Phonological Awareness

Reading

Comprehension Reading 44

Oral Language

Development Our Turn to

Talk

Phonological Awareness

Firm Foundations

Writing Development Writing 44

Explicit Instruction of Literacy Skills

• Awareness of the sound structure of words. • An important and reliable predictor of later reading ability

• A broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language – parts such as words, syllables, and onsets and rimes.

• Children who have phonological awareness are able to identify and make oral rhymes, can clap out the number of syllables in a word, and can recognize words with the same initial sounds like 'money' and 'mother.'

Phonological Awareness

The Importance of Phonological AwarenessThe most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989).

Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994).

• The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds--phonemes--in spoken words.

• A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a given language

• A part of phonological awareness

Phonemic Awareness

Cheetah = 7 letters, 2 syllables, 4

phonemes

Important Points about Phonemic Awareness:

• Phonemic awareness can be taught and learned.• Phonemic awareness can help students learn to read and spell.

• Learning to read and spell words by working with letter-sound relationships also improves children’s phonemic awareness.

• Phonemic awareness instruction can help preschoolers, kindergartners, first graders, and older, less able readers.

• Generous opportunities to engage in spoken language are needed before attempting written language.

Some Cautions About Phonemic Awareness

Instruction

• Phonemic awareness instruction is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It should be oriented toward helping children gain insight about the relationship between spoken sounds and letters.

• Phonemic awareness should not be the entire reading program!

• rhythm and rhyme

• hear the parts of

words

• sequence of sounds

• separation of sounds

• manipulation of

sounds

Phonemic Awareness

is Sequential

On-going Assessment and Intervention

1. Early screening and intervention2. Intervention and specific support

for students with learning challenges

3. Differentiated Instruction (ESL, Special Needs)

Some Clues that a Child May Have Difficulty with

Phonological or Phonemic Awareness• Difficulty thinking of rhyming words for a simple word like

cat (such as rat or bat).• Doesn't show interest in language play, word games, or

rhyming.• Doesn't correctly complete blending activities; for example,

put together sounds /k/ /i/ /ck/ to make the word kick.• Doesn't correctly complete phoneme substitution activities;

for example, change the /m/ in mate to /cr/ in order to make crate.

• He has a hard time telling how many syllables there are in the word paper.

• He has difficulty with rhyming, syllabication, or spelling a new word by its sound.

• From Reading Rockets: http://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/phonologicalphonemic

Launch into Reading SuccessSounds AboundsCommercially prepared material – be discriminating

Phonemic Resources

Firm Foundations An Early Literacy Framework

A classroom framework for play-based skills acquisition and performance assessments

In partnership with Our Turn To Talk, is based on the understanding that learning about reading and language is the foundation of the kindergarten curriculum

Firm Foundations: What is it?

Teaching and Intervention Systemic use of Firm

Foundations

TOPA… Test of Phonological Awareness – January

Intervention

June re-assessment

Tracking…School resource teams maintain continuity

Grade One Intervention

Firm FoundationsHierarchy and Timeline for Skills

Acquisition

Concepts of Print

Guiding Principles

Early literacy skills must be taught while maintaining the integrity of a play-based, learning environment.

Children must be able to hear and manipulate oral sound patterns before they can identify these patterns in print.

Teachers need knowledge about, and access to, meaningful and interactive materials and activities.

Phonological awareness skills are essential for learning to read.

Longitudinal Research Study

• Expertise, inspiration, energy for a District-wide focus on reading

• Active participation of the School District in a study directed by Dr. Linda Siegel of UBC

• Nine year study (1997-2007) on the effects of Early Identification and Intervention for the prevention of learning disabilities

• All children; 30 schools; 20% ELL; varying SES levels

normales

L1 English ELL

Kindergarten Results - 1998

Dyslexic

Normal

Dyslexic

Normal

Grade 6

L1 English ELL

Results/Benefits of the Study

• Positive impact of early intervention of potential ‘at risk’ learners

• Use of a variety of intervention strategies

• Assessment of effectiveness of interventions

• Improved diagnostic and teaching skills• Reductions in the number of ‘at risk’ readers

A Walk Through Firm Foundations

Rhymes Segmenting and

Blending Compound words Syllables Phonemes

Letter Sound Mastery Concepts of Print

• Teaching rhymes is an important skill for second language learners.

• Teaching lists of rhyming words may be quick, but students will not retain as much.

• Stories with rhymes help ESL students practice reading rhyming words in context. Reading the words in context helps build comprehension and fluency.

• The best way is to create a cloze and have students fill in the blank with the correct rhyming word.

• Rereading familiar rhyming picture books will help students develop fluency while gaining valuable comprehension skills.

Rhyming and ESL Learners

Willoughby wallaby weeAn elephant sat on me

Willoughby wallaby wooAn elephant sat on you

Willoughby wallaby Wustin,

An elephant sat on Justin

Willoughby wallaby WaniaAn elephant sat on Tania

Nonsense Rhymes

Willoughby wallaby woo.I don’t know what to do.

Willoughby, wallaby, wee.An elephant sat on me.

Willoughby, wallaby, washI’m feeling kind of squash

Willoughby, wallaby, woo.And I don’t know what to do.

Nonsense Rhymes

Rhyming Read-Alouds

Did you ever see a rat, a rat, a rat,

Did you ever see a rat sit on a cat?

R-at, c-at, r-at, c-at,Did you ever see a rat sit

on a cat?

"Did You Ever See…"

Did you ever see a cat, a cat, a cat,

Did you ever see a cat wearing a hat?

C-at, h-at, c-at, h-at,Did you ever see a cat

wearing a hat?

Identifying Rhyme

Cake and snake are rhyming words,Rhyming words, rhyming words.

House and mouse are rhyming wordsWe can hear them rhyme

Putting it to Music…

Favourite Stories for Generating Rhyme

Monster Mouth Word Muncher

I’m a monster mouth

and I love to munch,

On rhyming wordsfor my letter lunch.

Open up my mouthand drop them in,

Then close it again

to see me grin!

Centre-Time Rhyme…

Silly Songs, Rhymes and Finger Plays

Five Little FrogsFive little speckled frogsSat on a hollow logEating some most delicious bugsYum Yum!One jumped into the poolWhere it was nice and coolNow there are four speckled frogsGlub, glub

Five Little Frogs

Five little speckled _______Sat on a hollow _______Eating some most delicious bugsYum Yum!One jumped into the _______Where it was nice and _____Now there are four speckled frogsGlub, glub

Baby Bumble Bee SongI'm bringing home my baby bumblebeeWon't my mommy be so proud of me

I'm bringing home my baby bumble beeOuch! It stung me!

(squash up imaginary bee with hands) I'm squashing up my baby bumblebeeWon't my mommy be so proud of meI'm squashing up my baby bumblebee

EEEW! Yuck!(wash off imaginary bee with hands) I'm

washing off my baby bumblebeeWon't my mommy be so proud of meI'm washing off my baby bumblebee

Look! All gone!

It’s RainingIt's raining, it's pouring, The old man is snoring. He fell out of bed and bumped his head And couldn't get up in the morning.

Rhyming Assessments

blending and Segmenting

The most important forms of phonemic awareness to teach are blending and segmentation, because they are the processes that are centrally involved in reading and spelling words.

Two Important Phonemic Awareness Activities

• Phoneme blending. Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word. /d/ /o/ /g/ is dog. (This is the process used in decoding words.)

• Phoneme segmentation. Children break a spoken word into its separate phonemes. There are four sounds in truck: /t/ /r/ /u/ /k/. (This is the process used in spelling words phonetically: “invented spelling.)

Begin with one syllable words:

e.g. “Come here.”

“Sit down.”

“The cat is wet”

Segmenting and BlendingIndividual Words in a

Sentence

The cat wetis

The cat wetis

• Play Pocket Chart Compound Word Blending. Manipulate pictures in

• the chart to make a word. Show how two words can sometimes join together

• to form a completely different word

Segmenting and BlendingCompound Words

• Phonological insight transfers across languages and can provide a foundation for bilinguals to learn to read in their second language

• This conclusion applies to bilinguals who know two related languages, such as Cantonese and Mandarin (Chen, Anderson, Li, Hao, Wu, & Shu, 2004), but may not fully apply to children who know one of the Chinese languages and are trying to learn English

• The syllable is the most important phonological unit for learning to read Chinese because Chinese characters are associated with syllables, whereas the segmental phoneme is the most important unit in learning to read English and other alphabetical languages

Jie Zhang and Richard C. Anderson (2008)

Segmenting and BlendingSyllables and Phonemes

Differentiating Compound Word Play

Letter-sound mastery

AEM

FS

TW Z

Letter Naming

AEMF

S

TW Z

Alphabet Songs

Traditional ABC Songhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75p-N9YKqNo&feature=relmfu

• Increasing children’s experience with books leads to accelerated growth in reading comprehension and other aspects of language and literacy (Anderson, 1996; Stanovich, 1993).

The Power of a Good Story

“ Curiosity and prediction go hand in hand. They are the mainstays of pre-reading instruction. The more students predict as they read, the more they will read with certainty and confidence; the greater their curiosity, the greater their motivation.

…Richard T. Vacca

Reciting the Alphabet…

“What is the name of this letter?”“How many letters are there in the English alphabet?

Picture Walk

Predict what will happen…

During Reading Strategies:

Sing Along!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QdN-HYp46c&feature=related

During Reading Strategies

Post Reading Strategies

• Magnet board for retelling• Sing the song• Sing other ABC songs• Practise making the letters

• Let students manipulate letters and discover what smaller words can be formed from the word 'coconut.' (on, no, to, not, cot, cut, nut, out, count, and coconut!)

Post Reading Strategies

B is for…

Letter-Sound Mastery

• visually discriminate

letters

• discriminate letter

sounds

• identify letters

• match sound to letter

Letter-Sound Mastery

The Alphabet Chant

Concepts of Print

A Balanced Literacy Approach

Students with significant disabilities often experience literacy instruction as isolated skills in a hierarchical approach (e.g. drills on letter identification and letter-sound associations). “Such instruction has met with minimal success and does not follow recommended practices...”

“Instead of teaching word study skills in isolation, this teaching can occur within the larger and more meaningful context of reading and writing.”Highlight phonological skills in context:•Name on the board/textbook/locker•Initial letters and sounds of names in magazines, birthday cards•Menus, recipes•Cards in a card game

A Balanced Literacy Approach

My friend…

Look it’s…

I see…

Present language frames to

introduce the community of

learners

Pocket Chart Play

I see

I see my friend

At school I see my friend

Segmenting and BlendingWords in a Sentence

Performance Assessments

• Informal assessments for each of the phonological skills are provided

• The sequential progression of the assessments provides valuable information about skills acquisition

• Further intervention strategies, if needed, should be considered by the School Based Resource Team and the Learning Assistance Teacher

Firm Foundations Games

• In your package you will find games for

RhymesSegmenting and Blending

Compound words Syllables Phonemes

Letter Sound Mastery

• Which games will you create for your class?