Phonological Awareness

1. Phonological Awareness It’s all in the sound…with phonics on the side

2. What is Phonological Awareness? • “The ability to consciously recognize and manipulate units of the speech stream.” • Or, one’s awareness of the sounds of spoken language • Words of spoken language can be broken down into parts, each with its own sound • When we break down these words, we find phonemes, syllables, onset and rime • When these words are put into print, it’s called phonics (Shedd, 2008)

3. Breaking down words • Phonemes: “The smallest units of sound that change the meaning of a word” (Gleason, 2005 p.135) • Example: The word phoneme has 5 phonemes /f/, /o/, /n/, /e/, /m/ • Syllables: Pronouncing vowels or vowels with consonants (Shedd, 2008) • Example: Phoneme has two syllables Pho-neme • Onset and Rime: The consonant sound of a syllable that comes before the vowel is the onset (Ph) and rime is the vowel sound and everything that comes after it (oneme) (Shedd, 2008)

4. Why is it important? • Phonological awareness is a crucial part to learning literacy • Being able to break words apart by their sounds and relate words by similar sounds helps to decode new words and build ones vocabulary • “Not only does developing phonological awareness help a child learn to read, but learning to read helps develop greater phonological awareness” (Gleason, 2005 p.134) • This acquisition of reading skills through the development of phonological awareness (and its components) typically follows a natural trend (as shown in the diagram on the next slide) • Specific skills acquired as part of phonological awareness are essential for the development of later reading skills, as addressed within the Progression of Phonological Awareness Skills

5. The Progression of Phonological Awareness Skills http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254

6. The Progression of Phonological Awareness Skills • Typically the easiest thing for children to distinguish and the first skill learned is breaking words into syllables or beats • Acquiring this skill allows children to break printed words into syllables to read or spell • For example: Breaking reading into read and ing (Shedd, 2008)

7. The Progression of Phonological Awareness Skills • Shortly after syllables comes the ability to generate words that rhyme. • Of course, depending on the dialect, some words that rhyme are not “technically” supposed to rhyme • For example: Catch could rhyme with batch or catch could rhyme with fetch • Using this skill helps children build their vocabulary by creating word families (catch, batch, hatch, snatch, patch, etc.) (Shedd, 2008)

8. The Progress of Phonological Awareness Skills • Next, children typically learn to recognize and generate words that start with the same sound (also known as alliteration) • This should not be confused with rhyming, which is when words end with the same sound • A fun activity that can be done with children that have had some practice with this skill is to get them to create a sentence with words that all start with the same sound as the first letter of their name. • Through this skill, children start to learn the various phonemes by associating certain sounds with certain letters • They may also begin to learn that certain letters can make more than one sound (Shedd, 2008)

9. The Progress of Phonological Awareness Skills • The next two skills children typically learn together • The first is segmenting words into sounds (phonemes) • For example: History as /h/ /i/ /z/ /t/ /o/ /r/ /e/ • The second is blending these sounds together to figure out the word • For example: Putting the sounds of history together to say the word (Shedd, 2008)

10. The Progress of Phonological Awareness Skills • The last skill that children often learn is the ability to move sounds of words around to create new words. • This is an abstract idea that usually comes about in later elementary grades • An example would be if a child used the word town to decode the word howl. • The child uses the knowledge of the sound that ow makes in town and applies it to the word howl. (Shedd, 2008)

11. Fun with words Row, row, row your boatgently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;Life is but a dream Bow, bow, bow your boatbently bown the beam.Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;Bife is but a beam. Sow, sow, sow your soatsently sown the seam.Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;Sife is sut a seam. http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254 • For adults, fun with words typically means Scrabble. For children, fun with words can mean name games, poems, tongue twisters, songs; the list is limitless. • To the left is just one example of an activity you can do with children to help build their phonological awareness

12. Assessment • An interesting assessment for younger children is to ask them how many words are in the phrase “once upon a time” • Typically, children will have many different variations of this phrase: “onceupona time”, “once upona time”, etc. (www.dyslexiahelp.co.uk) • An assessment for older children would be to get them to write down as many words that they can think of that make the /ou/ sound as in house. Then tell them to write down as many words as they can that use ow to make the same sound.

13. A tribute to Meagan’s Phonological Awareness Dance Phonological Awareness! Phonemic Awareness! And Phonics on the side

14. References • Shedd, Meagan (2008). Phonological Awareness and Letter Sound Knowledge. Presentation for TE 301, East Lansing, Michigan. • Gleason, J.B. (2005). The Development of Language (6th edition). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc. • Chard, D.J.,& Dickson, S.V. (1999). Instructional and Assessment Guidelines. http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254 • Dyslexia Help. www.dyslexiahelp.co.uk. Staffs, U.K.