, and materials during initial learning of sounds and strategies for consciously hearing an manipulating sounds. The amount and type of mediated scaffolding used is determined by the needs of individual students in relation to the task.
Task adjustment: focus on factors that contribute to difficulty (number of phonemes in a word - cat is easier than sand); size of a phonological unit (compound words are larger than phonemes); phoneme position in words (initial sounds are easiest, medial sounds the most difficult); phonological properties of words (continuants like /m/ are easier than stop sounds like /t/; and phonological awareness dimension (rhyme is easier than segmentation). When the instruction is scaffolded, the problematic aspect of reading is mediated and systematically lessened, meeting the needs of all learners and the specific needs of diverse learners. Two factors that often contribute to difficulty related to phonological awareness are the memory requirements of the task and the characteristics of phonological units.
Easiest to hardest the range of difficulty for dimensions of phonological awareness (Yopp, 1988) is as follows:
rhyme
auditory discrimination
phoneme blending
word-to-word matching
sound isolation
phoneme counting
phoneme segmentation
phoneme deletion
Materials scaffolding: puppets, stories, pictures, blank tiles, markers, alphabet letter tiles, and template cards with boxes for the sounds in words can be used to illustrate strategies and to help focus children's attention. A high degree of material scaffolding is the number of markers and squares in a template to equal the number of phonemes in a word to be segmented.
Teacher scaffolding: by modeling phoneme sound production; explicitly drawing attention to how the sound feels when it is being produced; modeling strategies for detecting, saying or moving phonemes; and verbally stressing the target phoneme.
Strategic integration: refers to the planful consideration and sequencing of phonologic and alphabetic tasks to promote reading acquisition. Strategic integration of letter-sound correspondence instruction with phonological awareness is necessary for beginning reading instruction. Such a combination helps children acquire alphabetic understanding and improves their phonological awareness better than phonological awareness instruction alone. In addition, researchers have found that the effectiveness of phonological awareness/letter-sound correspondence instruction is strengthened by integrating direct instruction in reading. (Cunningham, 1990; Snowling, 1991).
The following sequence derived from research characterizes the strategic integration of phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding and reading instruction (Ball & Blachman, 1990; O'Connor et al., 1993; Blachman, 1991; Bryne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989; Cunningham, 1990).
Begin with phonological awareness activities (e.g. teach detection and segmenting).
Use simple phonological units (e.g., 1 - 2 phonemes, continuants) and focus on initial sounds.
After student mastery of simple phonological awareness skills, introduce letter-sound correspondences for phonemes used in phonological awareness activities.
Increase the complexity of phonological units over time (e.g. 3 - 4 phonemes, stopsounds, final and medial sounds).
Apply knowledge and strategies gained in steps 1 - 4 to decode words. When students know sufficient numbers of letter-sound correspondences, begin reading instruction (i.e., blending and segmenting) concurrently with phonological awareness instruction. Design instruction by attending to interactions among continua of difficulty for each dimension and for each characteristic of each dimension. Continue with additional letter-sound correspondences.
Primed background knowledge includes relevant and essential language skills and strategies with sounds that optimize new learning of phonological awareness. A system for activating and linking previously learned skills to advanced application (e.g., from detection to segmentation) is critical for diverse learners.
Judicious review: refers to the sequence and schedule of opportunities provided children to apply and develop facility with sounds. The systematic progression from easy to more difficult features across the continua of phonological difficulty, implied practise and review.
Guided practice is a type of scaffolding that includes a varying amount of assistance.
Daily review links previous to current lessons, thereby helping to prime background knowledge and skills. A carefully planned system of review interwoven with the presentation of new material enhances the development of automaticity, or fluency, that enables short-term memory to process increasing amounts of information.
Conclusions: For diverse learners, early identification of phonological awareness deficits combined with early intervention is pivotal in ensuring success in learning to read. Scaffolding makes a significant difference in student outcomes, particularly for diverse learners. If all materials and tasks are scaffolded, all strategies necessary for reading acquisition are strategically integrated and given sufficient judicious review, diverse learners would learn to read with greater likelihood of success.
Note: The above section came from the article Phonological Awareness: Curricular and Instructional Implications for Diverse Learners: Review of Converging Evidence (Smith, Simmons, Kameenui from University of Oregon). This document was prepared by the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators.
