PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

OBJECTIVES
• To distinguish phonological awareness and
phonics
• To identify the important components of
phonological awareness skill
• To understand the different instructional
approaches to reading
 Phonological Awareness..
• Phonological awareness is the understanding
that..

spoken language can be broken into smaller

units :
• Sentence into words
• Words into syllable
• Syllable into onset-rimes
• Words/syllable into phonemes
 Phonological Awareness..
• Pupils with learning disabilities need to learn words through sounds.

“ The hippopotamus jumps across the river”

the hippotamus jumps across the river

the hi-ppo-po-ta-mus jumps a-cross the ri-

ver
 Phoneme
• The smallest unit of spoken language sounds
• Vowels, consonants
• Transcribe using the IPA systems
e.g . /bΛs/
• Phonemes ≠ letters (graphemes)
 Phonics
• PHONICS is knowing how letter names and
phonemes relate to each other
• Also known as “letter-sound correspondence”
Phonological
awareness

Phonics
 Auditory skills and phonological
awareness..
• The ability to hear and discriminate phonemes
require adequate “auditory skills” and/or
“perceptual skills”

Star or
Co
Map or Start? ol o
Po
Mat? ol? r
 Auditory and Visual skulls, and letter-
sound correspondence
• The ability to hear and discriminate phonemes
require adequate “auditory skills’ and
“auditory perceptual skills”.
• The ability to see and discriminate reversible
letters require adequate “visual skills” and
“visual perceptual skills”
• The ability to associate letters with sounds
requires integration of auditory and visual
skills.
 Teaching phonological awareness
• The majority of students at risk for reading
difficulties have poor phonological awareness
and can profit from explicit instructions in
learning letter-sound correspondences, and
blending, segmenting, and manipulating
phonemes as early as possible.
 How to do explicit instructions in an
inclusive environment?
• Set a purpose for learning.
• Tell students what to do.
• Show them how to do it.
• Guide their hands on application of the new
learning.

* Explicit – saying effective, meaningful direct teaching

 LETTER-SOUND
CORRESPONDENCE
 How to teach letter-sound
correspondence?
• Pupils use grapheme-phoneme
correspndences to decode words
• Struggling readers benefit from learning to
blend and segment sounds so that they can
decode and spell words.
 How to teach letter-sound
correspondence?
• Teach one phonemes at a time. Start with
phonemes that occur frequently in simple
words ( /s/ , /a/ , /t/ , /p/ )
• Letters that look familiar and have similar
sounds (e.g “b” and “d”) should be separated
in the instructional sequence to avoid
confusion.
• Short vowels are taught before long vowels.
 How to teach letter-sound
correspondence?
• Lower case letters are taught first
• Start by teaching sounds of the letters, not
their names.
• Teach blending and segmenting in oral as well
as written language.
• Highlight the first phonemes of words.
 How to teach letter-sound
correspondence?
• Teach that some letters can represent more
than one sounds.
• Teach that different letters can make the
same sounds ( e.g. /s/ in “sit” and “city” )
• Teach that sounds can be represented by a
single letter or a combination of letters.
( e.g. /e/ in me and meet).
• Colour-code consonants or vowels.
Early phonological awareness skills
Awareness of rhyme and alliteration

Rhymes
Pick, kick, click

Alliteration : Words that start with the same onset

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

Rhyming words and alliteration help students to discriminate

phonemes as well as identify similar sounds in word

Phoneme in the initial position of words more sailient than those in

the final or middle position
 Early phonological skills and
example activities
Discrimination - Listening
-Two or more words begin with or end with the same sound
- Odd one out (e.g. which word does not begin with the /m/
sound ?
Counting - Clap the number of word in a sentence, syllables in a word
or sounds in a word
Rhyming - Create word families with rhyming words
Alliteration - Create tongue twisters
 Can you read this?
• I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty
uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the
icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid,
aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the
lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng
is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit
pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you
can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is
bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed
ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Later phonological skills and example activities

Blending *Students say the sound in a word and say

them fast while the teacher pushes
blocks or letters together to demonstrate
blending

Segmenting * Students say the word and the clap ( or

separate the syllables/phonemes ) and
say each syllable or phoneme
* Stretch-shrink technique

Manipulating *Deleting, adding, substituting and

transposing
 Segmenting words into sounds
( Stretch-shrink technique )

•“Put your fists together.”

•“Get ready to stretch the word”
•“ The word is fin. What word?” –Fin –
•Stretch it. Fffffinnnnn (stretch out arms as if pilling on
elastic cord)
•Shrink it. Fin (Clap hand back as if you gave into the
elastic cord)
•(repeat with different words, individual check if time
permits)
 Example activities for phoneme manipulation

Deleting • Listen to words and say them without the

first sound
• What’s “walked” without /d/? (present tense)
• What’s “books” without /s/? (singular)

Adding •Listen to words and add syllables or phonemes

•What’s “run” followed by “ing”?
•What’s “run” followed by /s/?

Substituting •Listen and change phonemes in a word

•Word: dog
•What’s the new word if you replace /o/ with /i/?

transposing •Reverse the sounds

•Swap /b/ and /t/ in “but”. What’s the new word?
 Reading Instructions

• In beginning to work with students who have limited sight

words and word identification strategies, it is helpful not
only to determine the students’ current strategies, but
also to determine what instructional approaches have
been used previously, how consistently, for how long,
and with what success

• It is also helpful to use the intervention research to

inform the teacher’s decision making.
 Reading Instructions

Beginning reading approaches that emphasize explicit,

direct teaching of phonological awareness and word
identification strategies that rely on using phonics, onset-
rime, and structural analysis result in greater gains in
word recognition and comprehension than approaches in
which phonological awareness and phonics are more
implicitly taught (US National Reading Panel, 2000).
Consequently, explicit code instruction approaches
should be a part of a balanced reading approach for
most students with special needs.
 Explicit Code Instruction
3 instructional features:
i. Systematic instruction of letter-sound
correspondence and teaching students to blend the
sounds to make words and segment sounds to spell
words.
ii. Scaffold instruction – provide modelling, guidance,
and positive and corrective feedback are integral
features of instruction.
iii.Provide opportunities for practices. ( e.g games with
word cards, constructing sentences, reading text )
 Linguistic Approach: Onset-Rime and
Word Families
• Use linguistic approach use controlled text and word
families (onset-rimes, prefixes and suffixes or spelling
pattern) such as –at , -igh , -an to teach word
recognition

• This approach is useful for students with

reading problems.
 Onset-rime
• Words with onset-rime :
1. (point to rime). This part is an. What part? an
2. Get ready to read words that end with an. Ran
3. (point to a new word) What word? Ban
4. (point to a new word) What word? Fan
5. (continue with additional word) man , Stan
 Rimes
Introduce words to its word family

ail ug in at in
an El at ice ay
aw ill est op ing
 English language learners and
reading difficulties
• Good reader rely primarily on decoding
words (understanding the sound to print
correspondence or alphabetic principles)
• They do not rely primarily on context or
pictures to identify words. They use
context to confirm word reading or to
better understand text meaning.
 Multisensory Structured
language instruction
- Multisensory structured language programs
combine systematic explicit teaching of
phonological awareness activities that
incorporate the visual, auditory, tactile
(touch), and kinesthetic (movement) (VAKT)
modalities.
 Sight word reading
• A sight is one students can read quickly and
automatically rather quickly.
• A sight word is accessed from information in
memory.
• We rely on memory to pronounce irregular words
in English (e.g., Yacht).
• Emergent readers recognise familiar words with
the presence if visual cues.
• Students more efficiently store words in memory
when they group or consolidate words by multi-
letter units such as onset-rimes, word families and
base words.
Break …
ACTIVITY
In your group, discuss the following
questions….
What is the main focus of the LINUS book
in Unit……. ?
• phonological awareness skill?
• reading instructions?
• Why?
 Trouble-Shooting 1
• What would you do if your pupils can’t circle the
words correctly? (Group Activity)

# Refer to Teacher’s Module Book 3, page xxxx

 Trouble-Shooting 2
• How would you make reading easier for
your pupils? (Group Activity)

# Refer to Teacher’s Module Book 3, page xxxx

Questions?