Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness in the early grades Leecy Wise

What is Phonemic Awareness?

What is Phonological Awareness?

What is Phonics?

click on the Literacy Resources Pre-K-5 Teachers Literacy Resources Pre-K-5 Teachers

What is Phonemic Awareness?  Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.

What is Phonemic Awareness?  Phonemic awareness is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words. Photo from

Phonemic Awareness - Assessment  ("Bell, bike, and boy all have /b/ at the beginning."  The beginning sound of dog is /d/. The ending sound of sit is /t/.“  /m/, /a/, /p/-- map  up--/u/, /p/ Review Sounds – voiced, unvoiced

Children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to the graphemes when they see them in written words.

What is Phonological Awareness? Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of Phonological Awareness. Phonemic Awareness

What is Phonological Awareness? The focus of phonological awareness is much broader than that of phonemic awareness. It includes identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language, such as words, syllables, and onsets and rimes--as well as phonemes. It also encompasses awareness of other aspects of sound, such as rhyming, alliteration, and intonation.

What is Phonics?  Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes, the letters that represent those sounds in written language Photo from

If children are to benefit from phonics instruction, they need phonemic awareness.

Today’s Agenda  Review terms  Take a short quiz  Strategies for teaching phonological awareness  Adaptation for students with special needs  Sample lesson plans and other resources  Using technology for reading

Quick Quiz Phonemic Phonological, or Phonics? 1. How many syllables does a spoken word have? Phonological: break down word into smaller parts 2. Say a word that rhymes with bat. (Phonological- rhyming sounds) 3. How many sounds are in cup? Phonemic – break into individual phonemes

Quick Quiz Phonemic Phonological, or Phonics? 4. Find all of the words in the sentence that have the letter that makes the /m/ mmmmm sound. Phonics- match sounds to letters 5. Put the sounds /d/, /o/, /g/ together and say the word. Phonological- manipulate phonemes to make words 6. What letter makes the first sound in pop? Phonics- match letter to sound

Assessing Phonemic Awareness  ("Bell, bike, and boy all have /b/ at the beginning."  The beginning sound of dog is /d/. The ending sound of sit is /t/.“  /m/, /a/, /p/-- map  up--/u/, /p/

 identifying and making oral rhymes; "The pig has a (wig)." "Pat the (cat)." "The sun is (fun)."  identifying and working with syllables in spoken words; "I can clap the parts in my name: An- drew." ASSESSING PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS Review

 identifying and working with onsets and rimes in spoken syllables or one-syllable words; "The first part of sip is s-." "The last part of win is -in."  identifying and working with individual phonemes in spoken words. "The first sound in sun is /s/." ASSESSING PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS Review

Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness  Research indicates that phonological awareness can be taught and that students who increased their awareness of phonemes facilitated their subsequent reading acquisition (Lundberg et al, 1988).

Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness  Teachers need to be aware of instructional activities that can help their students become aware of phonemes before they receive formal reading instruction; they need to realize that phonemic awareness will become more sophisticated as students' reading skills develop.

Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness (1) Engage children in activities that direct their attention to the sounds in words, such as rhyming and alliteration games. (2) Teach students to segment and blend. (3) Combine training in segmentation and blending with instruction in letter-sound relationships. Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read. ERIC Digest.

Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness (4) Teach segmentation and blending as complementary processes. (5) Systematically sequence examples when teaching segmentation and blending. (6) Teach for transfer to novel tasks and contexts.

Teaching Phonemic Awareness Yopp (1992) (a) Keep a sense of playfulness and fun, avoid drill and rote memorization. (b) Use group settings that encourage interaction among children. (c) Encourage children's curiosity about language and their experimentation with it. (d) Allow for and be prepared for individual differences.

Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness (e) Make sure the tone of the activity is not evaluative but rather fun and informal. Spending a few minutes daily engaging preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade [and older] children in oral activities that emphasize the sounds of language may go a long way in helping them become successful readers and learners.

Differentiated Instruction  Activities for students in the early stages should include identifying and categorizing phonemes.  Students who can identify and categorize phonemes should work with activities that help them learn to blend phonemes to form words and to segment words into phonemes.

Differentiated Instruction  More advanced activities are those in which students delete or add phonemes to form new words, and activities in which students substitute phonemes to make new words.

5 Levels of Phonological Ability Adams (1990)  to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes  to do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration)  to blend and split syllables

5 Levels of Phonological Ability Adams (1990)  to perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of phonemes in a word)  to perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder).

Stages of Literacy Development Phonemic AwarenessGreater Phonological AwarenessPhonics Awareness Spoken SoundsWritten Sounds Literacy Resources Pre-K-5 Teachers Literacy Resources Pre-K-5 Teachers Sample Lessons

 "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Benjamin Franklin