Early Reading Skills: Teaching Phonemic Awareness

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Early Reading Skills Teaching Phonemic Awareness

• Brandy Clarke
• CBC 2002

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The Need for Early Reading Interventions

• Poor reading ability correlates with long-term
  negative outcomes.
  
• Reading is the cornerstone of academic success.
• Students with poor reading skills in the
  beginning are likely to have poor skills in the
  future.
  

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Learning in Steps

• Research has demonstrated a need for children to
  learn to recognize words with speed and accuracy
  to read with fluency and comprehension.
  
• Progression of learning
• Understanding the concept of words
• Alphabetic Awareness
• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonics
• Word Recognition
• Fluency
• Comprehension

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

• Phonemic awareness is an understanding that
  speech is composed of individual sounds.
  
• It is part of the hierarchy of reading skills
  developed in early reading.
  
• It is not a unitary skill, but is comprised of
  various components.

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• Five levels of Phonemic Awareness (Adams,1990).
• Appreciation of sound in spoken language
  (recitation of nursery rhymes).
  
• Ability to compare and contrast sounds in words
  by grouping words with similar or dissimilar
  sounds (beginning, middle, and end of words).
  
• Ability to blend and split syllables.
• Phonemic segmentation or the ability to isolate
  individual sounds in syllables.
  
• Ability to manipulate phonemes by omitting and
  deleting phonemes to make new words.
  

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Why is it important?

• It is necessary in learning to read and spell the
  English language because English is alphabetic.
  
• Sounds correlate with letters to make words.
• Research has demonstrated a strong link between
  phonemic awareness and beginning reading.
  

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Why Phonemic Awareness over Whole-language?

• The Whole-language approach
• Focuses on teaching reading by immersing students
  in literature while providing minimal direct
  skill instruction.
  
• Provides students with ample opportunities to
  read and write and provides guidance as needed.
  
• Students learn to read through whole-word
  recognition which creates a guessing game when
  presented with new words.
  
• Students taught with phonics instruction read 54
  of new words correctly, students with
  whole-language read 3.
  
• However, balance is necessary.

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What skills are taught?

• Early Reading Skills (Good III, Simmons Smith,
  1998)
  
• Area 1 Phonological Awareness
• Awareness of correlation of sounds to words
• Area 2 Alphabetic Understanding
• Link between a letter and a sound
• Area 3 Phonological Recoding
• Use of relationship between phonemes and letters
  to recognize printed words, then read and spell
  them
  
• Area 4 Accuracy and Fluency with Connected Text
• Comprehending what is read

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How to assess skills

• Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills
  (DIBELS), University of Oregon
  
• Dynamic continuing evaluation of skills
• Indicators representative and correlated with
  important skill areas
  
• Predictive future reading performance
• Functional related to reading aquisition

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• DIBELS Assessments
• Target age range Preschool Second grade
• Onset Recognition Fluency
• Late preschool through winter of kindergarten
• Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
  children with low phonological awareness
  
• Letter Naming Fluency
• Fall of kindergarten through fall of first grade
• Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
  children with low skills in letter naming

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• DIBELS Assessments cont.
• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
• Winter of kindergarten through fall of first
  grade
  
• Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
  children with low phonological awareness
  
• Nonsense Word Fluency
• Fall of first grade through summer of first
  grade
  
• Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
  children with low skills in letter-sound
  correspondence
  

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How to teach Phonemic Awareness

• 5 Features of effective interventions (Good III
  et.al., 1998)
  
• Provide instruction at the phoneme level.
• Scaffold tasks and examples.
• Model skills prior to practice and provide
  opportunities for students to produce isolated
  sounds orally.
  
• Provide systematic and strategic instruction for
  identifying sounds in words, blending and
  segmenting, and culminate with integration of
  phonological awareness and letter-sound
  correspondence instruction.
• Use concrete materials to represent sounds .

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• Modeling activities
• Teaching vs. practice
• The importance of scope and sequence
• Larger units before smaller units (words before
  syllables)
  
• Continuous before stop sounds (cont. f, l, m, n,
  stop b, c, d, g)
  
• Fewer sounds before more sounds (VC or CV before
  CVC)
  
• Auditory blending before segmenting (e.g.
  foooot-baaaall vs. mmm-aaaaa-t)
  
• Blending and segmenting before manipulation (e.g.
  removing sounds to make new words)
  
• Oral before written language

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Phonemic Teaching Methods

• Phonemic Awareness in Young Children A Classroom
  Curriculum.(Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, Beeler,
  1998)
  
• The use of language games
• Play regularly (15-20 min)
• Go in order of sequence
• Use both segmenting (analysis) and blending
  (synthesis) activities
  
• Child should feel as though s/he is playing while
  learning
  
• Consistently pronounce words slowly and clearly

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• The Language Games
• Listening game Listening to Sounds
• Rhyming Poetry, Songs, and Jingles
• Words and Sentences Introducing the Idea of
  sentences
  
• Awareness of Syllables Clapping Names
• Initial and Final Sounds Guess Who
• Phonemes Two-Sound Words
• Introducing Letters and Spellings Guess Who
  Introducing Sounds and Letters

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Reading Intervention Program

• Reading Recovery Program
• Goal Help struggling students catch up to peers
• Requires a lot of teacher monitoring (11)
• Daily sessions last 30-40 minutes per session and
  run 10-20 weeks

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• Reading Recovery Program Strategies
• Reading left to right
• Using a return sweep rather than a slow return
• Monitoring whether story makes sense
• Searching for cues from context
• Rereading when unclear
• Self-correction

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Important Resources

• http//dibels.uoregon.edu/
• Provides explanation of DIBELS research and
  application
  
• http//reading.uroegon.edu/
• Big Ideas in Beginning Reading
• http//www.nifl.gov
• National Institute for Literacy
• National Reading Panel Update

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Application for CBC

• It is important to understand what is needed to
  promote early reading skills so that problems can
  be identified and treated before negative
  trajectory is established.
• Assessment techniques allow for problem areas to
  be targeted and monitored throughout
  interventions.
  
• Teaching techniques can be used across settings
  to facilitate partnerships in learning.
  
• Consultants can provide consultees with further
  resources to provide guidance throughout reading
  development.
  

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References

• Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read Thinking
  and learning about print. Cambridge, MA MIT
  Press.
  
• Adams, M.J., Foorman, B.R., Lundberg, I,
  Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic Awareness in Young
  Children A classroom curriculum. Baltimore, MD
  Paul H. Brooks Publishing Co.
• Good III, R. H. Dynamic Indicators of Basic
  Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) with CBM. Early
  Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth
  and Development. Eugene, OR.
• Good III, R. H., Simmons, D. C., Smith, S. B.
  (1998). Effective academic intervention in the
  United States Evaluating and enhancing the
  acquistion of early reading skills. School
  Psychology Review. Vol 27, No. 1, pp 45-56.

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References cont.

• Grossen, B. Carnine, D. (1991). Strategies for
  maximizing reading success in the regular
  classroom. In Stoner, G., Shinn, M. R., Walker,
  H. M. (Eds) Interventions for achievement and
  behavior problems. Silver Spring, MD NASP
• Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that
  works The case for balanced teaching. New York,
  NY The Guilford Press.
  
• Snider, V. E. (1995). A primer on phonemic
  awareness What is it, why its important, and
  how to teach it. School Psychology Review, Vol.
  24, No. 3, 443-455.