There is a new consensus arising from the research that calls for a balanced approach for literacy learning.  This means that we need to find methods to teach the skills of phonics within a context of a print-rich environment in ways that are functional and meaningful. Using literature (stories, rhymes, chants, songs) helps children make associations to concepts, to realize that particular subsets of language are contained in other contexts, to assist in integration and extension of their learning. We can use the quality literature, text, and rhymes from our classrooms, choose topics of interest to the children, support oral expression and interactive, constructive dialogue for a solid integrated framework for the development of phonemic awareness.

Research has demonstrated not only a predictive relationship between phoneme awareness and reading success, but also a causal relationship. Phoneme awareness that has a positive impact on reading can be developed in children through systematic instruction in K-2 classes. Early training in phoneme awareness should be a priority for those interested in improving early reading instruction and in reducing reading failure.

Teachers should be supported in their efforts to incorporate phoneme awareness activities into classrooms. These activities are not intended to replace children's interactions with meaningful language and print, but to be incorporated into classrooms as part of a language-rich environment. Reading aloud, using big books and predictable books, developing language experience charts, and using other language-oriented practices give children valuable reading experiences. By supplementing these experiences with related phoneme awareness activities, educator's can draw children's attention to a critical aspect of their language - its phonemic base. It takes only a few minutes a day to integrate activities that emphasize the sounds of the language into the rich, oral language environments that we are creating for our children. These few minutes can result in a lifetime of reading benefits to children who otherwise might not learn to read.

Review of Phonemic Skills

The English alphabet is a sound/symbols system made up of twenty-six letters which are used singly and in set combinations to write the 45 sounds of English speech. To decode accurately, first, one needs to be aware of the individual sound bytes in each word which will make up the words and sentences we want to read. True literacy involves much more than merely reading; we need to equip our students to think, write, spell and to express themselves orally and on paper which helps them to clarify their own thinking. For this, phonemic awareness must be accompanied by graphemic awareness.

Early primary-level instruction includes the teaching the shapes and sounds of the first 26 letters; the two sounds for c, g, and s; three sounds for a, o, u; three sounds for y; and two sounds for e and i.

Primary students normally continue to learn the 13 additional sounds (phonemes) which are depicted in print with 2 or 3 letter patterns (er, ir, ur, wor, ear, sh, ee, th, ay/ai, ow/ou, aw/au, er/ui, oy/oi, oo, ch, ng, ea, ar, ck, ed, or wh, oa). These phoneme/grapheme units which are called "phonograms" need to be recorded and words collected as encountered in print. The sound needs to be stressed to help children become more aware of it. The remaining 16 graphemes are "ey, eigh, ei,igh, ie,kn, gn, wr, ph, dge, oe, tch, ti, si, ci, ough".

All of the 2, 3, and 4 letter phonograms fall into two categories: they change sounds completely by having been combined (a and u or au), or the sound they depict is normally spelled with only one letter (igh/i, gn/n, wr/r). There are a total of 70 phonograms (graphemes) with 110 combinations of sounds (phonemes).

Techniques that target phoneme awareness most frequently involve direct instruction in segmenting words into component sounds, identifying sounds in various positions in words (initial, medial, final), identifying words that begin or end with the same sound, and manipulating sounds in a word such as saying a word without its beginning or end sound. Systematic instruction needs to be skillfully implemented by the integration of phoneme awareness activities in meaningful contexts and in conjunction with the reading approach being used in the classroom.

Specific words targeted for phoneme awareness should be selected from material used in the class, such as a story or picture book that was just read and discussed, the immediate environment, words fitting a thematic unit being taught, or discussions about a field trip. Phoneme awareness activities work well in classrooms where teachers implement shared reading. Phoneme awareness activities are a natural extension of the shared reading activities.

Teachers need to be aware of the developmental requirements of phoneme awareness activities. For example, when teaching children to partition words into parts, segmenting a compound word into two parts ("What two words do you hear in cowboy?") precedes segmenting syllables and sounds. Similarly, identification tasks (Which one doesn't rhyme - cat, hat, sun?) are generally easier than production tasks ("Tell me the first sound in car.") The difficulty level of most activities can be manipulated by changing the input or response modes. For example, "Find the picture that starts with /r/" will be easier than "What sounds do you hear in robe?"

Instructional Guidelines for Planning Phoneme Awareness Activities

(Also, check Strategies Section for more specific classroom ideas.)

1. Identify the precise phoneme awareness task on which you wish to focus and select developmentally appropriate activities for engaging children in the task. Activities should be fun and exciting - "play" with sounds, don't "drill" them.

2. Be sure to use phoneme sounds (represented by //) and not by letter names when doing the activities. Likewise, remember that one sound may be represented by two or more letters. There are only three sounds in the word cheese: /ch/ - /ee/ - /z/. You may want to target specific sounds /words at first and "practice" beforehand until you are comfortable making them.

3. Continuant sounds (e.g. /m/, /s/, /l/) are easier to manipulate and hear than stop consonants (e.g. /t/, /q/, /p/). When introducing continuants, exaggerate them by holding on to them: rrrrrrrrring; for stop consonants, use iteration (rapid repetition): /k/-/k/-/k/-/k/atie.

4. When identifying sounds in different positions, the initial position is easiest, followed by the final position, with the medial position being most difficult (e.g. top, pot, Setter).

5. When identifying or combining sound sequences, a CV (consonant-vowel) pattern should be used before a VC (vowel-consonant) pattern, followed by a CVC pattern. (e.g. pie, egg, red)

Awareness of Onset and Rime

Phonograms are the common elements in word families (e.g. the letter sequence "and" in sand, hand, band, land). The initial consonant that changes the meaning of the the word is called an onset and the following vowel/consonant combination that remains constant is called a rime. Because an awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes develops before an awareness of phonemes, the first suggestions focus on word play.

Literature

A natural and spontaneous way of providing children with exposure to phonemes is to focus on literature that deals playfully with speech sounds through rhymes. Simple rhyme patterns are easily recalled after repeated exposure, and children will get the idea of creating new rhymes. (e.g. Locket in my Pocket, zamp in the lamp, zuk in my book)

Alliteration is the repetition of an initial consonant sound across several words, often found in an alphabet book.

Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds within words, is often combined with rhyme ("rains and hails and shakes the sails" from Sheep on a Ship) or in humorous ways (A tooter who tooted the flute, tried to tutor two tooters to toot...).

Reread these fun types of stories, comment on the language use, encourage predictions of sounds, word, and sentence patterns, comment on or elicit specific aspects of sound patterns, and be creative in inventing new versions of the language patterns from the stories.

Word Families Chart

The exposure to rhyme leads naturally to the use of phonograms and the creation of word family charts. Charts can contain words from one story or a brain-stormed list from the children. You can use magnetic letters to 'create' words for a word family chart. Provide a rime of plastic letters (e.g. at) and have the children take turns placing different letters in the onset position to create new words. These charts can be used as reference charts.

Simple Phonemic Awareness:

Isolated Sound Recognition:

Children should be familiarized with speech sounds in isolation before they attempt to detect sounds within words. The teacher needs to provide children with a concept of speech sounds by associating phonemes with a creature, an action, or an object that is familiar to the child. E.g. the phoneme /s/ can be associated with the hissing sound a snake makes - sssssss. A sound personality can be created by calling /s/ the Sammy Snake sound. Many sounds have natural associations, such as a crowing rooster for /r/, a buzzing bee for /z/, the be quiet sound for /sh/. Sound personalities can be introduced naturally and in context by selecting a particular sound to talk about that is stressed in alphabet or other books that use alliteration. (See Sound Associations)

Word, Syllable, and Phoneme Counting

Activities that involve counting the number of words in a sentence or syllables in a word can be used as initial steps leading to isolated phoneme synthesis and segmentation. Word counting can be done for any sentence selected from a reading or writing lesson. The sentence should be read to the children without being visible. The children listen and place a marker from left to right for each word heard. The teacher then confirms the number by showing the printed sentence, pointing to each word as it is read, and having the children touch their tokens in a 1-1 correspondence.

Initially, two syllable words can be targeted, building up to three. Visible, manipulable representation of sounds also helps to clarify and guide counting and segmentation tasks for beginners.

Sound Synthesis

Sound synthesis or sound blending is an essential skill related to later reading ability, and is one of the easiest phoneme awareness tasks for children to perform. Sound synthesis can be done using the following sequence: blending an initial sound onto the remainder of the word; blending syllables of a word together; blending isolated phonemes into a word. The teacher can model blending an initial sound onto a word by using a jingle, "It starts with /l/ and it ends with /ight/, put it together and it says light." When they have the idea, the children supply the final word. An element of excitement can be created by using children's names for this activity and asking each child to recognize and say his/her own name when it is presented, "It starts with /b/ and it ends with etsy, put it together and it says Betsy." Context can be provided by limiting the words to objects that can be seen in the room or to words from a particular story the children just read. As the children become more proficient, they can take turns using the jingle to present their own words to be blended by the class.

Guessing games that utilize words broken into syllables or isolated phonemes provide fun sound blending activities. One involves a puppet who speaks funny by saying words syllable by syllable, or phoneme by phoneme for the children to figure out. The puppet can reply to guess, /f/-/i/-/sh/ ... I said fish!

Sound-to-Word Matching

Sound-to-word matching is useful as a beginning step in sound segmentation. The child needs to identify the beginning sound of a word. Awareness of the initial sound in a word can be done by showing the children a picture (dog) and asking the children to identify the correct word out of three: "Is this a /mmmm/-og, a /d/d/d/-og, or a /sssss/-og. A variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound: "Is there a /d/ in dog? This can be switched to "Which sound does dog start with- /d/, /sh/, or /l/? This sequence encourages the children to try out the three onsets with the rime to see which one is correct.

Identification of Sound Positions

Establishing that sounds occur in different positions of words - initial, final, and medial - helps some children with a later task of segmenting whole words into isolated sound components. One idea is to display a picture of a train composed of an engine, passenger car, and a caboose. Three connecting boxes can be drawn under each component. Explain that words have beginning, middle, and end sounds just like the train has a beginning, middle and end. Demonstrate by slowly articulating a CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word (e.g. /p/-/i/-/g/) and pointing to the box corresponding to the position of each sound in the word.

Sound Segmentation

Segmenting refers to the act of isolating the sounds in a spoken word by separately pronouncing each one is order. Segmenting is one of the most difficult simple phonemic tasks for children to perform. Start with isolated productions of initial phonemes as a precursor to segmenting entire words. Elkonin boxes help with phoneme segmentation. A card is prepared with a picture of a simple word at the top. Below the picture is a matrix that contains a box for each phoneme (not letter) in the word. The teacher models the process by slowly articulating the word phoneme-by-phoneme while pushing a counter into a box for each phoneme. The children can say the word with the teacher while the counters are being placed. Gradually the children should participate in this "say it and move it" activity by taking turns placing counters in each box while saying each sound in a word. both the matrix and picture can be eliminated over time so children are segmenting without visual cues. Words should be selected from familiar text to ensure a whole-to-part sequence of instruction and to provide the children with contextual cues that link word segmentation to everyday classroom lessons.

Letter-Sound Association

The most pedagogically sound method of phoneme awareness training is one that eventually makes explicit the complete letter-to-sound mappings in segmented words. As individual sounds are mastered by the children, their corresponding letter names can be introduced and placed on the tokens (magnetic letters, scrabble tiles). To reinforce letter names, play "post office" in which the children select a picture, say the initial sound of the picture, and identify the letter represented by the first sound by mailing it in the appropriate letter pouch.

The practice of invented spelling can also be used to make explicit connections between sound segments and letters. Children select words they wish to write but don't know how to spell. A box is drawn for each sound in the word. A child can fill in the letters she/he hears and knows with the teacher's help.

Compound Phonemic Awareness:

Word-to-Word Matching

Compound phonemic awareness requires holding a given sound in memory while performing a second operation such as determining whether two words begin with the same sound in a word-to-word matching task. (e.g. Do cup and cake begin the same?)

Each of these games can be related to other classroom activities by having children make their own dominoes, snap cards, and bingo cards using pictures from catalogs or magazines, or hand drawn and laminated. The pictures selected by the children can represent thing related to the literature and themes being covered in class.

Sound Deletion

Because sound deletion tasks require manipulation of phonemes in words, they are considered to be more difficult than other types of phoneme awareness tasks. Sound deletion should target only initial or final sounds in words.

To introduce the idea of deleting part of a word, show pictures or objects around the room that are compound words, then demonstrate how each word can be said with a part missing. e.g. This is a seesaw. If I say seesaw without the see, it says saw.

Identification of a missing sound can be played through a "What's missing?" guessing game. The teacher says two words for comparison and asks the children to identify the missing element: "Listen: eat-meat. What's missing in eat that you can hear in meat?" The same can be done for final position deletions. The children can be encouraged to make up their own words.

The actual task of deleting a sound from a word can be made easier by building on earlier segmentation practice, playing a game of "sound take-away". The teacher models how to orally segment a word into the "target" sound plus everything else and then takes the sound away. A modified jingle can be used: "Chair. It starts with /ch/ and it ends with air; take the first sound away and it says air." The jingle can be used until the children can delete sounds with a simple prompt: "Say ball without the /b/". Children who have difficulty with deleting sounds might benefit from visual clues. By placing two colored blocks side-by-side, the teacher can designate one as representing the target sound and the other as representing the remainder of the word: "I'm going to use these blocks to say moon. This (red block) says moo and this yellow block says /n/. The child is then asked what the first block said when the second block is removed.