A Presentation on Phonemic &

Phonological Awareness

Do You Hear What I Hear?

By Diane Lewis, SLP and Linda Mercer, SLP

November 4, 2009
 WELCOME!

• Opening Activities
Introductions
A Gift For You: Badoogles
Major Components of Reading
Instruction
 Phonological/Phonemic Awareness
 Phonics
 Vocabulary development
 Reading fluency
 Reading comprehension

This presentation will focus only on one aspect of

reading development - Phonological/Phonemic
Awareness.
 What is Phonological
Awareness?
• Phonological awareness is the
understanding of different ways that oral
language can be divided into smaller
components and manipulated.
 Sentences into words
 Words into syllables
 Onset and rime
 Individual phonemes
 Phonological Awareness
Tasks Include:
• Initial rhyming and rhyming songs
• Sentence segmentation
• Segmenting words into syllables
• Blending syllables into words
• Segmenting words into onsets and rimes
• Blending onsets and rimes into words
• This represents the continuum of complexity,
moving from less complex to most complex
 What Is Phonemic
Awareness?
• Phonemic awareness is the most sophisticated
level of phonological awareness

• It involves the ability to auditorally notice that

the spoken word contains a ‘sub-level’ of smaller
sounds or ‘phonemes’

• The smallest unit of sound in spoken language is

a phoneme
 What’s Involved in Phonemic
Awareness?
• Phonemic Awareness involves the ability
to :
 Segment, or separate, words into sounds
 Blend, or put those sounds together to make
a word
 Manipulate sounds, or change sounds within
words to make new words
 How Do They Fit Together
• T h e r e c e n t N a t io n a l R e s e a r c h C o u n c il
r e p o r t o n r e a d in g d is t in g u is h e s
p h o n o lo g ic a l a w a r e n e s s f r o m p h o n e m ic
a w a r e n e s s in t h is w a y :

 T h e t e r m p h o n o lo g ic a l a w a r e n e s s
r e f e r s t o a g e n e r a l a p p r e c ia t io n o f
t h e s o u n d s o f s p e e c h a s d is t in c t
f r o m t h e ir m e a n in g . W h e n t h a t
in s ig h t in c lu d e s a n u n d e r s t a n d in g
t h a t w o r d s c a n h e d iv id e d in t o a
s e q u e n c e o f p h o n e m e s , t h is f in e r -
g r a in e d s e n s it iv it y is t e r m e d
 Fascinating Facts &
Startling Statistics
• 68% of 4th grade students in the U.S.
are reading below the proficient level
(1)

• Children who fall behind at an early

age (kindergarten & 1st grade) fall
farther behind over time (2)
 Startling Statistics
• Only 29% of 8th graders meet the national
standard of reading proficiency

• Currently one-fourth of our students in grades 4 -

12 read below the minimum or “basic” standard
for their grade level

• Only 15% of urban 8th graders read at,

or above, a proficient level
 Startling Statistics

• About two-thirds of prison inmates are high

school dropouts and one-third of all
juvenile offenders read below the 4th
grade level

• Roughly one-third of high school graduates

are not ready to succeed in an
introductory-level college writing class
 Startling Statistics

• About 40% of high school graduates lack

the literacy skills employers seek

• The 25 fastest-growing professions have

far greater-than-average literacy demands,
while the fastest declining professions
have lower-than-average literacy demands
(2)
 Facts & Statistics

• Longitudinal studies show that of those

children who are reading disabled in 3rd
grade, 74% continue to read significantly
below grade level in the 9th grade,
indicating a persistent deficit rather than
developmental lag(3)
• Adults with reading problems exhibit the same
characteristics as children with reading
difficulties
 Facts & Statistics
• The ability to read and comprehend depends
upon rapid and automatic recognition and
decoding of single words.

• Slow and inaccurate decoding are the best

predictors of deficits in reading

• The significant link between a child’s phonemic

awareness skills & ultimate success in reading is
an internationally recognized phenomenon(2)
 Facts & Statistics
• The ability to decode single words
accurately and fluently is dependent upon
the ability to segment words and syllables
into phonemes.

• Deficits in phonological and phonemic

awareness reflect the core deficit in
reading disabilities
 Final Facts & Statistics
• Research indicates that without direct
instructional support, phonemic awareness
eludes roughly 25% of middle class 1st
graders
 Impact is substantially greater for children
from less literacy-rich backgrounds

• Evidenced in serious difficulty learning to

read, write, and spell
 First Things First
• Before children can make sense of the
alphabetic principle, they must first understand
that those sounds that are paired up with letters
are “one and the same” as the sounds of speech
(4)

• Children must therefore have solid phonemic

awareness skills before undertaking phonics
instruction

• We must begin with the sounds of language

 The Challenge and
The Good News
• The Challenge: Get children to notice
phonemes, to discover their existence and
separability, and to hear these differences
 Early intervention (kindergarten) is exponentially more
successful than later remediation

• The Good News: Many of the activities involving

rhythm, rhyme, listening, and sound that have
long been enjoyed by preschool-aged children
are ideally suited for this purpose
 More Good News

• Research indicates that critical levels of

phonological awareness can be developed
through carefully planned instruction, and
this development has a significant
influence on children's reading and
spelling achievement (5)
 How Can I Help?
• First of all, continue what you’re already doing in
class and at home:
 Having fun with language
 Songs, poetry
 Creating rhyming words
 Playing with nonsense words, and so on

• Here are a few more things you can to your bag

of tricks…
 1. LISTENING SKILLS
• Focus the child’s attention on sounds of
interest (a pre-phonemic awareness skill)
Tapes of birds Cars
Wind Breathing
Footsteps Door closing
Sink running Doorbell
Silverware being placed in a drawer

For older students also try listening for specific musical

instruments in classical music pieces; try to recognize familiar
voices on a tape
 Listening

• Develop the memory and attention skills

for thinking about sequences of sounds
and the language for discussing them
 Series of sounds
• Begin with simple rhythms and easily
distinguishable sounds
• Increase the complexity, eventually adding
rhymes to the series (clap clap snap “fall” -
clap clap snap “ball”)
 Listening
• Locate and localize to sounds
 Find a hidden clock

• Develop the ability to attend to differences

between what they expect to hear and
what they actually hear (oddity or absurdity tasks)
 Twinkle twinkle little car
 Humpty Dumpty wall on a sat
 Listening
• Exercise the ability to overcome
distractions, pronunciation differences
while listening to language
 Whispering Game or Telephone: whisper one
word to a student and have them pass it on
around the circle; build to phrases and
eventually sentences

• Engage in favorite listening activities for

M&M’s
 2. RHYMING

• Teach children to use meaning and meter

to notice and predict rhyming words
 Read rhyming books; What am I?

• Teach children to depend more strongly on

phonological cues to generate rhyme
 A cat wearing a ___(hat)
 A mouse that lives in a ___(house)
 A goat that is sailing a ___(boat)
 Rhyming
• Match rhyming words
 Monster Rhyming Cards - LinguiSystems

• Introduce new rhymes weekly

 Rhyme a Week Lessons - Webbing Into Literacy

• Favorite rhyming games for M&M’s

 Rhyming Word Sit Down
 Scavenger Hunt
 Erase the Rhyme
 3. WORDS IN SENTENCES
• NOTE: Segmenting begins at the sentence level,
with the eventual goal being segmenting at the
phoneme level

• Introduce the idea that sentences are

made up of strings of words and that a
sentence is like a short story. It tells
something and has to name who or what it
is telling about
 Words in Sentences
• Recognize complete sentences
 Thumbs UP or DOWN:
• “has blue eyes”; “the children”

• Count by Clapping
 Clap for each word in the sentence
 Begin with one syllable words; later introduce
two syllable words, etc.
 Begin with short sentences and gradually
lengthen
 Words in Sentences
• Represent the number of words in
sentences by placing colored squares/
blocks/or counting chips on the table
 Repeat the sentence while touching each
counter
• Great for language, sequencing, and memory

 Also a useful method in later grades for

sentence dictation/spelling; use finger-tapping
method or drawing lines on paper
 4. AWARENESS OF
SYLLABLES
• Introduce the concept that words are made
up of parts called ‘syllables’

• Start with compound words

 Segment into single syllables by clapping or
using colored squares/blocks to show the two
components
 snowman, airport, sailboat, cattail
 Awareness of Syllables
 Blend two one-syllable words to form a
compound word
• snow + man flash + light

 Syllable Deletion with compound words

• Say goldfish. Now say it again but don’t say
fish
• Say mailbox. Now say it again but don’t say
mail
 Awareness of Syllables

• Introduce children to the nature of syllables

by modeling
• Begin by clapping and counting the number of
syllables in their names
• Play ‘Clap It’ or ‘Whisper It’
• Use colored blocks to represent the number of
syllables in everyone’s names; compare the
number of syllables
 Awareness of Syllables

• Other Games:
 Box of Objects or Pictures of Objects
• Reach into the box and feel an object; say its
name; clap out the number of syllables

 Mother May I
• Take the number of steps to match the number of
syllables in the given words
 Awareness of Syllables
 Feed the Animals
• One box or basket marked for each animal:
lion, octopus, alligator
• Picture cards of foods with two, three, four
syllables
• The animals are fed the food with correct
number of corresponding syllables (cracker
for the lion; potato for the octopus;
cauliflower for the alligator)
 5. INITIAL AND FINAL
SOUNDS
• NOTE: Now working at the phoneme level
• First, lead children to discover that words
contain phonemes

• Second, help them begin to learn about

the phonemes’ separate identities so they
can recognize them & distinguish them
from one another
 Initial and Final Sounds

• The identities and distinguishing

characteristics of the phonemes are easier
to feel in one’s mouth than to hear in one’s
ear
 Direct children’s attention to the articulation of
phonemes and how they sound
 Initial and Final Sounds
• Phonemes are easier to recognize in the
initial positions of words
 Move from beginning sound to final sound;
sounds in the middle of words comes last as
they are hardest

• Be sure to use “pure” sounds when

modeling
 /b/ the sound stops on your lips; be careful not
to add “uh” as an extra sound
 Initial and Final Sounds

• Play “Guess Who” to teach how phonemes

sound in isolation and that phonemes are
parts of words:
 Guess who’s name I’m going to say: “b,b,b” or
“sss, sss, sss”. Guess all the possibilities for
each of the sounds

 Eventually the students initiate names

 Initial and Final Sounds
• Different Words, Same Initial Phoneme:
 Show pictures of objects; say their names; determine
if they begin with the same sound or not
 Sort pictures by initial sounds into separate piles

• Soundtration (Concentration Game)

 Place picture cards face down; turn over two cards;
keep pairs that have same initial sounds; turn is over if
the cards have different beginning sounds
 Initial and Final Sounds
• “I Spy”
 I spy something that starts with /s/
• Note: use sound, not letter name
• “I’m Thinking”
 I’m thinking of something that starts with /s/. It
has two legs and can fly. It’s bird by the
ocean.
• “Dudsberry Phoneme Postcards” from
LinguiSystems
 6. SEGMENTING WORDS

• Segmenting words into phonemes

 Use colored squares to represent each sound
in the word
 What sounds do you hear in the word “hot”
• Counting phonemes in words
 How many sounds do you hear in the
word “man”; “hat”; “cake”; “bike”
 Segmenting Words

• Use words that have easily distinguishable

and separable sounds (The ability to distinguish
blends/consonant clusters, dipthongs, etc. develops much later)

• Use counters or finger tapping methods

 7. BLENDING PHONEMES
INTO WORDS
• What word would you have if you put these
sounds together
 /s/ /a/ /t/
• Begin with initial sound plus end of word
 /c/ at /p/ en
• Move to final phoneme blending
 coa /t/ hou /se/
• Increase complexity by blending individual
sounds
 8. DELETION OF
PHONEMES
• Say “cat”
• Say “cat” again without the /k/

• What sound do you hear in “meat” that is

missing in “eat”
 9. MATCHING

• Word to word matching

 Do pen and pipe start with the same letter
• Odd word out
 What word starts with a different sound:
bag, nine, beach, bike
• Sound-to-sound matching
 Is there a /k/ in bike
 ADDING LETTERS TO
SOUNDS
• The relationship between phonological awareness and
reading is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature
(Stanovich, 1986). Early reading is dependent on having
some understanding of the internal structure of words,
and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is
very effective in promoting early reading.
• However, instruction in early reading-specifically, explicit
instruction in letter-sound correspondence appears to
strengthen phonological awareness, and in particular the
more sophisticated phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns,
& Griffin, 1998).
 CONCLUSION

• Phonemic awareness is one of the

necessary building blocks to reading and
spelling success
• The strategies we discussed also help with
general listening skills and vocabulary
development
• Continue the wonderful work you do and
have fun with language!
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1) "Educational CyberPlayGround" Internet.
Database available online. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com

2) NICHD Research on Reading. http://www.ksagroup.com/thecenter/

3) www.all4ed.org/files/AdolescentLiteracyFactSheet.pdf

4) Adams, Marilyn (1990). Beginning To Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press

5) Ball, E.W., & Blachman, B.A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten
make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading
Research Quarterly, 26 (1), 49-66
Stanovich, K.E., (1986), Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual
differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407
 Websites & Books
Sequences of Sounds
• http://www.readingrockets.org/article/377

Rhyming Games
• http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bll/reggie/index.htm
• http://www.gamequarium.com/rhymes.html
• http://www.teachers.cr.k12.de.us/~galgano/dibelrhyme.htm
• http://ezinearticles.com/?Rhyming-Games-For-Kids&id=924334
• http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/rhyming-games.html
• http://prekinders.com/rhyme/

Segmenting Words in Sentences

• http://www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Counting_words_in_a_sentence
• Scaffolding with Storybooks: A Guide for Enhancing Young Children's Language by
Laura M. Justice, Khara L. Pence, Angela Beckman
 Websites Continued
Segmenting Words into Syllables
• burrton.k12.ks.us/.../Segmentation,%20syllables,%20onset%20and%20rime.pdf
• http://www.proteacher.com/070171.shtml

Initial - Final - Medial Sound Discrimination

• http://www.readingrockets.org/article/377
• http://www.free-reading.net/index.php?title=Catch_a_Sound-final_sounds
• http://www.proteacher.com/070011.shtml