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Phonological Awareness as an Intervention

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Phonological Awareness as an Intervention

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Phonemic Awareness
*Use Elkonin boxes to segment phonemes in words or syllables. Blend sounds moving them from left to right.

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Onset/Rime
*Determine words with the same rime by placing them in the rime house.

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Syllables
* Say a word, clap the syllables, and sort the items by syllables.

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Word Awareness
*Listen to a sentence, move a chip up for each word, and repeat the sentence moving from left to right.

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This toolkit helps teachers and families understand the difference between phonemic and phonological awareness and how to support a child's development of these important reading skills.

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Rhyming and Alliteration
* Match pictures that rhyme by playing concentration

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Nursery Rhyme Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

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Nursery Rhyme Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

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Phonological Awareness Instructional and  Assessment Guidelines

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Phonological Awareness Instructional and  Assessment Guidelines

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This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading. Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading. Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided.

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream

Bow, bow, bow your boat
bently bown the beam.
Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;
Bife is but a beam.

Sow, sow, sow your soat
sently sown the seam.
Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;
Sife is sut a seam.

Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition. Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998). The 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).

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993). Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist. For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom. Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading.

The purposes of this article are to (a) clarify some of the salient findings from research on phonological awareness and reading and (b) translate those findings into practical information for teachers of children with learning disabilities or children who are experiencing delays in early reading. To this end, we answer three questions:

1. What is phonological awareness, and why is it important to beginning reading success?

2. What are documented effective principles that should guide phonological awareness instruction?

3. What principles should guide the assessment of phonological awareness?

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Spoken language can be broken down in many different ways, including sentences into words and words into syllables (e. g., in the word simple, /sim/ and /ple/), onset and rime (e. g., in the word broom, /br/ and /oom/), and individual phonemes (e.g., in the word hamper, /h/, /a/, /m/, /p/, /er/). Manipulating sounds includes deleting, adding, or substituting syllables or sounds (e.g., say can; say it without the /k/; say can with /m/ instead of /k/). Being phonologically aware means having a general understanding at all of these levels.

Figure 1. A continuum of complexity of phonological awareness activities

Operationally, skills that represent children's phonological awareness lie on a continuum of complexity (see Figure 1). At the less complex end of the continuum are activities such as initial rhyming and rhyming songs as well as sentence segmentation that demonstrates an awareness that speech can be broken down into individual words. At the center of the continuum are activities related to segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables into words. Next are activities such as segmenting words into onsets and rimes and blending onsets and rimes into words.

Finally, the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes and the ability to manipulate these phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words. The recent National Research Council report on reading distinguishes phonological awareness from phonemic awareness in this way:

The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51)

Throughout this article we will use the term phonological awareness to mean an awareness at all levels from basic rhyme to phonemic awareness. Only in some specific instances will we use the term phonemic awareness.

At this point, it is important to note that phonological awareness differs distinctly from phonics. Phonological awareness involves the auditory and oral manipulation of sounds. Phonics is the association of letters and sounds to sound out written symbols (Snider, 1995); it is a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations (Adams, 1990). Phonological awareness and phonics are intimately intertwined, but they are not the same. This relationship will be further described in the following section.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. For many children, this begins very early in the course of their language development and is likely facilitated by being read to from books that are based on rhyme or alliteration, such as the B Book by Stanley and Janice Berenstain, 1997, or Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, 1979, (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). As children grow older, however, their basic phonological awareness does not necessarily develop into the more sophisticated phonemic awareness. In fact, developing the more complex phonemic awareness is difficult for most children and very difficult for some children (Adams et al., 1996). However, it is a child's phonemic awareness on entering school that is most closely related to success in learning to read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).

Why is phonological awareness so important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be sensitive to the internal structure of words in order to benefit from formal reading instruction (Adams, 1990; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words. As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness in kindergarten is a strong predictor of later reading success (Ehri & Wilce, 1980, 1985; Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995).

Over the past 2 decades, researchers have focused primarily on the contribution of phonological awareness to reading acquisition. However, the relationship between phonological awareness and reading is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature (Stanovich, 1986). Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading. However, instruction in early reading-specifically, explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondence appears to strengthen phonological awareness, and in particular the more sophisticated phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

Many children with learning disabilities demonstrate difficulties with phonological awareness skills (Shaywitz, 1996). However, many other children have such difficulty without displaying other characteristics of learning disabilities. Although a lack of phonemic awareness correlates with difficulty in acquiring reading skills, this lack should not necessarily be misconstrued as a disability (Fletcher et al., 1994). More important, children who lack phonemic awareness can be identified, and many of them improve their phonemic awareness with instruction. Furthermore, although explicit instruction in phonological awareness is likely to improve early reading for children who lack phonemic awareness, most children with or without disabilities are likely to benefit from such instruction (R. E. O'Connor, personal communication, June 2, 1998).

In short, success in early reading depends on achieving a certain level of phonological awareness. Moreover, instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for most children and seems to be critical for others, but the degree of explicitness and the systematic nature of instruction may need to vary according to the learner's skills (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998), especially for students at risk for reading difficulties. With this in mind, we discuss documented approaches to teaching phonological awareness.

Teaching phonological awareness

There is ample evidence that phonological awareness training is beneficial for beginning readers starting as early as age 4 (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991). In a review of phonological research, Smith et al. (1998) concluded that phonological awareness can be developed before reading and that it facilitates the subsequent acquisition of reading skills. Documented effective approaches to teaching phonological awareness generally include activities that are age appropriate and highly engaging. Instruction for 4-year-olds involves rhyming activities, whereas kindergarten and first-grade instruction includes blending and segmenting of words into onset and rime, ultimately advancing to blending, segmenting, and deleting phonemes. This pattern of instruction follows the continuum of complexity illustrated in Figure 1. Instruction frequently involves puppets who talk slowly to model word segmenting or magic bridges that are crossed when children say the correct word achieved by synthesizing isolated phonemes. Props such as colored cards or pictures can be used to make abstract sounds more concrete. During the last few years, publishers have produced multiple programs in phonological awareness, some of which are based on research. Two of these programs are Ladders to Literacy (O'Connor, Notari-Syverson, & Vadasy, 1998) and Teaching Phonemic Awareness (Adams et al., 1996). Figures 2 through 4 are illustrations of phonemic awareness lessons that are based on examples from these programs.

Figure 2. Instructional activity that teaches synthesis of phonemes into words.

Guess-the-word game

Objective: Students will be able to blend and identify a word that is stretched out into its component sounds.

Materials Needed: Picture cards of objects that students are likely to recognize such as: sun, bell, fan, flag, snake, tree, book, cup, clock, plane

Activity: Place a small number of picture cards in front of children. Tell them you are going to say a word using "Snail Talk" a slow way of saying words (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/). They have to look at the pictures and guess the word you are saying. It is important to have the children guess the answer in their head so that everyone gets an opportunity to try it. Alternate between having one child identify the word and having all children say the word aloud in chorus to keep children engaged.

Figure 3. An Instructional activity that teaches segmentation at multiple phonological levels.

Segmentation activities

Objectives: Students will be able to segment various parts of oral language.

Activity:

1. Early in phonological awareness instruction, teach children to segment sentences into individual words. Identify familiar short poems such as "I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream!" Have children clap their hands with each word.

2. As children advance in their ability to manipulate oral language, teach them to segment words into syllables or onsets and rimes. For example, have children segment their names into syllables: e.g., Ra-chel, Al-ex-an-der, and Rod-ney.

3. When children have learned to remove the first phoneme (sound) of a word, teach them to segment short words into individual phonemes: e.g., s-u-n, p-a-t, s-t-o-p.

Figure 4. An instructional activity that teaches phoneme deletion and substitution.

Change-a-name game

Objective: Students will be able to recognize words when the teacher says the word with the first sound removed.

Activity: Have students sit in a circle on the floor. Secretly select one child and change their name by removing the first sound of the name. For example, change Jennifer to Ennifer or change William to Illiam. As you change the name, the children have to identify who you are talking about.

Extension Ideas: As children become better at identifying the child's name without the first sound, encourage them to try removing the beginning sounds of words and pronounce the words on their own.

After children learn how to remove sounds, teach them to substitute the beginning sound in their name with a new sound. The teacher can model this, beginning with easier sounds (common sounds of consonant s, e.g., /m/, /t/, /p/) and advancing to more complex sounds and sound blends (e.g., /ch/, /st/).

Most early phonological awareness activities are taught in the absence of print, but there is increasing evidence that early writing activities, including spelling words as they sound (i.e., invented or temporary spelling), appear to promote more refined phonemic awareness (Ehri, 1998; Treiman, 1993). It may be that during spelling and writing activities children begin to combine their phonological sensitivity and print knowledge and apply them to building words. Even if children are unable to hold and use a pen or pencil, they can use letter tiles or word processing programs to practice their spelling.

Instruction in phonological awareness can be fun, engaging, and age appropriate, but the picture is not as simple as it seems. First, evidence suggests that instruction in the less complex phonological skills such as rhyming or onset and rime may facilitate instruction in more complex skills (Snider, 1995) without directly benefiting reading acquisition (Gough, 1998). Rather, integrated instruction in segmenting and blending seems to provide the greatest benefit to reading acquisition (e.g., Snider, 1995). Second, although most children appear to benefit from instruction in phonological awareness, in some studies there are students who respond poorly to this instruction or fail to respond at all. For example, in one training study that provided 8 weeks of instruction in phonemic awareness, the majority of children demonstrated significant growth, whereas 30% of the at-risk students demonstrated no measurable growth in phonological awareness (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). Similarly, in a 12-week training in blending and segmenting for small groups (3-4 children) in 2-minute sessions four times a week, about 30% of the children still obtained very low scores on the segmenting posttest and 10 % showed only small improvements on the blending measures (Torgesen et al., 1994).

Torgesen et al. (1994) concluded that training for at-risk children must be more explicit or more intense than what is typically described in the research literature if it is to have a substantial impact on the phonological awareness of many children with severe reading disabilities. Therefore, we recommend two tiers of instruction. The first tier of instruction is the highly engaging, age-appropriate instruction that we introduced earlier. The second tier of instruction includes more intensive and strategic instruction in segmenting and blending at the phoneme level (e.g., Snider, 1995).

Beside content, another issue that requires attention in phonological awareness instruction is curriculum design. From research, we are able to deduce principles for effectively designing phonological awareness instruction. These design principles apply for all students but are particularly important for students who respond poorly to instruction. In the design of phonological awareness instruction, the following general principles increase students' success (Chard & Osborn, 1998):

Start with continuous sounds such as /s/, /m/, and /f/ that are easier to pronounce than stop sounds such as /p/, /b/, and /k/;

Carefully model each activity as it is first introduced;

Move from larger units (words, onset-rime) to smaller units (individual phonemes);

Move from easier tasks (e.g., rhyming) to more complex tasks (e.g., blending and segmenting); and,

Consider using additional strategies to help struggling early readers manipulate sounds. These strategies may include using concrete objects (e.g., blocks, bingo chips) to represent sounds.

Research suggests that by the end of kindergarten children should be able to demonstrate phonemic blending and segmentation and to make progress in using sounds to spell simple words. Achieving these goals requires that teachers be knowledgeable about effective instructional approaches to teaching phonological awareness and be aware of the ongoing progress for each of their students. In the next section, we describe effective ways to assess phonological skills and monitor progress in phonological awareness.

Assessing phonological awareness

Assessment in phonological awareness serves essentially two purposes: to initially identify students who appear to be at risk for difficulty in acquiring beginning reading skills and to regularly monitor the progress of students who are receiving instruction in phonological awareness. The measures used to identify at-risk students must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and separate low and high performers. Measures used for monitoring progress must be sensitive to change and have alternate forms (Kaminski & Good, 1996). In this section, we discuss only measures that have been demonstrated to be valid and reliable. We report the technical adequacy of the measures in the Appendix, rather than in the narrative description of the measure.

As stated earlier, screening measures must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and must separate high from low performers. Measures of automatized color, object, number, or letter naming meet these criteria (Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Burgess, & Hecht, 1997; Wolf, 1991). Segmentation is a second skill that is highly predictive of future reading ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Unlike rapid naming, segmentation is a skill that can be taught, and the instruction of segmentation benefits reading acquisition.

Screening measures must also separate high from low performers. This means that they must address skills that are developmentally appropriate. Phonological awareness skills seem to develop along a continuum from rhyme to segmenting. Typically, students develop the ability to segment words into onset and rime during kindergarten and to segment words into separate phonemes between kindergarten and first grade. Therefore, most first-grade students perform well on an onset-rime measure, whereas most kindergarten students do poorly on a measure of segmenting into individual sounds. In either case it is difficult to separate low and high performers. Although we know a great deal about identifying students at risk for reading difficulties, many questions remain unanswered. We recommend that teachers use a variety of screening measures, including one that measures automatized rapid naming and one that measures phonemic awareness sensitivity or segmenting.

Typically, kindergarten students are screened for risk factors in acquiring beginning reading skills in the second semester of kindergarten. Appropriate screening measures for the second semester of kindergarten include measures that are strong predictors of a student's successful response to explicit phonemic awareness instruction or beginning reading acquisition. Such predictors of successful response to segmenting and blending instruction are the Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (TOPA-K; Torgesen & Bryant, 1993), a Nonword Spelling measure (Torgesen & Davis, 1996), and the Digit Naming Rate (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). Predictors of the successful acquisition of beginning reading skills include automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters (e.g., Wolf, 1991) and segmenting ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Other measures used during the second semester of kindergarten to identify students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills include measures of phoneme deletion.

The measures appropriate for identifying first-grade students at risk for not acquiring reading skills overlap those used in kindergarten. The TOPA-K and onset-rime are no longer appropriate, as students should have developed these skills by the end of kindergarten, whereas segmenting is still an emerging skill. However, tasks such as automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters remain predictors for students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills, as do measures to determine whether students lag behind their peers in phonological awareness, such as measures of segmenting.

When using screening measures, the teacher must establish decision rules for identifying students requiring phonological awareness instruction. The decision rules vary. The TOPA-K has normed scores and provides information to help a teacher decide whether to provide phonemic awareness instruction to students who score one or two standard deviations below the mean. However, there is little research evidence to guide decision making about which children should receive the more intensive phonological awareness instruction.

A second use of measures is to monitor students' progress. Unlike the screening measures, progress-monitoring measures must be sensitive to growth and require multiple forms. The Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy (Kaminski & Good, 1996) fit this requirement and are appropriate for kindergarten and first grade. After the first semester of first grade, teachers may also be interested in monitoring their students' progress in generalizing phonemic awareness to reading and spelling. Two other measures of reading that are sensitive to growth and have alternative forms are oral reading fluency (tasks) and nonsense word reading fluency (Tindal & Marston, 1990).

As with screening measures, teachers must establish decision rules about how to gauge the progress of their students. One way is to establish a baseline by graphing three measurement points before the start of instruction, adding each subsequent data point to the graph, and checking the slope of students' progress. If many students are making slower progress than necessary to reach the level of their average-achieving peers, the teacher can modify the instruction by increasing one or more of the elements in the instructional guidelines. For example, if students are not acquiring segmenting, the teacher may decide to add more scaffolds, such as cards that the students can move as they segment words, thereby making segmenting instruction more explicit, or provide students with more guided practice. If most students successfully respond to instruction but a few respond poorly or not at all, the teacher may decide to place these students in a flexible group to receive more intense instruction. The teacher could also choose to provide some individuals with more intense instruction throughout the day to keep them up with their peers. If the progress-monitoring measures indicate that the first-grade students receiving instruction in phonological awareness lag behind their peers in reading or spelling, the teacher may choose to increase the integrated instruction in letter- sound correspondence and to make stronger the links between segmenting and blending skills and reading. Brief descriptions of the screening and monitoring measures that have demonstrated validity and reliability through research follow. For each measure, we indicate the grade and purpose for which the measure is appropriate. Note that some measures are appropriate for more than one grade level and for both screening and monitoring progress.

Test of phonological awareness- kindergarten

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure of phonemic sensitivity strongly predicts which students will demonstrate high segmenting ability following small-group instruction in phonemic awareness (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). The measure consists of one form with 10 items requiring students to indicate which of three words (represented by pictures) have the same first sound as a target word and 10 items that require students to indicate which of four words (represented by pictures) begins with a different first sound than the other three. The measure is administered to small groups of 6 to 10 children and is untimed. Students receive raw scores that are normed.

Nonword spelling

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students will demonstrate growth in blending and segmenting after small-group phonological awareness instruction. Five nonwords (feg, rit, mub, gof, pid) comprise the measure. Students receive one point for each phoneme that they represent correctly in the spelling.

Digit naming rate

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students are likely to demonstrate growth in blending after small-group phonological awareness instruction. The measure consists of six rows with five single digits per row on an 8 " x 11 " card. The students are timed as they name the digits as fast as they can, beginning at the top and continuing to the bottom. Students complete two trials using cards with differently arranged numbers. The score is based on the average time for the two series.

Yopp-SingerTest of phoneme segmentation

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). This test (Yopp, 1995) consists of 22 items and requires students to separately articulate each phoneme in the presented words. The student receives credit only if all sounds in a word are presented correctly. The student does not receive partial credit for saying /c/ or /c/ /at/ for cat. One feature that differentiates this screening measure from others is that students receive feedback after each response. If the child's response is correct, the test administrator says, "That's right." If the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner tells the student the correct response. Moreover, if the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner writes the error. Recording the errors helps the teacher decide what remediation the student requires. The student's score is the number of items correctly segmented into individual phonemes. The test is administered individually and requires about 5 to 10 minutes per child.

Bruce test of phoneme deletion

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). The Bruce (1964) test assesses phoneme deletion, a more difficult and compound skill than segmenting (Yopp, 1995). The measure consists of 30 one- to three-syllable words drawn from words familiar to children between the ages of 5 and 61/2. The examiner asks students to delete one phoneme from the beginning, middle, or end of a word and to say the word that remains. The positions of deleted phonemes are randomly ordered throughout the test. The test is individually administered and requires 10 minutes to administer.

Auditory analysis test

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure (Rosner & Simon, 1971, cited in MacDonald & Cornwall, 1995) consists of 40 items arranged in order of difficulty from deletion of syllables in compound words to deletion of syllables in multisyllabic words to deletion of phonemes in beginning, middle, and end positions. The teacher asks the student to delete a syllable or phoneme and say the word that is left. The measure is administered individually.

Rapid letter naming, dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). The Rapid Letter Naming, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is another of many measures used to assess the rapid letter-naming ability of students. The measure has 18 alternate forms and consists of 104 randomly selected upper- and lowercase letters presented on one page. The measure is given individually, and students have 1 minute to name as many letters as possible in the order that they appear on the page.

Phoneme segmentation fluency, DIBELS

(End of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen, Monitor Progress). The Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is one of many segmenting measures. The measure has 18 alternate forms. Each form consists of 10 words, each with two or three phonemes, randomly selected from words in the pre-primer and primer levels of the Scribner basal reading series. The measure is administered individually and is timed. Unlike the Yopp-Singer Test, students do not receive feedback on their responses but do receive scores for partially correct answers. In other words, for cat, a student receives a score of 1 for saying /c/, a score of 2 for saying /c/ /at/, or a score of 3 for saying /c/ /a/ /t/. Because this measure assesses the number of correct phonemes per minute, it is sensitive to growth and is, therefore, appropriate for both screening and monitoring progress.

Conclusion

As we noted at the outset of this article, efforts to understand the role of phonological awareness have far exceeded the efforts to relate research findings to classroom practice regarding phonological awareness. This article is an attempt to pull together the valuable information available on the role that phonological awareness plays in early reading development, the research-based teaching strategies that address the needs of all children, the instructional design principles that address the needs of children experiencing delays in early reading development, and the validated instruments available for screening and monitoring students' progress in phonological awareness.

Our description of the role that phonological awareness plays in reading development conspicuously fails to address the connection of phonological awareness and spelling. This failure is not an oversight, nor should it be perceived as a statement of our beliefs regarding the importance of spelling. We firmly believe that findings from spelling research (e.g., Ehri, 1998; Templeton, 1995; Treiman, 1993) represent such a significant part of our knowledge base about reading that they would go far beyond the length and scope of this article.

Recent research on phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, including how to teach and assess them, has made an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of how to teach reading to children with learning disabilities or delays in early reading. It is not, however, a cure for reading disabilities, but a significant advance in preventing and correcting reading difficulties so that more children are prepared to learn how to read in our alphabetic writing system.

About the authors

David J. Chard, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at The University of Texas at Austin. His current interests include research in professional developmental in early reading and analysis of children's discourse in mathematics classrooms. Shirley V Dickson, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at Northern Illinois University. Her interests are in research on phonological awareness and reading instruction and collaboration models in special education. Address: David J. Chard, University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of Special Education, SZB 408, Austin, TX 78712.

Appendix

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This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading. Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

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Successful Phonological Awareness Instruction with Preschool Children 

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Successful Phonological Awareness Instruction with Preschool Children 

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What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness and phonics are terms describing two related constructs that often are confused. Phonological awareness is distinct from phonics. Whereas phonological awareness is a measurable capability that each child can possess in smaller or greater amounts, phonics is a method of reading instruction that focuses on the associations of letter sounds with printed letters or groups of letters. Having strong phonological awareness skills likely aids children in benefiting from phonics instruction.

Another important distinction to be made is between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. In this case, one is a subtype of the other. Phonological awareness represents a range of manipulation and detection skills across different sizes of sound pieces. Phonemic awareness, however, specifically refers to the ability to manipulate and detect the smallest sound pieces in words, the phonemes (e.g., /b/, /s/, and /th/ all are phonemes). For example, the ability to say that the word "hat" has three phonemes, or to know that the sounds /p/ /i/ /g/ together make up the word "pig," are indications that a child possesses phonemic awareness.

Why Phonological Awareness is Important for Later Reading

Children's understanding that words are made up of smaller sounds like syllables and phonemes helps them to "break the code" of written language and acquire the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle refers to the fact that written words represent spoken words in a sound-by-sound correspondence. Sounds are signified by a single letter, or, in some cases, several letters indicating a single sound in a word (e.g., "sh" and "ch"). When teachers and parents tell a child who is trying to write or read to "sound it out," this suggestion will only make sense if the child grasps the concept that the word can be broken down into these smaller components. Phonological awareness, letter name knowledge, and letter sound knowledge come together in young children to forge this conceptual understanding and to facilitate reading and writing development. This is accomplished when children use their understanding of the regular relationships between sounds and letters to sound out unknown words ( Ehri, 2002; Foorman et al., 2003; Phillips & Torgesen, 2006; Share & Stanovich, 1995). A strong grasp of phonological awareness also may help children understand that the alphabetic principle applies despite the fact that in English, two or more letters can stand for the same sound in different words (e.g., "c" in cat and "k" in koala both represent the /k/ sound and "ee" "ea" and "ei" spelling patterns all can signify the long /e/ vowel sound, as in n eed, t eam, and rec ei ve.).

Research by Lonigan and colleagues (e.g., Lonigan, 2004a; Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, & Barker, 1998) and others (e.g., Bowey, 1995; Chaney, 1994; Hecht, Burgess, Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 2000; Raz & Bryant, 1990; Webb, Schwanenflugel, & Kim, 2004) has shown consistently that preschool and early school age children from lower-income backgrounds and those whose parents have less education demonstrate lower phonological awareness skills than more affluent peers. This discrepancy holds for the other key emergent literacy skills of print knowledge and oral language as well. Data indicate that there is a persistent gap in skill level and in rate of new skill acquisition ( Lonigan, 2003, 2007a; 2007b). Current theory suggests that these social class differences in early skill levels likely are related to early language environments and vocabulary development (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Landry, Smith, Millar-Loncar, & Swank, 1997; Lonigan, 2003, 2007a) as well as to the general home literacy environment (e.g., Evans, Shaw, & Bell, 2000; Lonigan, Dyer, & Anthony, 1996; Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Phillips & Lonigan, 2005; 2007). Such findings suggest that instruction in phonological awareness and other emergent literacy skills is especially critical for preschool children from these at-risk backgrounds, if early education is to meet its aspirational goal of closing the gap in educational achievement for children who grow up in conditions of poverty.

Phonological awareness, as with other decoding skills, is not an intuitive or naturally developing ability, as language skills may be for some children, but rather may require deliberate teaching and practice opportunities. The greater challenge in learning is, in part, because phonemes do not naturally exist in spoken language. When both children and adults speak, they do not distinctly pronounce each isolated phoneme. Instead, human speech includes what is called "co-articulation" of the speech sounds, with each phoneme affected by the ones preceding it, subsequent to it, or both. For example, not all words that begin with the letter b include the same version of the /b/ phoneme. When we say words such as "bit," "bright," or "body," the phoneme is pronounced differently, depending on what vowel or consonant comes after (test this yourself by noticing your own mouth movements while saying the /b/ sound in these words). The fact that phonemes do not exist as distinct units of sound when people speak, and that children and adults may be more disposed to pay attention to the meaning of words than to the specific sounds of words, represents a potential barrier to developing phonological awareness at the phoneme and larger unit levels. This suggests that a key early focus of phonological awareness instruction for many children is to prompt them to learn to attend to the sound structure of words, in addition to what the words mean.

The Developmental Continuum of Phonological Awareness

A growing amount of research with young children demonstrates that the normative developmental progression of phonological awareness skill is from larger to successively smaller units of sound ( Adams, 1990; Anthony, Lonigan, Driscoll, Phillips, & Burgess, 2003; Anthony et al., 2002; Blachman, 1994; Lane, Pullen, Eisele, & Jordan, 2002). As depicted in the continuum of skill development moves from the capacity to manipulate words, such as words in phrases and words within compounds (rain + bow = rainbow), to the syllable level (sister - /sis/ = /ter/), to onset-rime (/b/ + ird = bird), and finally to phonemes (/m/+/o/+/p/ = mop). In linguistic terminology, the onset of a syllable (or word, in the case of single syllable words) is the initial consonant, consonant cluster (e.g., "cl"), or digraph (e.g., "sh") in a word, and the rime of a syllable (or word, in the case of a single syllable word) is the vowel and the remainder of the phonemes after the vowel. Note that in the squares representing these levels of linguistic complexity overlap. This overlap represents the fact that the growth of phonological awareness is best represented as a continuum. It is not a sequential stage model in which children must demonstrate full mastery of a skill at one level before beginning to develop skill in the next level; rather, children's skills in multiple levels of the continuum may develop at the same time ( Anthony et al., 2003).

The other way in which children's phonological awareness skill develops is across different types of tasks with varied difficulty. Tasks that assess or teach phonological awareness can include identity tasks (e.g., rhyme oddity, first sound matching), synthesis tasks (e.g., syllable or phoneme blending) or analysis tasks (e.g., word or syllable segmenting or deleting, phoneme counting tasks). Blending tasks typically are easier to manage than are analysis tasks and tasks requiring production are more challenging than recognition tasks. Also, as will be discussed below, tasks supported by visual props or that use multiple-choice items often are simpler for children than those that require more memory or verbal production.

What the Continuum Suggests for Instructional Practice

One pragmatic implication of this continuum of phonological awareness along levels of linguistic complexity and cognitive operation is that at any given point in time, a classroom of preschool children will include children at numerous points along the continuum. Therefore, a teacher's initial task is to use formal or informal assessment to identify where each child is showing mastery. Whereas some children may enter the preschool classroom with relatively advanced skills, many others, likely those with one or more familial risk factors or language delay, may demonstrate very underdeveloped skills and perform quite poorly on initial assessments or informal probes. However, there is no evidence that could be interpreted to mean that teachers need to postpone phonological awareness instruction until children reach kindergarten age or until they show mastery in non-linguistic sound discrimination and matching (e.g., musical tones). In fact, regardless of their initial level of phonological awareness, children clearly can make substantial and significant progress in phonological awareness without attending to, or specific knowledge of, their auditory discrimination skills (e.g., Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991; Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen, 1988; Lonigan, Phillips, & Menchetti, 2006; Lonigan, Farver, Menchetti, Phillips, & Eppe-Chamberlain, 2005; Lonigan, Schatschneider, Westberg, et al., in press-a).

It is likely that preschool teachers will be confronted with substantial diversity of knowledge in each new group of children. At present, with respect to phonological awareness instruction, there is no empirical evidence either in favor of or against the idea of matching instruction to the child's current skill level (i.e., as opposed to starting all children at the same point, or only teaching one level of the continuum). Early childhood pedagogical research and theory (e.g., Bedrova & Leong, 2006; Berk & Winsler, 1994; Rogoff, 1990) does, however, support the concept of teaching within the near range of children's abilities. Thus, we recommend that teachers become proficient in teaching at multiple levels of the phonological awareness continuum and in understanding what tasks are more or less challenging than others. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of instructional approaches with empirical support include small group or individualized instruction ( Lonigan et al., 2006; Rashotte, MacPhee, & Torgesen, 2001; What Works Clearinghouse, 2007a). Therefore, we suggest that findings from an initial assessment of children should lead to grouping children into homogeneous subgroups, and then instruction should focus on the appropriate level of the continuum for each group. As these children may progress along the continuum at different rates, these groupings should be flexible and children regrouped as indicated by ongoing assessment.

Instructional suggestions provided throughout this paper are derived not only from developmental and experimental findings but also from principles of universal design. That is, these pedagogical methods are intended to be appropriate for children with a wide range of cognitive and sensory abilities, including those with developmental disabilities and delays. The instructional principles described are fully consistent with current best practices for children with developmental disabilities and delays (i.e., small group instruction, explicit instruction, individualized differential instruction, scaffolding techniques; see also Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998). Further, as detailed below, many of the experimental studies in which these methods have been evaluated included significant representation of children with a range of developmental disabilities, primarily children with speech and language disabilities and delays (e.g., Lonigan et al., 2005, 2006).

Despite the evidentiary support for the efficacy and benefits of phonological awareness instruction in this age group, recent observational research indicates a striking absence of such instruction occurring in preschool classrooms. In a recent intervention study, nine classrooms assigned to a "business as usual" condition were repeatedly observed during a 2-year period. The observers encountered phonological awareness activities, regardless of the group size or whether they were explicit or implicit, in only 12 −15% of the observations ( Phillips et al., 2007). Similarly, in a recent multi-state study of state-funded pre-k, researchers found a relatively low average rating for the instructional climate of classrooms, indicating that intentional instruction and use of small group instruction were rare, irrespective of the targeted skills ( NCEDL, 2005). In particular, the time spent on letter or sound activities averaged 3% and time spent in small groups averaged just 6% of the total daily time allocation.

Perhaps one reason for the dearth of phonological awareness instruction in preschool classrooms is the concern expressed by some members of the early childhood education community that preschool is too early to begin phonological awareness or other letter and sound focused instruction, or that because of the children's age it would not be effective or appropriate ( Alliance for Childhood, 2006; Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; Elkind, 1987; Olfman, 2003). One of the most notable conclusions of the forthcoming National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) report, however, is that phonological awareness interventions had an equivalent, and substantial, effect on children regardless of whether they were of kindergarten or preschool age ( Lonigan et al., in press-a). Further, results showed that children's skills improved significantly regardless of the level of their print-related skills at the outset of intervention. From a broader perspective, the recent research studies conducted by Lonigan and colleagues, and by other early childhood educational researchers, clearly refute the notion that early educators have to choose dichotomously between imaginative, play-based, and developmentally-focused activities and activities that enhance early literacy skills such as phonological awareness. Rather, these and similar studies show that children can benefit from well-designed early literacy instruction in a developmentally appropriate preschool context that also involves daily opportunities for independent exploration, dramatic play, and other important activities of early childhood ( Landry, Swank, Smith, Assel, & Gunnewig, 2006; Lonigan et al., 2005, 2006; Phillips & Lonigan, 2005). In fact, empirically supported instructional methods rely on very consistent, but brief and interactive small group or individual sessions lasting no longer than 10-15 minutes a day ( Ehri et al., 2001; Lonigan et al., in press-a; What Works Clearinghouse, 2007a). Such findings support the idea that effective phonological awareness instruction can be integrated into a curriculum that simultaneously supports the development of children's language, social, motor, and general knowledge and interests.

The Issue of Rhyme

Long before researchers and educators became aware of the powerful link between phonological awareness and reading, parents and teachers of young children have been singing songs, reading books, and playing games associated with rhyming. Many have experienced a child's enjoyment of the cadence and humor in these rhyming texts. The assumption that rhyming falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness abilities has led many educators to either assume that the rhyming activities already present within their curriculum were sufficient for building skills or to expect that rhyming is among the easiest of the phonological awareness capabilities and that it should be a central focus of early literacy activities ( Snow et al., 1999; Culatta, Kovarsky, Theadore, Franklin, & Timler, 2003; Majsterek, Shorr, & Erion, 2000).

Although rhyming is indeed part of the phonological awareness construct (e.g., Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Anthony et al., 2002; Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000), evidence shows that rhyming is not necessarily the most evidence-based of the pedagogical choices or the simplest phonological awareness skill to master ( Lonigan, 2007b; Woods, 1998). To understand why this is the case, consider that rhyming activities might involve identifying which two of three words rhyme in a matching task or identifying which word in a trio does not rhyme with the others (e.g., 'rhyme oddity'). Another popular task and instructional game, potentially the most challenging of all, is rhyme production (i.e., responding correctly to a query of, "Say a word that rhymes with 'boat'"). All of these rhyme tasks rely on the basic fact that words rhyme because they share a common rime, or ending sound, and thus, these tasks represent assessment or instruction of skills near the middle of the developmental continuum of phonological awareness. Indeed, evidence from some developmental and intervention samples indicates that contrary to popular belief, competence at these types of rhyme matching, oddity, and production tasks arrives on average at an older age than does the capability to manipulate segments of compound words, syllables, and perhaps even some phoneme-level skills ( Dorr, 1999; Lonigan, 2007b).

One way of explaining why rhyme manipulations are actually more difficult then they may appear is to do a kind of task analysis and break down the component abilities within the successful performance of a rhyme oddity problem, for example. Suppose a child is confronted with three pictures, one of a cat, a bat, and a pig. To correctly identify pig as the odd-one-out, the child must first know what it means to rhyme--that words share the same ending sounds. The child must then attend to the sound structure in all three words, and mentally segment the /at/ and /ig/ sounds from the onsets of /c/, /b/, and /p/. She or he then has to compare these ending vowel-consonant rime sounds across the three words. Finally, the child needs to conclude that cat and bat share a rime whereas pig has a different rime. Imagine how much more complex the task might be for a four- or five-year-old child if instead of pig, he or she was faced with the same task using the words cup, cat, and bat. Now, the word cup shares an onset with one of the other two words--a possible challenge to his or her focus on words sharing ending, rather than beginning sounds ( Carroll & Snowling, 2001).

Of course, none of this implies that children will not enjoy exposure to nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss books and other rhyming classic and more modern texts and songs. It is also possible that such exposure may aid children in learning to pay attention to the sound structure in words as well as the semantic structure. However, the instructional implications from the developmental and efficacy research are several. First, it is likely that teachers who mistakenly consider rhyme manipulations or productions to be entry-level skills that children can master readily may find themselves frustrated and bewildered by the confusion and poor performance demonstrated by their students. Second, the studies suggest that if teachers are to include a focus on rhyming in their instructional plans, then the expectation likely needs to be that children will benefit from repeated exposure, explicit teaching of what it means to rhyme, and a high degree of scaffolding (i.e., supportive verbal prompts and modeling; Roth, Troia, Worthington, & Dow, 2002). Moreover, given the metalinguistic skills involved, it may be best to teach rhyming in the context of explicit onset - rime instruction, rather than as a stand-alone activity. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the findings suggest that teachers looking for an efficient and effective linguistic focus may be better served by teaching children phonological awareness via word, syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme level manipulations, rather than exclusively or predominantly through more traditional rhyming activities.

Pedagogical Strategies for Young Children

The instructional strategies presented below are derived from the processes and outcomes of three curriculum and intervention studies with preschool children that produced statistically significant and educationally meaningful effects on the children's phonological awareness development ( Lonigan, 2004b; Lonigan et al., 2005, 2006). Children served within these studies included typical children, children with mild, moderate, and severe developmental disabilities, and English Language Learners. These projects were conducted in collaboration both with certified teachers serving Title I pre-kindergarten children and with non-certified teachers in Head Start Centers and other child care settings.

The goal here is to summarize the core pedagogical content knowledge accrued during the development and implementation of these studies and several other ongoing projects with the same age group and younger children. These suggestions also are consistent with the methodologies of the effective studies surveyed by the NELP and the What Works Clearinghouse in their respective comprehensive reviews of early code-focused instruction ( Lonigan et al., in press-a; What Works Clearinghouse, 2007a; 2007b). Although not promoting a particular curriculum or specific instructional activities, the information reviewed below may assist early childhood teachers in scrutinizing, selecting, or developing the phonological awareness component of classroom curricula. Throughout each of the following sections are examples of accommodations and modifications that may be useful when working with children with developmental disabilities and delays, and ways in which speech language pathologists and other early intervention specialists can provide integrated small group and individualized instruction that supports both individual children's Individualized Education Plan goals and the needs of the inclusive classrooms.

Systematic and explicit instruction

A teacher whose goals include providing every child with the opportunity to make substantial advances in his or her phonological awareness capabilities is unlikely to find that incidental or implicit instruction alone will suffice. Incidental instruction relies on seizing the moment to bring up a phonological awareness topic in interactions with children, typically prompted by a text or song with rhymes or by something a child says that prompts attention to the sound structure in words, rather than intentionally introducing these topics in planned instructional sequences. Likewise, implicit instruction in phonological awareness, albeit more planful, typically focuses exclusively on exposure to different sound patterns and on teachers commenting about shared sounds between words. To varying degrees, both incidental and implicit instruction carry the presumption that all children bring to the instructional situation a level of conceptual understanding by which they can benefit from this type of instruction. For phonological awareness instruction this conceptual understanding (i.e., the knowledge and skills necessary to help children think about and understand the learning process and its goals) would include aspects such as the understanding that they should attend to the sound structure of words, an understanding of what it means to blend sounds, and the knowledge of what it means for words to rhyme.

It is clear from developmental and observational research that a presumption of children's preexisting conceptual understanding is inaccurate in many classroom contexts ( Neuman & Roskos, 1993; Zill & Resnick, 2006). Therefore, many children require a more explicit and systematic type of instruction that follows a carefully planned scope and sequence and that intentionally includes a focus on building conceptual understandings in the process of helping children to master specific tasks. There are several key elements to providing systematic and explicit instruction. These include instructional sequencing, modeling, and explaining the task, scaffolding, and providing corrective feedback. Each of these is described below in the context of phonological awareness instruction for the preschool age group.

Instructional sequencing requires the teacher to plan ahead of time what is going to be taught, (e.g. phonological awareness skills), the order in which it is going to be taught (e.g., compound words - syllables - onset and rime -- phoneme), the pacing of instruction, and how it is going to be taught (e.g., whole group, small group, or one-on-one). A lesson plan that includes these details serves as the teacher's "instructional road map" and should reflect the coherent and intentional design as well as the planned presentation of the instruction. Classroom management strategies that encourage children to learn routines and schedules also help enable teachers to maximize the instructional time during each day and to insure that children receive the level of instructional intensity they need to learn these novel concepts and skills. Moreover, well-managed transitions and small groups help support the needs of children with attention and behavioral difficulties, a significant challenge that in many children goes hand in hand with developmental disabilities and difficulties in learning to read ( Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002; Nelson, Benner, & Gonzales, 2003: Torgesen et al., 1999).

During instructional activities, pacing can contribute to student attentiveness if it moves quickly but not so fast as to cause unnecessary errors. A fast pace helps students stay engaged, provides more practice time, and helps students maintain on-task behavior--thus reducing behavior management problems ( Zanolli, Daggett, & Pestine, 1995). One way to maintain an optimal pace is to limit the number of different lesson formats so that children can focus their attention on the conceptual tasks at hand, rather than on learning a new procedural or game sequence. Likewise, limiting task variability within the instructional session makes learning the task easier. Attempting to teach too many skills in one session can be overwhelming for the novice learner. Limiting the focus of each phonological session to a single skill is effective and efficient as it reduces the complexity of introducing numerous skills that would increase the memory demands for the child. Pacing considerations may be particularly important when working with children with cognitive and language impairments, as they may benefit from a slightly slower pace and more "wait time" to allow them to process the verbal and visual prompts and formulate a response.

Planned redundancy or systematic review helps preschool age children gain mastery over newly acquired skills. This means that newly introduced skills, concepts, and vocabulary need to be repeated and revisited as a natural occurrence throughout not just the day, but as a planned on-going cycle throughout the year. Young children need to use newly acquired skills in multiple settings to help them gain proficiency. Setting up the classroom environment and teacher-child interactions to provide children with multiple opportunities to explore and utilize newly acquired skills and concepts is a vital means of supporting and encouraging phonological awareness development. As an analogy, a print rich environment provides many opportunities for children to see and actively engage in print-related activities (e.g., having a classroom library, a listening center, a writing center, displaying examples of children's writing around the room, taking dictation on children's art work, and demonstrating writing during group time, to name a few). In the same way, an environment in which teachers include review of phonological awareness instruction as brief transitional activities and as whole group games, where the picture cards and props from the instructional groups are made available to children for independent play, and where teachers seize opportune moments for incidental reinforcement can support children's mastery of these new skills and can contribute to the rich language and conceptual milieu of the classroom. An observer in a classroom abundant in phonological awareness would see planned, systematic, explicit instruction in one of the phonological awareness modules taking place with small groups of children. The instructional format would be game-like in manner and utilize visual props and hand signals. The teacher would rotate small groups until all the children participated. Additionally the teacher would make connections throughout the day to reinforce the phonological awareness lesson. For example, if the lesson had been on compound words the teacher might have compound word cards in the writing center, books with multiple examples of compound words in the reading center, an art activity focusing on creating pictures of the two independent words of a compound word, transition signals utilizing compound words and so on.

Some children with disabilities or classroom behavioral difficulties may benefit from additional structured practice with the teacher or an early intervention specialist, particularly with newly introduced concepts and with novel additions to the classroom environment. For example, if the teacher adds a set of rhyming word puzzles to the writing center for independent exploration, some children may need more explicit guidance on how to interact meaningfully with the new materials.

A hallmark of explicit instruction is that it includes specific teacher statements and behaviors that make it very clear to the students both what they are being asked to do and what it looks like when accomplished. Instructional strategies typically utilized include defining the concept (e.g., "compound words are words made up of two separate words combined together to make a new, different word"), modeling and explaining ("when I put 'sea' and 'shell' together, they become 'seashell'"), providing guided practice with feedback, and following with supported practice then independent practice. These different types of practice relate to how much support, or scaffolding, a child needs to be able to successfully produce the targeted behavior (e.g., saying the compound word or identifying the piece left when a sound piece is removed). The scaffolding is directed at providing just the right amount of support for the child to arrive at the correct answer or perform a skill independently. Support may include verbal cues or reminders after an error occurs. The error may indicate a skill or conceptual deficit; in which case, the skill may need to be further divided into smaller steps or task-analyzed to help the child gain mastery. Other types of support may include repeated modeling, providing additional examples, and guided practice. For example, during an activity on compound words, a child may have difficulty blending the two separate words into one. The teacher may say, "What word is this, 'cow' (2 second pause) 'boy'?" If the child does not answer, the teacher can repeat with a shorter pause between the two words, "What word, 'cow' (1 second pause) 'boy'." Additionally, the teacher could use pictures during this activity. She could hold up a picture of a cow and a boy. When the words are said separately the two pictures are held apart, and when the words are said together the teacher moves the pictures together and asks, "What word?"

Feedback to children is most effective when it is specific, positive, frequent, and immediate. Effective feedback is specific as opposed to generic (e.g., "You're right, the first sound in deer and dog is /d/"--not "Good job."). Frequent positive reinforcement is especially important during the skill acquisition phase when the child is learning the new skill. Positive feedback should be provided immediately following the desired behavior or response; this lets the child know what he or she is doing right. Likewise, when providing corrective feedback it is important to distinguish whether the error is due to a lack of knowledge or a lack of attentiveness. A lack of knowledge indicates a skill limitation requiring the appropriate instructional support and additional scaffolding. A lack of attention on the part of the student requires the teacher to focus on the child's motivation and increase his or her eagerness to learn or to focus on minimizing distractions in the environment. Within these instructional contexts, the provision of corrective feedback is not "high stakes" for the children, and all children can feel successful, motivated, and supported regardless of their actual performance. Positive feedback for even partially correct responses or good efforts may be especially important for maintaining the motivation and attention of children, such as those who may have cognitive delays, who may initially struggle with some of these activities.

Specific pedagogical features important for phonological awareness instruction

One of the most salient features of phonological awareness instruction is the importance of clear and consistent articulation. Many letters--especially vowels--have more than one sound. The most common sound of a letter is the one produced in a short, one-syllable word, such as sun or mad. For vowels, the most common sound is the short vowel sound (the a in bat, e in set, i in fit, o in hot, and u in nut). When producing letter sounds, it is important to understand the difference between stop sounds and continuous sounds (i.e., most fricatives, nasals, and approximants). A stop sound can only be "said" for an instant, whereas continuous sounds can be said for several seconds. Holding a stop sound for longer than an instant distorts its sound. For example, the letter b makes the /b/ sound, not /buh/. It is critical not to add the 'uh' at the end of any letter sound, as it will cause confusion for the child. When making a continuous sound the voice should be held in a monotone fashion without raising or lowering the voice in a "sing-song" manner. For example the letter m makes the /mmm/ sound. Again, this is to avoid confusion (imagine the misunderstandings and opportunities for errors children might experience when a teacher sounds out the word 'stop' in this manner /ssSs/ /tuh/ /OOo/ /puh/ and then asking the child, "What word?").

As children will repeat the teacher's model, it is imperative that the modeled letter sound production be articulate and clear. Teachers also need to model correctly the space between sounds when conducting blending/segmenting activities. In multisyllabic words, teachers need to be very careful not to repeat letter consonant sounds in words that contain repeated consonants such as butter (bu/ter; not but/ter). In Standard American English, the letters that make stop sounds are: b, c, d, g, j, k, p, q, t, and x. The letter h and the 'ch' sound, although not stop sounds, also can be challenging to articulate without adding extra sounds. The letters that make continuous sounds are: a, e, f, i, l, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, y, and z.

Scaffolding children's learning

Nonverbal cues can be used to support children's task engagement and understanding, to maintain good pacing, and to minimize behavioral problems during instruction. Many classrooms are filled with a variety of nonverbal cues, signals that alert the children to a transition, a request, or some other requirement without the teacher having to speak. For example, many teachers blink the lights on and off (or ring a bell) to cue the children that it is time to stop what they are doing, clean up, and get ready for the next activity. The visual and auditory cues can be seen or heard by all the children simultaneously. Research on the use of signals ( Cowart, Carnine, & Becker, 1976) indicates that the use of signals by a teacher resulted in the students attending more and responding at higher levels.

Nonverbal cues can be used during small group time to signal a child to respond after a teacher directive. For example if a child starts to speak while the teacher is explaining directions, the teacher can hold up her hand like a stop sign to signal the child to wait until talking. This is less obtrusive and keeps the group focused on the lesson. The teacher may also want to teach the students that different hand signals mean different things depending on the nature of the task. For example, during a lesson on compound words, when the teacher holds the picture cards apart the children say the two words with a pause between them (segmenting); when the pictures are placed side-by-side the students say the words together (blending). Another positive implication of the use of signals is that it allows the student the opportunity to initiate his or her own response ( Carnine, Silbert, & Kameenui, 1997).

One successfully implemented, strategic use of nonverbal cues is to introduce hand and body gestures to accompany the auditory phonological awareness activities. The most ubiquitous and familiar version of this is clapping while counting, such as clapping the number of words in a phrase or the number of syllables in the children's names. Going beyond that, teachers in experimental intervention studies have found that physical movements that represent the act of putting sounds together or taking them apart can be a useful augmentation during word-, syllable-, and phoneme-level blending or elision tasks. Teachers can model gestures such as holding hands wide apart and then bringing them together to represent the concept and action of blending two syllables or compound word elements. Children may also be taught to use such gestures themselves when they are engaged in these blending and segmenting activities. Children with limited oral language or mobility can be given adaptive response modalities such as pointing, nodding, or using images within their communication boards.

Given that phonological awareness activities require a child to hold a representation of multiple sound pieces in memory while performing a manipulation (i.e., blending or separating sounds), the use of picture or object props can help ease the memory load and enable better task performance. A child who can be looking at the image of a pony, for example, is likely to bring more cognitive resources to bear on the task of producing the segment 'po' when asked "what you get when you say pony without 'ne'" than will a child who must also remember the original word. Perhaps more importantly, the use of pictured items allow for children to demonstrate gradual skill mastery via less taxing multiple-choice, matching, and similar activities in which they can point to a picture to indicate their response. These tasks are lower on the continuum of task difficulty than are tasks in which a child is asked to produce the target word or component sound section of a word. Pictures of the words may be especially useful when manipulating compound words, such that you can display both the component word pictures and the image of the compound word, and when pictures are cut into the same number of puzzle pieces as component parts (e.g., cutting a picture of a banana into three pieces). Using pictures and other visual props also allows children with limited expressive language abilities--because of delay, developmental disability, or English Language Learner status--to actively participate in the interactive learning in the preschool context. It would be particularly useful to build pictures from these activities into the communication boards of children with limited oral language. Likewise, adding knobs, hooks, or other easily grasped devices onto picture cards, or using enlarged copies can allow students with limited fine motor skills or impaired vision more independence. Of course, for a child who is demonstrating strong performance with visual support, removing the pictures can appropriately increase the challenge and allow for generalization to words that are not as easily pictured (e.g., adjectives, verbs, etc.).

The use of boxes or markers to represent each word, syllable, or phoneme can help make oral activities more concrete for young children ( Castiglioni-Spalten, & Ehri, 2003). A number of evidence-based phonemic awareness curricula make use of these visual aids, and some evidence suggests that the use of blank markers can be an intermediary step between purely auditory and writing-linked activities, in which the next step would be to use individual letter tiles to represent each phoneme.

Many of the activities teachers use to teach phonological awareness may include multiple-choice type tasks where the child is asked to choose the option that rhymes with or starts or ends with the same sound as a presented word. This type of task also can work well with some blending or deletion tasks where the target choice is the correct remainder when a sound is removed (i.e., a picture of a key, when the teacher says "point to monkey without the /mon/ sound"). In developing such activities, it is important to keep in mind that the nature of the alternative, incorrect choices presented can increase or decrease the difficulty level of the task. For example, in a rhyming task where the presented word is "bug" the task would be harder if one of the foils was "bus" or "nut", both words that share sound elements with the cue word without sharing the target sound of the rime. Likewise, in a blending task for compound words, having the component words be among the choices, along with the complete compound, increases the challenge as it forces the child to focus very specifically on the sound assembly task that yields the correct response, and not to just choose an option that seems to sound like the cue words (i.e., if the teacher presented "door ---- bell" as the prompt, having images of a door, a bell, and a doorbell as the options). As with all other scaffolding strategies, teachers can alter the difficulty level of teaching and practice tasks for individual children by changing the multiple choice options presented. Increasing the challenge is also one way of informally assessing whether a child truly grasps the underlying concept of the sound manipulation tasks. In the same manner, tasks can be made simpler by reducing the number of choice options and by including incorrect options that are clearly distinct from the target.

Other Instructional Considerations

A survey of published studies of phonological awareness instruction in early childhood is important not only for what it does support, as illustrated throughout this paper, but also for what it does not support. At present, virtually all phonological awareness interventions for preschool, and kindergarten that are supported by efficacy data, have been conducted with individual children or with small groups of children rather than with large groups ( Ehri & Roberts, 2006; Lonigan et al., in press-a, What Works Clearinghouse, 2007a; 2007b). Further, the overwhelming majority of the successful efficacy studies have included explicit instructional strategies in which the teacher clearly explains, models, and supports children's initial practice with the tasks.

In contrast to the strategies included within the intervention literature, observation of preschool classrooms ( Bracken & Fischel, 2006; Phillips et al., 2007; NCEDL, 2005) and a review of popular preschool curricula (e.g., Heroman & Jones, 2004; Hohmann & Weikert, 2002) indicate (where there is any relevant instruction at all) a predominance of either whole group activities, implicit activities, or the combination to teach phonological awareness. Examples include reading rhyming stories, whole group clapping of syllables, and singing word play songs. Whereas no published study to date indicates that exposure to these more implicit activities or to instruction in large groups has null or negative effects on phonological awareness skills, there is an absence of studies supporting that they have any positive effect. This implies that teachers would be best served by considering these common--and no doubt enjoyable--implicit experiences as supplemental to, rather than sufficient for, a scope and sequence of phonological awareness instruction. Teachers who want to implement instructional strategies supported by scientific evidence should attend to the evidence for small group or individual, systematic, and explicit instruction.

Reciprocal Links with Print Knowledge and Oral Language

A number of longitudinal studies (e.g., Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Frost, 2001; Webb et al., 2004) indicate that the development of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge and the development of phonological awareness are reciprocally supportive, and that both are strong predictors of decoding skill. That is, growth in one skill can set the stage for, and increase, improvement in the other. This may be particularly true for the link between letter-sound knowledge and onset-rime and phoneme level phonological awareness skills (e.g., Carroll, 2004; Johnston, Anderson, & Holligan, 1996; Foy & Mann, 2006; Webb et al., 2004). Further, the forthcoming NELP Report ( Lonigan et al., in press-a), demonstrates that almost all of the instructional studies to date that yielded significant growth in letter knowledge also included instruction in phonological awareness, and the earlier National Reading Panel Report on phonemic awareness instruction supported the inclusion of letters when teaching phonemic awareness ( NRP, 2000).

At the same time, evidence from a preschool intervention study indicates that instruction in phonological awareness or letter knowledge alone will not always automatically lead to growth in the untaught skill area ( Lonigan, 2004b). Moreover, instruction in phonological awareness that actively includes written letters, which is essentially the earliest stage of phonics instruction, assumes that children already know the names and, to some degree, the sounds of individual letters. For preschool age children, for whom in many cases this is an invalid assumption, teachers may need to use formal and informal assessment results to determine whether children have acquired enough letter knowledge to benefit from a fully integrated instructional strategy that teaches phonological awareness by having children manipulate written letters, rather than targeting phonological awareness and letter knowledge in distinct but contemporaneous instructional modules. That is, whereas letter name or sound knowledge is clearly not a prerequisite for sound-based phonological awareness instruction, it may be beneficial to insure that children know the sounds of letters used if conducting integrated, phonics-like instruction (i.e., using written letters to manipulate sounds or spell words).

Like phonological awareness, strong letter knowledge skills facilitate the acquisition of decoding ability, and can be taught effectively with preschool children. Evidence from comprehensive instructional studies in preschool classrooms (e.g., Lonigan, 2004b, Lonigan et al., 2005) indicates that instruction in letter names and sounds should be systematic and explicit. Virtually all of the pedagogical features discussed regarding phonological awareness instruction apply comparably to teaching letter names and sounds. Similarly, experimental evidence suggests that incidental and implicit exposure to letters without explicit instruction is unlikely to result in substantial growth in children's letter knowledge ( Lonigan et al., 2006). Children benefit from systematic opportunities to hear the letter names and sounds modeled, to practice discriminating between different letters, and to practice both receptive (i.e., "point to the letter G") and expressive (i.e., "what is the name of this letter?") identification of letters.

Preschool teachers are faced with numerous decisions regarding letter knowledge instruction, including the order in which to teach letters, whether to teach letter names and sounds simultaneously or sequentially, and whether to teach upper case, lower case, or both. Unfortunately, there is a lack of empirical evidence evaluating and comparing these instructional choices. Recent investigations do suggest, however, that children may benefit from learning letter names before letter sounds ( Justice, Pence, Bowles, & Wiggins, 2006; Share, 2004), and may be most motivated by, and most readily learn, the letters in their own names ( Bloodgood, 1999; Phillips, Lonigan, & Graham, 2006; Treiman & Broderick, 1998). In the absence of more concrete experimental evidence, teachers should at a minimum focus on giving all children the opportunity to learn all the letter names and as many sounds as possible, and on planning instruction such that exposure and manipulation activities with each letter are repeated and cumulatively reviewed (i.e., as opposed to a brief exposure to a letter and then no further opportunities to practice with that particular letter). Further, teachers should assess children's foundational understanding of the difference between letters and non-letters (e.g., other shapes, numerals) and provide instruction in this preliminary capability where needed. Likewise, the difficulty of letter identification and discrimination activities can be modified by controlling the number of other letters included, by reducing task complexity (e.g., matching to sample is simpler than selecting from several options), and by being sure that children with visual and motor impairments are given appropriately modified letter models to manipulate.

Vocabulary is another key skill area that appears to have the possibility of increasing children's phonological awareness ability. Results of some intriguing studies suggest the possibility that the larger a child's vocabulary becomes, particularly with more words that may share sound components, the more likely a child is to cognitively grasp the concept that words are made up of sound components, the key insight needed for growth in phonological awareness and later phonemic decoding skill (e.g., Metsala and Walley, 1998; Walley, Metsala, & Garlock, 2003). Results from a recent intervention study, in fact, indicated that those children exposed to an intervention component focused on oral language but not one focused on phonological awareness nonetheless demonstrated modest but significant growth in their phonological skills ( Lonigan, 2007a). Even outside of intervention contexts, rich home language environments and accelerated vocabulary development indeed may be one of the reasons that some children appear to develop phonological awareness capabilities in the absence of specific instruction, and conversely, may be one of the key factors behind the gap seen in early phonological awareness for children from less enriching homes. Many children with expressive and receptive language delays from all backgrounds demonstrate lower phonological awareness than more typical peers, a factor contributing to these children's increased risk for reading problems (e.g., Bishop & Snowling, 2004; Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999). Clearly, strong and consistent instruction in vocabulary and other language skills is critically important for young children, especially those from at-risk backgrounds and those with known language difficulties, irrespective of its potential indirect impact on phonological awareness development. Moreover, the NELP report ( Lonigan et al., in press-b) and other data sources (e.g., Storch & Whitehurst, 2002) indicate that various types of oral language component skills, such as vocabulary, syntactical knowledge, and narrative understanding, are key for reading comprehension later in elementary school.

Conclusions

References

Al Otaiba S, Fuchs D. Characteristics of children who are unresponsive to early literacy intervention: A review of the literature. [Remedial and Special Education. 2002;23:300-316. Google Scholar]

Cowart JB, Carnine DW, Becker WC. The effects of signals on child behaviors during DISTAR instruction. University of Oregon Follow Through Project Technical Report. 1976:76-1. 55-85. Appendix B. [Google Scholar]

Metsala J, Walley A. Spoken vocabulary growth and segmental restructuring of lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. [Google Scholar]

Rogoff B. Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford University Press; New York, NY: 1990. [[PubMed] Google Scholar]

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Successful phonological awareness instruction with preschool children: Lessons from the classroom

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Phonological awareness and phonics are terms describing two related constructs that often are confused. Phonological awareness is distinct from phonics. Whereas phonological awareness is a measurable capability that each child can possess in smaller or greater amounts, phonics is a method of reading instruction that focuses on the associations of letter sounds with printed letters or groups of letters.

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The Big Five: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, Orton Gillingham Online

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The Big Five: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, Orton Gillingham Online

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In " The National Reading Panel and the Big Five," I introduced you to the origins of "The Big Five" essentials for reading. Today, I am going to discuss the first of the "Five," which is Phonological and Phonemic Awareness. This area is so important to remediation, that I will cover it over two blogs. It is the foundation upon which all the other layers are built and, unless it is solid, the other layers will most definitely suffer, and the student will struggle to read. Phonological and phonemic awareness is, of course, the core deficit for dyslexic students, and the most common cause of poor reading. That said, these difficulties can be preempted and corrected before the child starts reading, but before we go any deeper into this topic, I need to define phonological and phonemic awareness.

When we talk about a student having "auditory problems," this refers to all the sounds they hear. "Phonological," on the other hand, refers only to the sounds of spoken language. Students that have learning difficulties generally don't have auditory problems that are not related to speech sounds. They can understand, speak, and communicate using language, because their phonological issues are related to parts of words, rather than whole words. Reading is a challenge for them because our ability to decode (read) is based on being able to break words apart, and to match those parts to their written parts or letters. In other words, as David Kilpatrick says, "they struggle to connect parts of spoken language to their alphabetic forms." [Sources #1, below.]

I like to think of Phonological Awareness as an umbrella term, with phonemic awareness as one of the skills that comes in under that umbrella. Phonological awareness includes:

● Syllables

● Alliteration and Initial sounds

● Phonemes (Phonemic Awareness)

I will quote David Kilpatrick's definitions of the differences between the two from his book, " Equipped for Reading Success ":

Phonological awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate the sound properties of spoken words, such as syllables, initial sounds, rhyming parts, and phonemes.

Phonemic awareness: The ability to recognize and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words.

Phonemic, or phoneme awareness is crucial to reading, and the other skills of phonological awareness, mentioned above, are its foundation. The order in which phonological awareness is developed is a complex subject, and I find myself tweaking it from time to time. The most important thing is to lay thefoundation for phonemic awareness to be developed through rhyme, words, syllables, and alliteration and initial sound work. Later in this blog, I will talk about my current preferred order, along with some examples, but first we must define a phoneme.

Phoneme comes from the Greek word, phonos, which means "sound" or "voice." To quote David Kilpatrick again, "A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a spoken word." Written letters represent the phonemes in our spoken language. Phonemes and letters are not the same; phonemes are the oral sounds while letters are a written representation of those sounds. It is really important that children understand that phonemes are the smallest parts of oral words, whereas letters are the smallest parts of written words.

It is worth repeating: Phonemic awareness is crucial to reading, and the other skills of phonological awareness are the foundation for phonemic awareness.

Now I will lay out my current order so this foundation can be developed. I will also mention the order in which I personally introduce phonemic awareness, once the foundation is in place, and I will discuss this in greater depth in part 2 of this blog.

A parent recently shared with me that when her daughter was becoming distressed when trying to figure out whether two words rhymed. She hit on the idea of asking her daughter to think about whether her mouth moved in the same way as she said the end of each word, and also to feel her lips. These two tips really helped.

● How many word-parts do you hear in "monkey?"

● How many syllables do you hear in "photograph?"

Blending of syllables: Children are asked to put two syllables together to form a word. For example, "Blend these two word parts together to make a word: win-dow."

Syllable Segmentation: The parent, or teacher says a multisyllable word, and then asks the child to separate the word into its parts. For example, "Tell me the parts of this word: Doughnut (dough-nut), wonderful (won-der-ful)."

For students who want to treat each syllable in multisyllable words as individual words, I use different colors or types of counters for syllables, to those which I use for words. This way, if the child has mistakenly selected word-counters for each syllable, it becomes a teaching opportunity, as the teacher or parent can go through the sentence again and discuss the multisyllable words. Then, together, they can exchange each group of syllable counters for a single word counter.

Syllable Deletion: The teacher or parent starts by saying a compound word and asks the student to delete the initial and then the final syllable.For example, "Say cupcake without saying cup," and, "Say sailboat without saying boat." Then simple multisyllable words are introduced, and syllables are deleted. For example, "Say hamper without the ham." The next stage is to delete syllables from three-syllable words, again starting with compound words. For example, "Say basketball without the ball." From here a teacher can ask the student to remove syllables from the beginning of more complex words such as, "Say improvement without /im/," and then on to removing the final syllable in a word such as clarinet: "Say clarinet without the /net/."

Onset-Rime: This is where development charts of Phonological Awareness tell us phonemic awareness starts. I will define this term for you.

David Kilpatrick, in Equipped for Reading Success, separates his levels of phonological awareness into these levels:

1. Syllable Level (Also Alliteration and Rhyming): Pre-K to Kindergarten

2. Onset-Rime: Early Kindergarten to Second Grade

3. Phoneme Level: Basic, which is mid 1st Grade to Early 2nd Grade, and Advanced, which is late 1st Grade to 3rd Grade

He starts with a deletion of syllables, then works on onsets and rimes, and then moves on to substitutions of both.

His Phoneme Level covers manipulation of initial phonemes, then deletion of ending phonemes, onto substitution of phonemes, and finally working on reversal of phonemes. For teachers and parents not following this program, the following may be helpful, I will cover these in greater depth in part 2 of this blog.

1. Identification of phonemes

2. Blending of phonemes

3. Segmentation of phonemes

4. Deletion of phonemes

5. Addition of phonemes

6. Manipulation of phonemes

Part 2 will also include more resources, including assessment and curriculum materials for teaching phonological and phonemic awareness.

For further information about phonemic awareness, the Orton-Gillingham Online Academy offer a free webinar on this topic.

1. David A.Kilpatrick, Ph.D. Equipped for Reading Success

2. Unlocking Literacy by Marcia K. Henry

3. Great Leaps Reading Grades K-2 by Kenneth U.Campbell

4. Great Leaps Language Growth Phonological Awareness and Language Activities by Kenneth U. Campbell.

Lorna Wooldridge is a dyslexia specialist tutor with over twenty-five years of experience and qualifications in the field of learning differences, from both the UK and USA. Lorna has a unique perspective on this condition as she has dyslexia, and her passion is to serve this community in any way she can.

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The Big Five: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness - Part 1

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In "The National Reading Panel and the Big Five," I introduced you to the origins of "The Big Five" essentials for reading. Today, I am going to discuss the first of the "Five," which is Phonological and Phonemic Awareness.

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Threads of Reading by Karen Tankersly, Chapter 1- Readiness/Phonemic Awareness

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Threads of Reading by Karen Tankersly, Chapter 1- Readiness/Phonemic Awareness