Module 2: Phonological Awareness.

Start With Easier Skills

Research suggests that children typically begin learning the manipulation of larger units of sound, like whole words or syllables, earlier than smaller units of sound. Based on this finding, teachers may find it useful to focus early phonological awareness lessons on larger units of sounds including compound words. These activities are a good place to start because some children master them quickly, and because these activities help call children's attention to the way words sound, separate from their meanings. There are a number of such skills that can be taught, such as blending words into compound words, and working with syllables. For example, children can be taught to combine words to make a compound word (e.g., straw + berry = strawberry), and to divide compound words into the separate words that make them up (e.g., cupcake = cup + cake)

Segmenting

Segmenting is splitting units of language into smaller units (e.g., breaking words into syllables, and syllables into individual sounds).

Good Phonological Awareness Instructional Practices

In the following video, Dr. Lonigan discusses different ways you can help children learn phonological awareness. If, by the end of the school year, the children can do the following, they will have a strong foundation for learning to decode words in kindergarten: 1. Combine words to make compound words and delete a word from a compound word. 2. Combine syllables to make words and delete a syllable from a word. 3. Combine word parts (onset and rime) to form a familiar one-syllable word.

Scaffolding

In the following video, Dr. Whalon discusses the importance of scaffolding in order to allow children with varying special needs to respond to questions. Did you notice how Dr. Whalon suggested using visual supports to allow children with limited language skills to respond in a nonverbal manner? Reflect on how you could access or create visual supports in order to adapt your lessons for children with limited language skills.

Move from Easier Skillsto More Difficult Skills

As children become proficient in their phonological awareness skills, the teacher can begin to introduce more advanced phonological awareness activities. For example, teachers can introduce the concept of onsets and rimes after children have demonstrated some skill at blending and separating syllables in words. Children can be taught to recognize the onset (initial consonant sound or sounds) and rime (vowel and final sounds) of a syllable (e.g., for cat, c is the onset and at is the rime). Once this concept is mastered, children can practice combining onsets and rimes to form words. It will also be possible to ask children to recognize the first sound in words, and then find words that match these initial sounds (e.g., say b is the first sound in bike - can you generate more words that start with b?). This is one of the activities that can help connect children's developing phonological awareness with their developing print knowledge.

Connections between Phonological Awareness and Print Knowledge

Be aware that these more difficult phonological awareness skills also can be supported by the letter name and letter sound knowledge that children are developing from the separate print knowledge lessons they have been experiencing throughout the year, too. However, remember that phonological awareness is exclusively an oral language skill. This means that if your activities involve calling children's attention to printed letters or words you are actually teaching the more advanced skill of phonics not phonological awareness.

Blending

Blending is when smaller units of sound are combined into larger units (e.g., combining phonemes into syllables, or syllables into words).

Using Phonological Awareness Tasks

Did you notice, in the previous video, how the teachers smoothly incorporated phonological awareness questions into children's play? Reflect on the way that teachers can make selective use of these tasks to reinforce skills, and to enliven play and content-area lessons.

Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction is teacher-led, interactive instruction where the teacher makes the children aware of the concepts under study. The teacher models expectations, provides practice with feedback, and provides opportunities for independent practice.

Motivation

From a very young age, children are naturally curious about the language they hear around them. It is rewarding for them to learn to communicate with the people they see on a daily basis. As children learn more about language, they start to notice things about the way language sounds, separate from its meaning. Enjoying the rhythms of nursery rhymes and engaging in other kinds of language play is one way that children start to learn about the sounds of language.

Importance of Phonological Awareness

In the following video, Dr. Christopher Lonigan discusses the role that phonological awareness plays in the acquisition of literacy skills. Pay particular attention to the typical developmental sequence that he presents. - Did you notice how Dr. Lonigan explained that rhyming is not the first skill that children develop in phonological awareness? Reflect on how you can sequence your phonological awareness instruction to match the developmental sequence that Dr. Lonigan explained.

Onset-Rime and Rhyme

Once the concept of onset and rime is mastered, it will be possible to make use of more explicit rhyming activities. For example, the teacher might plan an interactive reading activity asking children to guess or provide the rhyming word that is going to come at the end of the next line of text. Teachers can support phonological awareness skills by reading from different rhyming books. For example, many books make extensive use of rhymes, and teachers can use these rhymes as a springboard for a number of different kinds of activities. For example, earlier in the year teachers can read rhyming books just to expose children to the rhythms and sounds of language; this can be a great way to help children pay attention to the sounds of words, instead of just focusing on what they mean. At the same time, teachers can use rhyming books, and other more explicit activities, to help children learn to identify when two words rhyme, and when they do not. As this can be a particularly difficult concept, the generation of rhyming words is typically most useful as an end of the year activity.

Teachers should systematically plan individualized instruction for some children including formal, planned, one-on-one interactions on a regular basis.

Phonological Awareness Example: As the children arrive in the morning, the assistant teacher greets each child and helps them find a morning activity while the lead teacher chooses one child with whom she will complete compound word puzzles or segment and blend syllable pictures depending on the needs of the individual child.

Teachers should look for other opportunities to pair or group children with mixed abilities. More advanced children can model for, and even assist, children who are not as advanced.

Phonological Awareness Example: During playground time, two children are paired together to use a ball to bounce out and then blend the number of syllables using their own words choices. Another pair of children march around the playground with the teacher stomping for each individual word they hear in a compound word and then saying the separate words. A more advanced child is paired with a struggling child. This pair is tasked with finding examples of one syllable word objects all around the playground.

Teachers should look for opportunities to group children according to ability for both remediation of skills as well as to expand a lesson to children who have achieved mastery. Remember that differentiated instruction applies to challenging children as well as providing additional support.

Phonological Awareness Example: During small group time, the teacher has one group work on segmenting and blending compound words and making new, possibly nonsense, compound words. Another small group may be asked to blend syllables in various words from the word wall. A more advanced group may be asked to match picture cards with the same onset and other picture cards with the same rime. Another advanced phonological awareness skill that can be taught to some children is blending individual sounds, phonemes, to form short words. The teacher encounters children playing with a pan in the housekeeping center. The teacher asks the child to break the word "pan" into individual sounds: "p"-"a"-"n."

Teachers should seek brief, informal interactions throughout the day with each child. These can be accomplished as the teacher circulates during center time or even on the playground.

Phonological Awareness Example: The teacher can ask children to blend and delete syllables in shape names. For example, prompts could include: What word is 'dia' (clear pause) 'mond' together? What is oval without /o/?

Integration Across the Content Areas

Phonological awareness skills can be integrated into instruction for other content areas. One easy way to do this is to ask children to identify words that share an onset, or to practice manipulating syllables in simple words during another class lesson. For example, the teacher might introduce the name of an animal, tool, or fruit during a lesson. As a brief activity within a larger lesson, the teacher might ask the children to remove the final syllable from relevant two-syllable words (e.g., in a lesson on animal habitats ask, what is "penguin" without "guin"?). The teacher can similarly ask children to blend the onset and rime of the target word (e.g., in an art lesson on primary colors ask, what do you get if you put /r /-"ed" together?), or even to identify the first sound.

Working with Syllables in Words

Similarly, children can be taught that words can be broken into syllables. One way to do this is to support children's skill at putting syllables together to form words. For example, children can learn how to blend "ro" - "bot" into "robot". In addition to putting syllables together, teachers can ask children to clap the syllables of a word, and tell how many parts they hear in the words. For example, children can learn how to break up the word "market" into "mar" - "ket". Finally, teachers should plan activities that encourage children to remove syllables from words to leave behind either real words or silly nonsense words. For example, children can learn to take away "ster" from "monster" to get "mon". These beginning skills can be taught first in small group lessons and then reviewed in whole class sessions to provide children with the opportunity to work on their phonological awareness skills in different settings. In addition, graphic displays showing the components of a compound word (e.g., the word strawberry with straw written in one color, and berry written in another) or the first and second syllables of a word can be placed around the room and used as a visual reminder as children begin to acquire print knowledge. Using pictures, bingo tiles, or unifix cubes to represent the syllables in words can help children master these skills as well.

How Can PhonologicalAwareness Be Effectively Taught?

Teachers can plan fun and engaging activities to build phonological awareness skills. There are a number of activities that you can implement in a prekindergarten classroom that will promote the development of children's phonological awareness. A common theme to these activities is that they call children's attention to the way language sounds. As a prekindergarten teacher, your goal is to help children develop a number of phonological awareness skills. For example, take syllables away from words ("baby" without "ba" = "bee") how to blend these sounds into a word, how to split longer words into syllables ("elephant" = "el" - "e" - "phant"), and how to tell if two words share the same ending sounds, or rhyme (among other skills). At the end of the year, some children may even be able to segment words into their individual sounds ("man" = "/m/ /a/ /n/"). Another way of thinking about teaching phonological awareness is to say that your goal is to help children learn to manipulate the sounds of their language.

Modifying Instruction

Teachers need to be aware of the children's individual needs when planning lessons and including differentiated instruction. One common factor that requires the teacher to differentiate their instruction is the presence of English language learners in the class. English language learners can come from a variety of backgrounds. It is important for the teacher to consider the child's native language when thinking about phonological awareness instruction. Some languages will have sounds systems that are similar to the sound system of English, but others will not. The similarity of the child's native language to English can make it easier or more difficult for the child to learn the sounds of English, and to build some of the skills discussed here.

Decoding

The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by using knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences. The process involves deciphering a new word by sounding it out.

Systematic Instruction

The activities that we have described include explicit instruction of phonological awareness and activities that reinforce and extend these skills. It is important for teachers to remember that they do not have to choose between these types of activities and lessons - both are fun, appropriate and useful for teaching phonological awareness skills. In fact, incorporating both explicit instruction and reinforcing activities into the classroom is essential for building a broad and varied plan for teaching phonological awareness skills. It is important to remember that a key factor in teaching phonological awareness is the way that the teachers themselves pronounce the sounds. Providing a model of accurately pronounced sounds for children makes it easier for them to learn about the relationship between sounds and letters, and to learn to blend these sounds together when reading words. This may be a good opportunity to review the video on pronouncing sounds from the Print Knowledge module.

Phonological Awareness Development

The development of phonological awareness skills is a process that takes place over several years - from even before preschool through kindergarten and beyond. Preschool is a critical time to begin learning phonological awareness skills. Younger children can learn to break the stream of speech that they hear into large chunks - words, or the parts of a compound word (blue-berry). They learn to recognize and use these chunks. As this skill develops, children become able to hear and manipulate the smaller, more abstract sound sections of words, like syllables (can-dy). Later, children will be able to distinguish the smallest sound parts, such as the first sounds in words, and then all the sounds, or phonemes in a word, (/l/ /o/ /g/). By the time children finish kindergarten, children are typically able to blend phonemes into short words.

Rime

The final sounds in a syllable (e.g., the /at/ in "bat").

Onset

The initial sound in a syllable (e.g., the /b/ in "bat").

Phonemes

The smallest unit of sound in a language, and typically correspond to individual letters.

What is Phonological Awareness? Why Does It Matter?

The term "phonological awareness" is an umbrella term that includes several different skills related to the sounds of alphabetic languages. Phonemic awareness is the most difficult phonological awareness skill. It is the goal toward which we want children to develop during preschool and kindergarten. But well before children demonstrate phonemic awareness, they can learn and master many other types of phonological awareness.

Effective Instructional Practices

There are many ways to incorporate phonological awareness activities into your classroom. When selecting activities for your classroom, there are a few additional things to remember. Although phonological awareness can be taught in different classroom settings, it is generally best to do phonological awareness instruction with small groups of children. The small group setting gives children more opportunity to practice their skills. It also allows teachers to monitor each child's progress more closely than would be possible in a whole class setting. As you plan your lessons, it is important to keep in mind that systematic phonological awareness instruction does not have to be lengthy to be effective. Small-group lessons of just 10-15 minutes can support children's growth in this skill area. Whole group, transitions, outside play time and centers are great opportunities to reinforce phonological awareness skills.

Syllables

Units of speech that contain a vowel (e.g., the /a/ in "about"), and typically also one or more consonants (e.g., "bat").

Video: Comprehensive Phonological Awareness Instruction

Watch how these teachers introduce and then reinforce children's phonological awareness skills across the day and across the school year with activities in many settings and group sizes. - Did you notice that phonological awareness activities are easy to use throughout the school day, and allow children to build their phonological awareness skills in a number of different settings?