PHONEMIC AWARENESS
What is it?
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, /k/, , and /t/, requires phonemic awareness. |
Blending Lesson Plan
Teaching Phonological Awareness
How to Teach Phonological AwarenessJust like phonics skills, there is a developmental sequence to teaching phonological awareness skills. Teaching phonological and phonemic awareness is done in the absence of written text.
An in-depth assessment, such as the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP), will help you determine your student’s present level of functioning and set developmentally appropriate goals. Below is the developmental progression of phonological processing skills, followed by specific activities.
Early Developing Skills
Later Developing Skills (words are generally 2-4 phonemes long)
Begin each lesson with a level that your student has mastered and then give easy examples of a new skill or a word with one additional phoneme. Have the student follow your model and gradually increase the length and complexity. End with a different type of phonological task. Remember, phonological awareness tasks need not be boring. A board game or picture flashcards (sorted by the number of phonemes in the word) may be transformed into a phonological awareness game. Experiment with nonsense words. Ask your student to try to "stump" the teacher. Movement makes phonological exercises more engaging.
We highly recommend Louisa Cook Moats' book Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Brookes Publishing, 2010, 2nd edition). Dr. Moats does a superb job connecting oral language to all aspects of print. The tutorial format of the book provides both comprehensive, understandable descriptions as well as concrete examples of the oral language connections.
Phonological awareness is different from phonics (and includes phonemic awareness) and is an essential skill to learn to read. Therefore, it is critical to make this concept explicit for all students with dyslexia. Developmentally appropriate phonological awareness goals should be incorporated into your student's IEP. Instruction should begin with meta-cognition and should be targeted to your student's learning style. Fun activities should allow for mastery and also challenge the student by incrementally increasing the number of phonemes and difficulty of task. Your intervention in this area will help your student with dyslexia to build up the neuro-pathways that are weak and will set him up for success with reading and writing! Success starts here!
An in-depth assessment, such as the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP), will help you determine your student’s present level of functioning and set developmentally appropriate goals. Below is the developmental progression of phonological processing skills, followed by specific activities.
Early Developing Skills
- Rhyming Counting/manipulating words in sentences
- Counting syllables
- Sound-matching
- Identifying initial phoneme in a word
- Identifying final phoneme in a word
- Identifying the medial sound in a word
- Discriminating (same or different) words and phonemes
- Blending and segmenting syllables (cow+boy)
Later Developing Skills (words are generally 2-4 phonemes long)
- Adding or subtracting the initial, final, or medial sounds in words
- Counting the number of phonemes in a word
- Substituting sounds in words (on becomes in)
- Shifting sounds in words (ask becomes aks)
- Repeating sounds in words (kis becomes kiks)
- Blending real and nonsense words
- Adding, subtracting, or re-arranging prefixes and suffixes for multisyllabic words
- All of the above
Begin each lesson with a level that your student has mastered and then give easy examples of a new skill or a word with one additional phoneme. Have the student follow your model and gradually increase the length and complexity. End with a different type of phonological task. Remember, phonological awareness tasks need not be boring. A board game or picture flashcards (sorted by the number of phonemes in the word) may be transformed into a phonological awareness game. Experiment with nonsense words. Ask your student to try to "stump" the teacher. Movement makes phonological exercises more engaging.
We highly recommend Louisa Cook Moats' book Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Brookes Publishing, 2010, 2nd edition). Dr. Moats does a superb job connecting oral language to all aspects of print. The tutorial format of the book provides both comprehensive, understandable descriptions as well as concrete examples of the oral language connections.
Phonological awareness is different from phonics (and includes phonemic awareness) and is an essential skill to learn to read. Therefore, it is critical to make this concept explicit for all students with dyslexia. Developmentally appropriate phonological awareness goals should be incorporated into your student's IEP. Instruction should begin with meta-cognition and should be targeted to your student's learning style. Fun activities should allow for mastery and also challenge the student by incrementally increasing the number of phonemes and difficulty of task. Your intervention in this area will help your student with dyslexia to build up the neuro-pathways that are weak and will set him up for success with reading and writing! Success starts here!
http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/professionals/dyslexia-school/phonological-awareness/teaching-phonological-awareness
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic Awareness Lesson Plan
A phonemic awareness lesson plan…great idea but should be done verbally instead of written since phonemic awareness is about the sounds not the letters.
Phonemic Awareness Worksheets
Classroom Activities to teach Phonemic Awareness
Classroom Activities on Phonemic Awareness By Bridgett Michele Lawrence, eHow Contributor
Teach phonemic awareness with these fun activities.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to break words down into the sounds that individual letters make as well as the sounds letters make when paired with other letters. Phonemic awareness is crucial to the development of word recognition and reading skills in elementary school children. Interactive activities make learning phonics more effective.
Other People Are Reading
References
Read more : http://www.ehow.com/list_7647378_classroom-activities-phonemic-awareness.html
Teach phonemic awareness with these fun activities.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to break words down into the sounds that individual letters make as well as the sounds letters make when paired with other letters. Phonemic awareness is crucial to the development of word recognition and reading skills in elementary school children. Interactive activities make learning phonics more effective.
Other People Are Reading
- Tapping Syllables
- Review familiar words and sounds by having children clap their hands or tap their feet as they say the syllables in the words. This can also be done to introduce new words. For extra fun, musical instruments can be used to make the sound. Challenge the children to think of multisyllabic words for the class to tap out.
- Performing this song and dance is also a way to teach children to break down words into letters and sounds. Begin by giving the class a word with at least two to four phonemes (sounds). Have the students stand and tap their head, shoulders, knees and toes as they sound out the word. For example, for the word "cat", children would touch their head on "c," their shoulders on "a" and their knees on "t."
- Begin the lesson by introducing or reviewing the sound of the day. For example, if the sound of the day is "k" teach children to make the sound then identify the letters and groups of letters that make that sound. Then ask the children to give examples of words that include that sound such as "truck," "bike" and "cat." It is important to point out to the children that the letter "c" can also make the "k" sound. Read a story to the class. Have them identify words in the story that include that sound. Repeat this activity for multiple sounds and have the students keep a chart of the sounds they have learned and their corresponding words.
- Review familiar words and sounds by having children clap their hands or tap their feet as they say the syllables in the words. This can also be done to introduce new words. For extra fun, musical instruments can be used to make the sound. Challenge the children to think of multisyllabic words for the class to tap out.
References
- Reading Resource: Phonemic Awareness Activities
- Reading Rockets: Phonemic Activities for the Preschool or Elementary School Classroom
- Scholastic: Spelling Strategies
Read more : http://www.ehow.com/list_7647378_classroom-activities-phonemic-awareness.html
The Hungry Hungry Rhyming Monster
This is an activity the whole class can participate in and it helps demonstrate the foundations for phonemic awareness.
Phonemic Awareness Presentation
A short mini lesson to freshen up on what phonemic awareness is and what all it entails.
Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness and Kindergarten Readiness
Welcome to featured Friday at Pre-K Pages. Today we have a guest post from Kelly Wilson on how to prepare your child for kindergarten by teaching phonemic awareness skills.
When I heard that my preschooler needed to have strong phonemic awareness in order to be ready for kindergarten, I felt a tinge of panic. I wanted to run to my nearest teacher store and buy any helpful curriculum I could find. Demonstrating phonemic awareness is a vital skill for children entering kindergarten. In fact, “The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness).”
Much to my relief, phonemic awareness is simply understanding and demonstrating oral language skills independent of printed words. This is separate from phonics, which is recognizing and decoding printed letters and words and connecting them with corresponding sounds. In other words, your preschooler doesn’t need to read anything to show phonemic awareness – it’s all about hearing and differentiating sounds.
Use these suggestions with your preschooler anytime and anywhere to develop strong phonemic awareness!
First Sound, Last Sound, Every Sound, Without A Sound
While you’re in the car, turn down the radio and ask your child about something he/she likes – a favorite toy, snack food, or activity.
My son likes to talk about jumping, so I use the word “jump” to discuss the following with him:
- What’s the first sound in the word “jump?”
- What’s the last sound in the word “jump?”
- Let’s say the word “jump” together slowly, making sure we say every sound.
- What does the word “jump” sound like without the “j”?
Rhyming
Rhyming is an essential skill that is also a lot of fun for preschoolers. My son and I start with common rhymes while we’re walking in the grocery store or to the park. The great part about this game is that the words don’t have to make sense; some of the rhyming “words” could be mapple, papple, or lapple. The more nonsensical, the better!
Syllables
Practicing syllables is fun for younger kids because clapping can be incorporated. Start with words that have one syllable, like “cat.” Show your child how you can fit one clap into that word. The second word you might use is your child’s name, like “Dav-id.” Say the word slowly and clap with each syllable.
How Many Words?
This is a fun activity that requires practice. Make up a sentence and ask your preschooler how many words he/she hears. Start with a simple sentence, like “I love you,” and move on to longer sentences.
These simple word games will help your preschooler master the skills necessary for strong phonemic awareness while having fun at the same time!
Kelly Wilson is an editor with Teaching Resource Center, who for twenty-five years has provided high quality, low-cost teaching materials and classroom supplies.
http://www.pre-kpages.com/kindergarten-readiness/
ELL Students and phonemic awareness
This website is more of a reference as to what to do to help your ELL students when they are learning about phonological awareness.
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Teaching ESL Students Reading & Phonemic Awareness
by Robin Schwarz
Spoken language is noise which the experienced listener sorts into meaningful chunks. A child spends many years perfecting this sorting. In a similar way, a learner of a new language must sort out the unfamiliar sounds into pieces that make sense: phrases or sentences, words, syllables and even phonemes (the smallest sound segments). Reading experts have known for years that difficulty with the sorting process, or phonological skills, is directly connected to the reading and spelling problems of many students. More recently, researchers studying native English-speaking students who were having trouble learning a foreign language found that these students have problems similar to those of poor readers and spellers in that they do not perceive and manipulate the sound system and its corresponding written code effectively. In other words, the at-risk foreign language learners also have weak phonological skills. Moreover, the researchers found that when the struggling foreign language students were explicitly taught the phonology of the foreign language, they were able to learn the target language fairly successfully, and also improve their phonological skills.
This was good news for me, as I was searching for a way to help at-risk students in the college-level intensive English program where I teach. Every semester, several of our students, who are certainly capable in many respects, are unable to make progress in their English classes. Typically, they display poor spelling and grammar skills, despite having what I term "lots of language." In other words, they are not lacking in vocabulary or a general idea of how to express themselves; they cannot, however, control their grammar or get beyond that plateau of “fair” communication, a fatal flaw in writing classes. Usually, their reading skills are adequate for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) work, but not for more demanding reading.
When I first decided to find a way to help these students, I began searching the ESL literature for ideas. Because some of our students who had these problems were known to have learning disabilities (LD), having been diagnosed elsewhere before coming to our school, I combed the LD literature. Not much turned up in either field to give me any idea of why the students were having a hard time learning English until I delved into the literature. I decided to try teaching my students English phonology in a much more explicit way than is usually the case in ESL. I also decided to try using some other adaptations in teaching that reportedly had been effective for LD students learning foreign languages in classes adapted to their needs.
Because the foreign language learners who were having difficulties had poor phonemic awareness as well as poor phonological skills, my first priority was clear, direct teaching of the sound system of English.
Another lesson learned from the foreign language research was that the sounds should be taught one at a time in a clear sequence. I chose to start by teaching the short vowels in alphabetical order to match some other ESL materials I had, and I selected appropriate drills or activities.
The process requires lots and lots of repetition. Students with difficulty in the language area require much more time to process information and much more review and practice than average learners.
We continued on to long vowels, and the process became faster because the students had begun to discriminate sounds more accurately and knew what to expect in the activities and practices.
At first, the students, who were of college age or older and many of whom were graduate students, were skeptical of these lessons. When they began to see the results, however, they became enthusiastic and made sure to request handouts missed when they were absent. Those who knew they had made progress, but had not yet mastered the skills, asked if there were some way to have more lessons in a lab or some other classes.
Although there is not much research on teaching phonology to ESL students who are at risk, my students’ experiences clearly demonstrated the benefits of this instruction. Of course, their spelling improved dramatically, and few needed more sustained review and practice to maintain their gains. A more pervasive benefit was that they could perceive individual words in spoken sentences far more accurately than before. This resulted in significantly more accurate dictations and, so the students reported, a noticeably improved ability to follow conversations and proceedings in other classes. In addition to my observations of the students’ increased confidence in many domains, their other teachers reported similar improvements.
Another important benefit of the phonology instruction, though less directly documented outside of our class, was that the students' decoding skills increased significantly. They amazed themselves by reading multisyllabic words with ease. Finally, overall, the students were able to do much better in classes than students with similar problems in our program who had not had such reading intervention.
It is my hope that research will bear out these benefits. In the meantime, our university is benefiting from these instruction methods by retaining students who otherwise might have dropped out of classes and by strengthening the foreign language acquisition skills of at-risk native English-speaking students.
direct link to article
http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/teaching-esl-students-reading-phonemic-awareness
by Robin Schwarz
Spoken language is noise which the experienced listener sorts into meaningful chunks. A child spends many years perfecting this sorting. In a similar way, a learner of a new language must sort out the unfamiliar sounds into pieces that make sense: phrases or sentences, words, syllables and even phonemes (the smallest sound segments). Reading experts have known for years that difficulty with the sorting process, or phonological skills, is directly connected to the reading and spelling problems of many students. More recently, researchers studying native English-speaking students who were having trouble learning a foreign language found that these students have problems similar to those of poor readers and spellers in that they do not perceive and manipulate the sound system and its corresponding written code effectively. In other words, the at-risk foreign language learners also have weak phonological skills. Moreover, the researchers found that when the struggling foreign language students were explicitly taught the phonology of the foreign language, they were able to learn the target language fairly successfully, and also improve their phonological skills.
This was good news for me, as I was searching for a way to help at-risk students in the college-level intensive English program where I teach. Every semester, several of our students, who are certainly capable in many respects, are unable to make progress in their English classes. Typically, they display poor spelling and grammar skills, despite having what I term "lots of language." In other words, they are not lacking in vocabulary or a general idea of how to express themselves; they cannot, however, control their grammar or get beyond that plateau of “fair” communication, a fatal flaw in writing classes. Usually, their reading skills are adequate for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) work, but not for more demanding reading.
When I first decided to find a way to help these students, I began searching the ESL literature for ideas. Because some of our students who had these problems were known to have learning disabilities (LD), having been diagnosed elsewhere before coming to our school, I combed the LD literature. Not much turned up in either field to give me any idea of why the students were having a hard time learning English until I delved into the literature. I decided to try teaching my students English phonology in a much more explicit way than is usually the case in ESL. I also decided to try using some other adaptations in teaching that reportedly had been effective for LD students learning foreign languages in classes adapted to their needs.
Because the foreign language learners who were having difficulties had poor phonemic awareness as well as poor phonological skills, my first priority was clear, direct teaching of the sound system of English.
Another lesson learned from the foreign language research was that the sounds should be taught one at a time in a clear sequence. I chose to start by teaching the short vowels in alphabetical order to match some other ESL materials I had, and I selected appropriate drills or activities.
The process requires lots and lots of repetition. Students with difficulty in the language area require much more time to process information and much more review and practice than average learners.
We continued on to long vowels, and the process became faster because the students had begun to discriminate sounds more accurately and knew what to expect in the activities and practices.
At first, the students, who were of college age or older and many of whom were graduate students, were skeptical of these lessons. When they began to see the results, however, they became enthusiastic and made sure to request handouts missed when they were absent. Those who knew they had made progress, but had not yet mastered the skills, asked if there were some way to have more lessons in a lab or some other classes.
Although there is not much research on teaching phonology to ESL students who are at risk, my students’ experiences clearly demonstrated the benefits of this instruction. Of course, their spelling improved dramatically, and few needed more sustained review and practice to maintain their gains. A more pervasive benefit was that they could perceive individual words in spoken sentences far more accurately than before. This resulted in significantly more accurate dictations and, so the students reported, a noticeably improved ability to follow conversations and proceedings in other classes. In addition to my observations of the students’ increased confidence in many domains, their other teachers reported similar improvements.
Another important benefit of the phonology instruction, though less directly documented outside of our class, was that the students' decoding skills increased significantly. They amazed themselves by reading multisyllabic words with ease. Finally, overall, the students were able to do much better in classes than students with similar problems in our program who had not had such reading intervention.
It is my hope that research will bear out these benefits. In the meantime, our university is benefiting from these instruction methods by retaining students who otherwise might have dropped out of classes and by strengthening the foreign language acquisition skills of at-risk native English-speaking students.
direct link to article
http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/teaching-esl-students-reading-phonemic-awareness