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PA Strategies for Building Literacy Skills

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PA Strategies for Building Literacy Skills

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University led strategies and findings.

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. There are approximately 41 phonemes in the English language, according to a report from the National Reading Panel. Other estimates vary between 36 and 44 phonemes, Connie Juel writes in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Volume 2.

Syllables and words are a combination of phonemes. Some words have only one phoneme, such as a or oh. But most words blend several phonemes, such as go with two phonemes, or check with three phonemes, or stop with four phonemes, according to the National Reading Panel.

Phonemic awareness (PA) reflects a deep understanding of these units of sound. PA and letter knowledge are the two strongest school-entry predictors of how well students will learn to read in their first two years of school. Educators can implement phonemic awareness strategies to benefit children with reading skills.

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words, according to the National Reading Panel.

Phonemic awareness represents a high level of phonological awareness, or understanding different ways oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Phonological awareness may begin with a child recognizing language sounds in rhyming songs and progress to recognizing how sentences can be broken down into individual words.

Finally, the child may be able to approach individual words. This involves syllables, onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster), rime (the vowel and consonants that follow the onset), and individual phonemes. The following examples of the term "protect" provide an illustration.

Syllable: /pro/ and /tEkt/

Onset and Rime Within the Syllable: /pr/ and /o/, and /t/ and /Ekt/, respectively

Individual Phonemes: /p/, /r/, /o/, /t/, /E/, /k/, and /t/

"The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning," the National Research Council says in Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. "When that insight includes an understanding that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness."

Assessing phonemic awareness typically involves tasks such as isolating or segmenting one or more phonemes of a spoken word, blending or combining a sequence of separate phonemes into a word, or manipulating the phonemes within a word, such as by adding or subtracting. For instance, a teacher may have students replace the /c/ in "cat" to /p/ to create a new word ("pat").

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Effectiveness of Phonemic Awareness Strategies and Training

The National Reading Panel analyzed 96 cases comparing treatment groups that received phonemic awareness education to control groups that received either an alternative form of instruction or no special instruction. Three main outcome variables were examined: phonemic awareness, reading, and spelling.

Training was found to be very effective in teaching phonemic awareness to students. The effect was strong immediately after training and remained so long-term. Phonemic awareness training also improved children's ability to read and spell in the short and long term, and this effect was moderate.

"Findings of the meta-analyses show that PA training benefits the processes involved in reading real words, pseudowords, and text reading," the National Reading Panel says. "It also benefits spelling skills in normally progressing readers below 2nd grade and in beginners at risk for developing reading problems."

Phonemic Awareness Strategies

Primary Tasks

The National Reading Panel identified common tasks used to assess or improve children's phonemic awareness. These methods include:

Isolation: This means recognizing individual sounds in words. For example, the first sound in "paste" (/p/).

Identity: This is recognizing the common sound in different words. For example, the sound that is the same in "bike," "boy" and "bell" (/b/).

Categorization: This is when the child is asked to find the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words. For example, "rug" is the word that does not belong in "bus, bun and rug."

Blending: By listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds, the child learns to combine them to form a recognizable word. For example, the word created with the sounds "/s/ /k/ /u/ /l/" is "school."

Segmentation: Students may tap out or count the sounds of a word, or pronounce and position a marker for each sound. For example, counting the number of phonemes in "ship" (three: /š/ /I/ /p/).

Deletion: When a phoneme is removed, the child learns to recognize the word that remains. For example, the word created when /s/ from "smile" is eliminated ("mile").

Activities and Games

Activities and games are a great way to help educators teach phonemic awareness. The following examples are from the journal Intervention in School and Clinic, in an excerpt reprinted by Reading Rockets.

Simple Phonemic Awareness

Isolated Sound Recognition: Instructors can associate phonemes with a creature, an action or an object familiar to the child. For instance, associating the phoneme /s/ with the hissing sound of a snake and calling it a "Sammy snake" sound. Others include the crowing rooster for /r/, a buzzing bee for /z/ and the "be quiet" sound for /sh/. These sound personalities create a natural connection for children.

Word, Syllable and Phoneme Counting: Instructors can read sentences to children without the sentence being visible. The children place a marker from left to right for each word heard, and the teacher can confirm the amount of words by showing the printed sentence and pointing to each word as it is read. Clapping hands, tapping the desk or marching in place can help children count syllables or sounds in words.

Sound-to-Word Matching: Instructors can show children a picture of a dog, and ask children to identify the correct word out of three options ("Is there an /mmm/-og, a /d/d/d/-og or an /sss/-og?"). A variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound ("Is there a /d/ in dog?").

Compound Phonemic Awareness

Word-to-Word Matching: Instructors can use games to help children practice determining whether two words begin with the same sound. Dominoes, card games and even a bingo game using similar sounds can all be effective. One game is to make a set of dominoes with two pictured objects on each side and have children join cards sharing beginning sounds. Another is a version of the card game "snap," where children take turns drawing a card from a face-down pile and placing it in a face-up pile. When a card has the same beginning sound as the top card in the face-up pile, the first child to say "snap" collects the pile. Or, children can play sound bingo using cards with pictures. Children mark when one of the pictures has the same beginning sound as the word said by the caller.

Sound Deletion: Instructors can show pictures or point to objects in the room that are compound words, and demonstrate how each word can be said with a part missing. For instance, by saying "seesaw" without the "saw," or saying "hotdog" without the "dog." This can be done in the form of a "Simon says" game: "Simon says, 'say bookmark without the book.'"

Building Skills in Reading

Phonemic awareness strategies help young children build a foundation for reading and spelling. When students are ready to read, reading activities for kids can further develop these abilities and encourage a passion for reading.

Southeastern University offers online education degrees that help teachers inspire and lead students. Programs such as the Master of Education in Reading Education and the Master of Education in Elementary Education focus on literacy skills. They take place in a flexible and convenient online learning environment.

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Phonemic Awareness Strategies for Building Literacy Skills

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. There are approximately 41 phonemes in the English language, according to a report from the National Reading Panel. Other estimates vary between 36 and 44 phonemes, Connie Juel writes in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Volume 2.

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A group focused on learning disabilities explaining details of reading.

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By Dr. Deborah Berrill, Professor Emeritus, School of Education & Professional Learning, Trent University and English LD Expert, LD@school
Many children who have learning disabilities (LDs) have difficulty in reading. There are multiple reasons for this, reminding us of the complexities of the neurobiological underpinnings of LDs and how brain differences affect learning.

One of the main reading difficulties people with LDs have is in decoding printed words. People without LDs often use a phonics approach to sound out unfamiliar words but that does not work as well for many people with LDs who have difficulty in phonological processing - that is, in hearing the different sounds in words. They may also have difficulty associating sounds with letters (Lyon, 1995). This, in turn, interferes not only with the ability to sound out unfamiliar words but it also strongly affects spelling - for how could someone spell a word accurately when they do not hear all of the sounds in the word?
Click here to read more about Literacy and LDs.
Phonological awareness includes not only hearing different sounds but also being able to manipulate sounds in words. This is not something that comes naturally to people: rather, the processes of phonological awareness must be explicitly taught. This is particularly important because in the early stages of reading, phonological awareness is the strongest predictor of reading progress (Stanovich, 1986).

Adams et al (1998) indicate that a child's level of phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten is one of the strongest predictors of future reading success. Yet they also note that "more than 20 percent of students struggle with some aspects of phonological awareness, while 8-10 percent exhibit significant delays. Early intervention is crucial and can make a real difference to students with limited levels of phonological awareness" ( Comprehensive Literacy Resource for Kindergarten Teachers. Chapter 2: Phonological Awareness).

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness includes the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in oral language, from parts of words to syllables and phrases. Phonological awareness thus refers to a wide range of skills. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness focusing just on the smallest units of sound in human speech. These units are called phonemes and phonemes form the sound system of a given language. The same phonemic principles apply whether the language is English or French, Greek or Chinese.

In English, although we have 26 letters in our alphabet, there are 44 phonemes (sounds) because some letters have more than one sound. For example, the letter 'a' represents one sound or phoneme in the word bat and a different phoneme in the word baby; similarly, the letter 'c' represents one sound in the word cup and a different sound in the word city. Additionally, some letters form a completely new sound when they are put together, such as 'th' in the word the or 'ch' in the word chat. For a complete list of phonemes in the English language, please click here to visit the Reading Well website.

Phonemic awareness relates to the ability to hear and identify individual phonemes. Citing multiple research studies, Bryant et al (2014: 211) note the strong "connection between young children's awareness of phonological segments, particularly of phonemes, and their progress in learning to read (Badian, 1994; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Cardoso-Martins & Pennington, 2004; de Jong & van der Leij, 1999; Ehri et al., 2001; Muter & Snowling, 1998; Parrila, Kirby, & McQuarrie, 2004)." Many other studies consistently confirm that phonemic awareness along with letter recognition are the two best early predictors of reading success, and more recent studies have demonstrated that phonemic awareness skills influence children's broader academic success throughout most of their schooling (Blomert & Csépe, 2012; Bryant et al, 2014; Vaessen & Blomert, 2010).

Phonemic Awareness Skills

In reading, we are interested in a child's ability to distinguish the sounds in three different locations: at the beginning of words; at the end of words; and in the middle of words. Each of these is a different skill. Once these three skills are mastered, the child needs to learn how to blend sounds together to make a full word. As words becomes more complex, more complex phonemic awareness skills are needed.

There are five different types of phonemic skills of importance. These are outlined on the Reading Rockets website and include the following:

Phoneme matching - the ability to identify words that begin with the same sound.

Phoneme isolation - the ability to isolate a single sound from within a word.

Phoneme blending - the ability to blend individual sounds into a word.

Phoneme segmentation - the ability to break a word into individual sounds.

Phoneme manipulation - the ability to modify, change, or move the individual sounds in a word.

Unfortunately, many people with LDs have difficulty developing these skills. It is important to understand these skills and to recognize if a child is having difficulty with them. Teachers - and family, too - need to understand that if this is the case, it is not because the child is not trying. Rather, it is because the physiology of a child's brain makes the task extremely difficult.

Assessment FOR Learning in Phonemic Awareness

Teachers and parents can do some informal exploration of a child's phonemic awareness, starting with an exploration of their ability to segment - or isolate - sounds in short words. Let the child know that you are going to play a word game. Then tell them that you are going to say a word and they have to tell you the first sound in that word (Weiner, 1994). E.g., "What sound do you hear at the beginning of the word pat?" (/p/). This would be followed by asking, "What sound do you hear at the end of the word pat?" (/t/).

We start with the initial sound in a word first - that is the easiest. Then we ask for the last sound. If the child can do both of those, then ask, "What sound do you hear in the middle of the word pat?" (/a/). More complex versions of these skills would involve identifying consonant blends such as bl, tr, sp, at the beginning, at the end and in the middle of words.

Other tasks that help us understand a child's phonemic awareness abilities include the following:

Phoneme deletion: "What word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?" Or, at a more difficult level, "Say the word 'play.' Now say it again but don't say /p/."

Word to word matching: "Do pen and pipe begin with the same sound?"

Blending of sounds: "What word would we have if we blended these sounds together: /m/ /o/ /p/?")

Phoneme segmentation: "What sounds do you hear in the word 'hot'?"

Phoneme counting: "How many sounds do you hear in the word 'cake'?" (Three: /k/ /ā/ /k/)

Rhyming: "Tell me all of the words that you know that rhyme with the word 'cat'."

(Stanovich, 1994).

A child may be able to do phoneme deletion relatively easily with short words but they may have more difficulty with longer words or deletions that are not at the beginning or end of the word. (E.g., "Say the word 'stale.' Now say it again, but don't say /l/.") Phonemic awareness skills are on a continuum from less complex skills, like rhyming, to more complex skills such as deletion of medial sound (sounds in the middle of words) or blends. The latter might include a task such as "Say the word 'stale.' Now say it again but don't say /t/."

The Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills can be a helpful starting point. Children should be able to respond correctly to the following by the end of Grade 3.

Phonemic Awareness of Phoneme Deletion: The Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (1993) (Click here to view the Test of Auditory Analysis Skills.)

There are multiple phonemic awareness assessment tools supported by research that can be used beginning in Kindergarten and going through higher grades, including the Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (Rosner, 1993), the Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (TOPA-K; Torgesen & Bryant, 1993), the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation (Yopp, 1995) and the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996). Click here to access a full list of research-supported phonemic awareness measures on the LD Online website. Having evidence to know whether or not a child has difficulty with phonological processing is essential in knowing how to best meet their needs.

If a child has difficulty with phonemic awareness, it is important to talk with the Special Education Resource Teacher at your school. They can do additional assessment and together you can plan what type of explicit instruction in auditory analysis the child will receive.

Blending Phonemes

Once a child is able to isolate sounds, they need to learn to blend those sounds together. The child would be asked, "What word do we have if we blend together the following sounds: /p/ /a/ /t/ ?" Like other phonemic awareness skills, this often needs to be taught through modelling and blending the word orally with the child. The initial slow blending needs to be done increasingly quickly so the child can hear the full word properly. What is particularly heartening is that we know that phonemic awareness training, where children are taught how to blend sounds and how to delete sounds, can be extremely effective and subsequently makes a significant difference in reading ability (e.g., Rosner, 1974; Weiner, 1994). With children who have learning disabilities, this training needs to be explicit and intensive in order to be effective.

Phonemic awareness skills of isolating and blending sounds in simple words are usually mastered by Grade 1. And the ability to manipulate phonemes is usually mastered by the end of Grade 1 or early Grade 2. For a full list of ages at which specific segmentation and manipulation skills are typically mastered, click here to visit the Reading Rockets website.

Where Does Phonics Fit In?

Phonics is an approach to reading that involves the association of sounds to written letters and includes "sounding out" unfamiliar words. A large body of research confirms that readers who can use a phonics approach by sounding out unfamiliar words are more successful readers. Yet many people with LDs have great difficulty in being able to use a phonics approach either because they cannot the different sounds (phonological awareness) or they may have difficulty in blending sounds together. Nagy, Berninger and Abbott (2006: 136) note that "an increasing body of research has documented how a variety of symptoms of reading disability can be traced to a basic phonological deficit (e.g., Adams, 1990; Morris et al., 1998; Olson, Wise, Conners, Rack, & Fulker, 1989; Shankweiler et al., 1995; Stanovich, 1986)." This challenge makes a phonics approach to reading almost useless to them.

The longstanding findings of the effectiveness of explicit teaching of phonics was again re-affirmed in a recent thee-year pilot project launched by New York City in 2008 with 700 children in ten low income schools. Results were matched with 350 children in ten demographically similar schools who did not receive the same instruction. Students who received explicit phonics teaching showed significantly greater gains than children who did not in word identification, word attack, comprehension and spelling as measured by the Woodcock-Johnson III assessment.

Metacognition Is Needed Along With Phonemic Awareness

For many aspiring readers, learning phonemic awareness skills is not enough in itself to improve reading (Weiner 1994). Instead, as both Cunningham (1986) and Wittrock (1986) emphasize, it is critical to teach children how to think about their reading - using metacognition or thinking about one's thinking - and to train them regarding when and why to use various segmentation and blending strategies to decode new words.

A number of reading software programs and reading approaches incorporate metacognitive strategies. These include the Empower TM reading program ( click here to learn more about EmpowerTM) and Lexia Core 5 R software ( click here to learn more about Lexia Core 5R), programs which are highly recommended by Ontario Provincial Demonstration Schools for students with LDs. For instance, Empower TM teaches five different decoding strategies and children explain which strategies they will use in decoding specific words. This metacognitive awareness of what strategies are being used is helpful because if those strategies don't work with a particular word, the child can purposefully choose a different strategy. This teaches them that different strategies may be more helpful for decoding different words and helps them from getting stuck in their reading.

Summary: Phonological Approaches to Reading

1. Phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and distinguish different sounds in words, has been directly correlated with reading success and achievement.

2. Children with learning disabilities are often unable to distinguish sounds or to manipulate them, making a phonics approach to reading untenable for them.

3. Explicit and intensive teaching of phonemic skills along with metacognitive awareness of when to use the different skills has proven to be successful for children who were previously unable to master these skills.

Morphological Analysis: A Complementary Approach to Strengthening Reading
Whereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language, morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language - either in whole words or in parts of words. Morphology, the study of morphemes, explains the basis for our spelling system. People may understand morphology best when thinking about affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and root words: these are the three types of morphemes.

For instance, the word unzipped has three morphemes: the prefix un- which means "not" or "opposite;" the root or base word zip; and the suffix - ed which indicates that this was an action done in the past. Understanding morphology helps a reader determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word by enabling the reader to segment, or break down, a word into its root word and its affixes. This also helps readers better understand meaning and also spelling.

Understanding that root words in English come from a variety of languages, including Greek, Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon, helps explain the logic behind what may seem like random differences between the spelling of different words. Research has established that knowing root words, prefixes and suffixes helps readers gain control over decoding and improves reading success as well as broader success at school (Bryant et al, 2014; Nagy et al, 2006; Wolf & Kennedy, 2003). The work of Hurry et al (2006) also demonstrates that learning about morphemes results in improvements in students' spelling.

A morphological approach thus not only complements a phonemic approach to decoding but it is of tremendous help for people who have difficulty with the phonics approach as it does not rely on the ability to hear the sounds in words. Rather, a morphological approach relies on recognizing and understanding the meanings of root words and affixes.

Unfortunately, research in North America and in England shows that some teachers do not know what morphemes are and that many who do know about them do not understand their importance for reading and spelling (Hurry et al, 2006; Wolf & Kennedy, 2003). As a result, teaching students about morphemes often does not occur or occurs only incidentally rather than explicitly (Snow, Griffin & Burns, 2005). The ramifications of this have particularly negative impact for students with LDs, many of whom have phonological challenges.
Supporting Morphemic Awareness at School
Morphemic awareness is something that should be part of regular teaching practice. Explicit teaching of common prefixes, suffixes and root words should be part of the introduction of new words and new topics.

These words should then be posted, either on chart paper with the name of the unit/topic at the top of the paper, or on a word wall. Prefixes will all be written in one colour, the suffixes in a different colour and the root words in a third colour. For example:

prefixes in green (like the "go" colour on a traffic light, signaling the beginning of the word)

suffixes in red ("stop" on a traffic light, signaling the end of the word)

Keep reviewing learned affixes and slowly add new ones. According to Honig et al (2000), the four most common prefixes in English (dis-, in/im-, re- and un-) account for 97% of prefixed words printed in school English, and the same is true for the four most common suffixes (-ed, -ing, -ly, -s/es).

Students will enjoy a game that reinforces prefixes and suffixes and root words that can be played at least once a week.
Click here to access a lesson plan for a morpheme awareness game entitled Build-a-Word Game.
Morphology is powerful, for those who know morphemes understand that the meanings of words are predictable from the meanings of their parts (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Bear et al (2004) have shown that knowledge of morphemes is essential for accuracy in spelling and Nagy et al (2006) have shown that since almost all longer words are made up of numerous morphemes, understanding of morphemes contributes to fluency in the recognition of more complex words. Kirby and Bowers (2012) emphasize that "morphology works" as it helps increase vocabulary knowledge and understanding and it predicts reading development and achievement.

The earliest approaches to reading are sound/letter correspondences and phonological awareness training. Morphological approaches, however, can begin quite early as well.

Morphological approaches to reading make a distinct contribution to reading success by grade 4 and the impact increases as students get older and words get longer and more complex (Nagy et al, 2006).
Challenges Become Greater with Each Passing Year
More than 30 years ago, Stanovich (1986:379) noted that the "growing body of data indicates that variation in vocabulary knowledge is a causal determinant of differences in reading comprehension ability (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson & Perfetti, 1983; Stahl, 1983)." By grade 4, children whose vocabulary knowledge is below grade level are likely to have difficulties in reading comprehension (Biemiller & Boote, 2006).

The challenges only become greater and more profound with each passing year. Since reading is difficult for most children with LDs, they read significantly less than children reading at grade level expectations. This difference in the amount of reading that occurs has ramifications on vocabulary development, access to new information, and learning in all academic areas. We have known this for more than 30 years. In 1984, Nagy and Anderson wrote that the children who are least motivated to read "in the middle grades might read 100,000 words a year while the average children at this level might read 1,000,000. The figure for the voracious middle-grade reader might be 10,000,000 or even as high as 50,000,000. If these guesses are anywhere near the mark, there are staggering individual differences in the volume of language experience, and therefore, an opportunity to learn new words (p. 328)." This has been reinforced by Juel & Minden-Cupp (2000) and affects learning new ideas across all subject areas.

Stanovich (1986) referred to the cumulative effect of reading challenges as "the Matthew effect," which comes from the notion that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With this analogy, Stanovich emphasizes that the learning and knowledge gap between poor readers and good readers continues to grow and grow over time, further disenfranchising poorer readers with every passing year.

Research confirms what Stanovich (1986) indicated: the learning and knowledge gap between poor readers and good readers grows and grows over time because poor readers read less - and learn less - and good readers read more - and more complex text - with each passing year.

However, this does not need to happen. A large body of research demonstrates the powerfulness of explicit training in phonological awareness - even at grades 9 and 10. This combined with the complementary approach of morphological awareness makes a significant and life-changing impact on students who have been struggling in reading (Nagy et al, 2006).

References:

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Beck, S., Condy, J. L. (2017). Instructional principals used to teach critical comprehension skills to a Grade 4 learner. Reading & Writing. Capetown. Vol. 8, Iss. 1.

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Snow, C.E., Griffin, P. & Burns, M. S. (Eds.) (2005). Knowledge to support the teaching of reading: Preparing teachers for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.

Stanovich, K.E. (1994). Romance and reality. The Reading Teacher, 47 (4), 280-291.

Torgesen, J. K., & Bryant, B. R. (1993). Test of phonological awareness. Austin, TX: PRO-ED.

Torgerson, C. J., Brooks, G., & Hall, J. (2006). A systematic review of the research literature on the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and spelling (DfES Research Rep. 711). London, UK: Department for Education and Skills. Retrieved from: http://webarchive.nationalarchives. gov.uk/20130401151715/http://www.education.gov.uk/publications.

Vaessen, A., & Blomert, L. (2010). Long-term cognitive dynamics of fluent reading development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105( 3), 213-231.

Weiner, S. (1994). Effects of phonemic awareness training on low- and middle-achieving first graders' phonemic awareness and reading ability. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26 (3), 277-300.

Wolf, M. & Kennedy, R. (2003). How the origins of written language instruct us to teach A response to Steven Strauss. Educational Researcher, 32(2), 26-30.

Yopp, H. K. (1995). A test for assessing phonemic awareness in young children. The Reading Teacher, 49, 20-29

Web Resources
Click here to access the Reading Rockets website and learn about phonological and phonemic awareness. Click here to visit the LDonline website and access the article, "Beginning Reading and Phonological Awareness for Students with Learning Disabilities". Click here to access the Saskatchewan Learning Resource, "Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties and Disabilities: A Guide for Educators".
Click here to visit the Core Knowledge website.
Click here to access the Comprehensive Literacy Resource for Kindergarten Teachers, Chapter 2: Phonological Awareness. Click here to visit the Reading Well website and access the article, "The 44 Phonemes in English". Click here to visit the Reading Rockets website and access the article, "Phonemic Awareness Assessment". Click here to visit the LDonline website and access the article, "Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines". Click here to visit the Sick Kids website and learn more about EmpowerTM Reading. Click here to visit the Lexia website and access the article, "Lexia Reading Core5". Click here to access the graphic organizer "Most Common Prefixes" on the Scholastic website. Click here to access the graphic organizer "The 20 Most Common Prefixes in the Academic Texts" on the Centre for Development & Learning website.
Phonemic Awareness Games
Click here to visit the Reading by Phonics website to access videos, learning guides, and learning activities related to phonics. Click here to visit the Top Notch Teaching website and access the article, "4 Useful Strategies to Improve Phoneme Manipulation".

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Learning to Read: The Importance of Both Phonological and Morphological Approaches

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By Dr. Deborah Berrill, Professor Emeritus, School of Education & Professional Learning, Trent University and English LD Expert, LD@school Many children who have learning disabilities (LDs) have difficulty in reading. There are multiple reasons for this, reminding us of the complexities of the neurobiological underpinnings of LDs and how brain differences affect learning.

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Understanding meaning of written language

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Understanding meaning of written language

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Research on reading comprehension from an educational lab to improve teaching and learning.

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Published in SEDL Letter Volume XIV, Number 3, December 2002, Putting Reading First

Reading | Phonemic awareness | Linguistic skill | Phonemic awareness and learning to read | Acquiring phonemic awareness | Not acquiring phonemic awareness | Related Resources & Products

Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning to read an alphabetically written language. Yet a fair amount of confusion, especially among educators, persists about what this skill is and why it is so important. Written for practitioners, this article describes phonemic awareness and discusses why it is a prerequisite for learning to read, how we have come to understand its importance, why it can be difficult to acquire, and what happens to the would-be reader who fails to acquire it. Our discussion of phonemic awareness is framed within a particular view of reading, to which we turn first.

What is reading?

Reading, or more precisely reading comprehension, is the ability to derive meaning, particularly that intended by the author, from the printed word-in short, reading is understanding the meaning of written language. The major difference between the written and the spoken word is not what is being communicated, but how the communication is taking place, by eye rather than ear. In this simple view, reading is dependent on two major cognitive capacities. The first is comprehension, the ability to understand language. The second is decoding, the ability to derive a word's phonological representation (one based in the domain of spoken words) from the sequences of letters that represent it. Skilled decoding allows the reader, through print, to retrieve the meaning of words known and organized through the learning of spoken language. Together, decoding and comprehension skills combine to permit language comprehension to take place via the printed word.

To foreshadow the discussion to come, while phonemic awareness is a linguistic skill, it is not a skill that is needed either for learning, or subsequently for understanding, language. Certainly, every competent speaker of a language has mastered its phonology. But since language learning is a tacit process, one that takes place without conscious attention, that mastery comes without the need for an explicit, conscious understanding of phonology. However, for learning to read, specifically for learning to decode, a conscious understanding of the phonological units underlying the spoken word is critical.

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a cognitive skill that consists of three pieces. The first piece concerns a linguistic unit, the phoneme; the second concerns the explicit, conscious awareness of that unit; and the third involves the ability to explicitly manipulate such units. Phonemic awareness is thus the ability to consciously manipulate language at the level of phonemes. Let's take each of these in turn.

A phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit. Linguists define it as the most basic unit of language capable of making a difference in meaning. As an example, the difference between the word pairs (each containing three phonemes) bit and pit, bat and bet, bin and bid, is a single phoneme, one occurring in these examples in the initial, medial, or final position, respectively, of the spoken word.

Phonemes are abstract because they are not the actual sounds of which words are composed; these are known as phones. Rather they are the underlying category of which the phones are members. To illustrate this, think of how the sound represented by the letter p is different in the words pan and span. To make this readily apparent, hold your hand close to your mouth and notice that the puff of air that is released when saying the former is much stronger than that released with the latter. The puff, known as aspiration, is not distinctive in English, in that there are no pairs of words where this single difference in aspiration marks a difference in meaning. In short, these two sounds (or phones) are different, yet they represent the same underlying category (or phoneme). As we will see, the abstract nature of phonemes presents one of the obstacles a child must overcome in developing phonemic awareness.

It is also important to recognize that phonemes are linguistic units and not units of writing systems. Thus, while bit, bait, butte, and bought all differ in the number of letters they possess, they each represent words containing only three phonemes, which differ only in their second phoneme.

Beyond the phonemic unit, the second piece of the phonemic awareness concept entails the explicit, conscious awareness of these units. Any child who has learned a language knows the phonemes of that language Ñ if she did not, she could not recognize the difference between spoken minimal pairs in that language, like bit and pit. But being able to use that linguistic difference in speaking and listening to language is very different from knowing explicitly that the difference being used is in the initial part of the word. This explicit knowledge is the metalinguistic nature of the skill, or the ability, to consciously reflect upon the linguistic units that underlies language.

More than just being conscious of the phoneme, the third piece of the phonemic-awareness concept requires some level of skill in manipulating phonemes. In learning to read an alphabetic language, it is not enough just to be aware of the phonemic units, the child also must be able to manipulate those units. Such manipulation is important because the child learning to read must be able to hold and contrast in memory both the phonemes and the letter strings that represent them. If she cannot, she will not be able to master the relationship between the letter units and the phonemic units. In learning to read, the child must be able to isolate, compare, and contrast phonemes and letter sequences Ñ for example, noting that the final phoneme in both bit and bought is the same, but that one is represented by a single letter and the other by three letters.

To sum up, the three pieces of phonemic awareness are knowledge of language at the level of individual phonemes, knowledge of these language units that is conscious, and skill at consciously manipulating language at this level.

Why is a linguistic skill that is not needed to learn language so critical for learning to read a language?

As mentioned earlier, phonemic awareness is not necessary for reading all written languages, only those that are alphabetic. For instance, writing systems that use logographic representations (where a single symbol represents a word) do not require would-be readers to possess phonemic awareness. But any system that links written letters to the phonemes underlying the spoken word requires phonemic awareness, because the would-be learner cannot connect the units underlying the written word (the letters) with the units underlying the spoken word (the phonemes) unless she is consciously aware of both and has the intent to learn the relationship between the two (known as the alphabetic principle). Thus, if you know the letters and you know there is some relation between the letters and the spoken word, but you do not know the units underlying the spoken word, then you will not be able to figure out what the relationship is between the two representations.

To summarize, knowledge of phonemes is critical to learn a language, but language learning is an unconscious process that only requires immersion in an active linguistic environment; explicit instruction is not necessary. In accomplishing this remarkable feat, the child's language learning system responds to information at the phonemic level without the need for conscious awareness of that level. Learning to read that language, if it is represented alphabetically, does require explicit knowledge of the phoneme since, unlike learning language, learning to read is a process that requires more

Terms Often Confused with Phonemic Awareness

Phonics: An instructional approach for helping children learn the relationship between
letters and sounds.

Phonetics: The process used by linguists to describe the speech sounds in natural language.

Phonology: The linguistic component of language that deals with the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in languages (distinguished from the other two components of language, which are syntax and semantics).

Phonological awareness: A general term for metalinguistic awareness of any of the phonological characteristics of language, including phonemic units, syllables, rimes, and words.

How do we know that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read?

Much research, conducted under a variety of research designs, converges on the conclusion that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read in alphabetic languages. First, there is evidence from concurrent correlations, which are derived from research designs that simply measure two skills in a sample of students at roughly the same point in time and then determine how those skills vary with each within the student sample. For example, a typical design might use all the first-grade students in a school as a sample, measuring each student's phonemic awareness skill and reading skill at the end of first grade. Positive correlations between these two measures exist when, in general, students with better performance on one skill (phonemic awareness) also have better performance on the other skill (reading) and vice versa (that is, when students with poorer performance on one skill also have poorer performance on the other skill). Such positive correlations are generally found when both phonemic awareness and reading skills are measured in the early elementary grades. This same positive relationship has been found whether reading skill was measured as skill in reading individual words, skill in reading letter sequences that do not form real English words but are constructed like English words (for example, the pseudoword splure), or skill in reading connected text where fluency or comprehension were measured. These correlations are consistent with a causal relationship between the two variables, where skill in one is the cause for the development of skill in the other, but they do not guarantee that the variables are causally linked (indeed, there might be a third variable that is causing the development in the other two skills). Nor, even if causally linked, do these correlations specify the direction of causation (that is, does phonemic awareness cause the reading skill or is it the other way round?).

Even more suggestive evidence comes from a closer look at the distributions between phonemic awareness and reading skills concurrently measured. If you plot skill in phonemic awareness against skill in decoding (measured as reading individual pseudowords), you find triangular distributions. In these distributions, there are many instances of either low skill in both domains or high skill in phonemic awareness coupled with either low or high skill in decoding. However, there are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high skill in decoding. This pattern suggests that phonemic awareness is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for skill in decoding. That is, you must have skill in phonemic awareness if you are to acquire skill in decoding, but having skill in phonemic awareness is no guarantee for successful development of skill in decoding. To get the latter, you need something in addition to phonemic awareness (you also need knowledge of the letters and of the alphabetic principle, plus lots of practice pairing written and spoken words).

Predictive correlations, derived from research designs where phonemic awareness is measured at one point in time and reading skill is measured at some subsequent point in time, are even more suggestive of causal relationships. Many studies report such correlations, where the time lag between the measure of phonemic awareness and the subsequent reading skill (measured either as decoding or reading comprehension skill) ranges from very small (a matter of months) to very large (a matter of many years). While providing stronger evidence than concurrent correlations do, these results could still appear even when the two variables were not causally related. For instance, as in concurrent correlations, there could be a third, unmeasured factor that is the cause underlying the development of both skills, where the two skills themselves are not at all causally linked.

There are no instances of low skill in phonemic awareness and high skill in decoding.

The strongest evidence for a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading comes from training studies. In the typical training study design, children who lack phonemic awareness skills are randomly divided into different groups, one receiving training designed to develop phonemic awareness skill and the other receiving training designed to develop a skill that is unrelated to reading (say, a mathematical skill like counting). After training, the different groups are given the same reading instruction, and one looks to see whether those groups that received phonemic awareness training in fact do better in both assessments of phonemic awareness and reading than those who did not. Many studies like this have now been conducted, and the majority of them report that the groups receiving phonemic awareness instruction subsequently did much better in reading development than those who did not receive such training.

Now it is true that reading by itself does advance skill in phonemic awareness Ñ reading practice advances reading skill, and the more skill in reading, the more skill in phonemic awareness. This indicates a reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, where skill in one supports development of skill in the other and vice versa. But the critical question is whether some amount of skill in phonemic awareness is critical before skill in reading can advance; the evidence suggests (especially that from training studies) the answer to this question is yes.

Why is phonemic awareness so difficult for some children to acquire?

Current research suggests that most children who enter school at kindergarten do not come skilled in phonemic awareness. Research also suggests that if there is no explicit instruction in this skill, many will fail to acquire it. Further, for some small percentage of young people, even explicit training is insufficient to guarantee the development of phonemic awareness. So what is known about the reasons behind the difficulty in acquiring phonemic awareness?

First, as discussed above, phonemes are abstract-they cannot be isolated and presented to the child as objects. When we explain to a child that the first sound in bug is "buh," what we are actually pronouncing is neither abstract (for abstract things are by definition unpronounceable) nor something related to a single phoneme. In fact, what we are saying is a syllable, one that has two phonemes underlying it. Thus, one difficulty in developing phonemic awareness is that it is not possible to explicitly state to the child what she must become aware of, rather we can only lead her to try to induce for herself what must be acquired.

Some Examples of How Phonemic Awareness Skill Is Demonstrated

Isolation: Say the first part of the word song; say the middle part of hop; say the last part of stick.

Deletion: Say the word pies without the first part.

Addition: Say the word you have when you add the sound s to the beginning of the word top.

Categorization: Say the word that does not belong in this group of words: pig, pack, top, put.

Substitution: Say the word you make when you take out the second part of stop and replace it with the first part of lake.

Segmentation: Say how many parts there are in the word build.

Second, the sound units that are transmitted in speech that are derived from the underlying abstract phonemes do not arrive at the ear in a strict serial order. Rather the information that allows the hearer to detect the first sound in a word generally comes overlapped with information about the subsequent segment in the word Ñ linguistic information is transmitted in parallel. As an example, if we recorded our speaking of the word bug and then, starting at the end of the tape segment, cut off successive pieces and played what was left, we would never be able to isolate a piece of the tape representing only the initial phoneme of the word. Rather, the best we would come away with would be some resemblance of the first two sounds of the word. This is true because the positions of the articulators (those things we use to produce speech, like our tongue and jaw) are set to reflect both the beginning and subsequent sounds that are to be made. You can get a sense of this for yourself by noting the position of your lower jaw as you begin to say bug and bought. In the latter example, the lower jaw is lowered from the outset to prepare for the pronunciation of the vowel that follows. These co-articulation effects result in the parallel transmission of linguistic information. And this poses a significant problem for acquiring phonemic awareness, for in many cases we cannot isolate even the initial sound (or phone) that is a member of the phonemic category the child is attempting to become aware of. Again, the best we can do is to set conditions where the child will induce the phonemic category we are trying to have her attend to.

Third, what we are asking the child to do is counterintuitive. For the child learning language, meaning has been paramount, while the forms in which the meaning is represented have been unimportant-they are merely the medium, which is to be ignored in favor of the message. With phonemic awareness, we are asking the child to focus attention in the opposite fashion, ignoring meaning and attending only to form.

Each of these features of language make difficult the task of acquiring the awareness of phonemesÑbut there are instructional approaches that can be helpful. Future issues of SEDL Letter will address this topic.

What happens if a child does not acquire phonemic awareness?

For the child having difficulty acquiring phonemic awareness, the prognosis is not good. First, such a child is not able to take advantage of the alphabetic principle. She might know the letters, even that the letters are somehow connected to the spoken word, but without phonemic awareness, she is baffled by what that relationship might be.

Second, we know that exposure to print is important for figuring out the relationships between letters and phonemes. With the prerequisites in hand (namely, knowledge of the letters, phonemes, and the alphabetic principle), the greater the opportunity to pair printed and spoken words, the greater the opportunity to learn the relationship between letters and phonemes. The child who lacks these prerequisites cannot take advantage of such opportunities, and print exposure is no longer efficacious for learning to read.

Third, we know that if the child is not making progress in reading by the third grade, there is very little likelihood that she will ever, regardless of the intervention used, be able to read at the same level as her same-age peers. Our challenge as educators is thus to do all that we can to make sure our students are making early progress, including mastering phonemic awareness early in their school careers. This is something that can be achieved, if only we understand what must be done and provide appropriate support mechanisms to help teachers master those techniques that can best help their students master this (and other) skills.

Definitions of Some Terms Used in Scientific Research

Convergence: When research results obtained under a variety of settings and designs lead to the same general conclusions.

Correlation: An indicator of whether a measure of a skill in one area is systematically varying with the measure of a skill in another area.

Concurrent Correlation: A correlation derived from a research design where the two measures of interest are taken at approximately the same point in time.

Predictive Correlation: A correlation derived from a research design where there is a significant difference between the times when two measures of interest are taken.

Triangular Distribution: A distribution of two variables where all combinations of measured low and high skill occur except one - that is, low skill in one area is never accompanied
by high skill in the other area.

Training Study: A research design where students with similar skills are divided into groups, one group subsequently receiving training in a skill of interest while the other one receives no training or training in a different skill; the effects of such training are then measured on some outcome variable at some point in time after the training.

Wes Hoover is SEDL president and CEO. He holds a doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin in human experimental psychology, with a specialization in reading and psycholinguistics.

Next Article: Reading and the Migrant Student

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The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read

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Published in SEDL Letter Volume XIV, Number 3, December 2002, Putting Reading First Reading | Phonemic awareness | Linguistic skill | Phonemic awareness and learning to read | Acquiring phonemic awareness | Not acquiring phonemic awareness | Related Resources & Products Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning to read an alphabetically written language.

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Bridges between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

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Bridges between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

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An organization dedicated to assisting teachers in their quest to teach students how to read.

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

To start, phonology is a segment of linguistics that focuses on the study of speech sounds and patterns. In other words, its focus is on the study of sounds in a particular language.

Phonological awareness is the understanding that our spoken language is made up of words and that our words are made up of individual units of sounds called phonemes. Phonological awareness encompasses many skills such as word recognition, rhyming, syllables, and phonemic awareness. All of these are acquired by listening and manipulating words or sounds.

Without phonemic proficiency, studies have shown that students will struggle to master other components to reading as they continue their education.

Although these skills can be worked on simultaneously, phonemic awareness is typically the last of the phonological awareness skills that students master. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sound units called phonemes, and that those sounds have distinct articulatory features. We use articulators to shape the airstream when forming sounds. Articulators include the tongue, teeth, lips, alveolar ridge (ridge behind your teeth), hard palate, and soft palate. Here is a basic example of phonemes in a word:

The word 'cat' has three phonemes: k/a/t

The word 'boat'' has three phonemes: b/ō/t

The word 'dough' has only two phonemes: d/ō

Understanding that these phonemes exist and that the articulators (mouth, tongue, teeth, etc.) are all doing something different to form these sounds is vital in allowing a student to connect these different sounds to the letters that represent them. Since the emphasis is on oral language, students do not need to know the alphabet before developing their phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness can be difficult for some students to grasp. Unless explicitly taught, it can be challenging to hear individual sounds within words or individual words within a sentence. The reason?

No. of Letters in Alphabet: 26

No. of Phonemes: ~44

No. of Ways to Spell Phonemes: ~250

The English language is certainly complex, but there are consistencies that we can teach our students. Phonemic awareness is a critical skill in this process and should be taught and assessed early in a child's life.

The skill should especially be focused on in Pre-K through 2nd grade. Studies have shown that children with high phonemic awareness at the beginning of 1st grade showed uniformly high reading and spelling achievement at the end of the year.

Strategies that help grow your students' phonemic awareness include finger tapping, blending strips, tokens and Elkonin boxes, and identifying the beginning and ending sounds in a word.

Specific skills that should be developed include:

Isolation of Initial Sound: What is the first sound in the word dot? (/d/)

Isolation of Final Sound: What is the last sound in the word sun? (/n/)

Phoneme Blending Onset and Rime: What is this word? /t/ /op/ (top)

Phoneme Blending All Phonemes: /p/ /i/ /g/ What is the word? (pig)

Phoneme Segmentation: What are the individual sounds you hear in pot? /p/ /o/ /t/

Phoneme Deletion of Initial Sound: Say take without the /t/. (ake)

Phoneme Deletion of Final Sound: Say big without the /g/. (bi)

Adding Phonemes: Say /it/. Now add /s/ to the beginning. (sit)

Phoneme Substitution of Initial Sound: Replace the first sound in the word back with /t/. (tack)

One thing to note, however, is that phonemic awareness is often falsely equated with phonics skills.

What is Phonics?

In its most basic form, phonics is the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes).

For most reading this, that relationship might seem like second nature to you. The truth is there are millions of people across the world that were never taught how a combination of letters can be blended together to produce a word.

Some might have memorized all the words they needed, while others continue to struggle with reading and writing.

What is important to remember about phonics is the fact that the alphabet lies at the core of any phonics program. A student must know the letter(s) of the alphabet that corresponds with certain sounds.

As we know in phonics, sounds can often be represented by multiple letters. For example, the words more, for, door, and oar all end with the same sound but are all represented by a different spelling.

The goal of phonics instruction is to help children grasp the idea that there is a logical, predictable, and organized relationship between the letters in the alphabet and spoken sounds.

The most effective phonics programs incorporate direct instruction that is structured, systematic (have a clear step-by-step order of instruction), and incorporate multi-sensory elements. What's also important is keeping children engaged by incorporating phonics games and activities.

By teaching your students phonics in a systematic, explicit, and structured way, they can begin to sound out and decode new words.

Synthetic Phonics vs. Analytic Phonics

It is a question that has come up more in recent years. Traditionally and historically, children have been taught using analytic phonics in which they analyze specific parts of a word.

There is an emphasis placed on the initial sound of a word (/t/ in 'top'), onset, rime, and word families. Children are taught to recognize larger chunks of a word, rather than the individual sounds or phonemes.

Children are also taught to take clues from the recognition of the whole word and the context.

On the other hand, synthetic phonics emphasizes hearing and identifying each phoneme in the word. This approach could be more helpful for early learners as it allows educators to simplify their instruction and tackle phonics on a smaller, more consistent scale.

One important note for educators is that this approach requires you to pronounce the phonemes as correctly as possible.

You would be surprised by some of the bad habits we display when speaking to our children on a day-to-day basis. We take shortcuts around words and sentences, so be mindful of this when you are teaching your lessons.

Summary

In short, phonemic awareness focuses only on the sounds of a word while phonics focuses on the relationship of sounds and letters.

In other words, it will be very difficult for your students to develop their phonics skills if they don't have a good foundation in phonological and phonemic awareness.
IMSE believes that all children should be able to read. To achieve this end, IMSE wants to bring Orton-Gillingham to all educators to give children the best literacy instruction possible. Learn more about what you can do to improve literacy for all using the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education's Orton-Gillingham training. Please connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to get tips and tricks from your peers and us. Read the IMSE Journal to hear success stories from other schools and districts, and be sure to read the OG Weekly email series for refreshers and tips.

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Phonemic Awareness vs. Phonics | IMSE Journal

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To start, phonology is a segment of linguistics that focuses on the study of speech sounds and patterns. In other words, its focus is on the study of sounds in a particular language. Phonological awareness is the understanding that our spoken language is made up of words and that our words are made up of individual units of sounds called phonemes.

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A journalist examines why many students struggle to learn to read.

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Some time, usually between the ages of 5 and 6, most children begin to read. Watching a child transition from a nonreader to one who can both entertain and educate herself with a book is, for many parents, one of the milestones and miracles of family life.

Learning to read accurately, fluidly, with good comprehension and stamina is also a crucial set of skills for school success. Schools know this. That's why in the best ones, the early years of primary education are devoted to teaching kids to read using scientifically proven methods to ensure that all kids are reading at grade level.

But in many schools, in all kinds of neighborhoods, there is a shockingly large chunk of kids - about one in three - who don't master the skills they need to learn to read in a sophisticated way. Their road is a difficult one: although many will try to use their intelligence to cover the holes in their skill set, as the work gets harder and the reading grows more complex, these children will find they are unable to keep up.

This is one of the great tragedies of the American school system. It is even more heartbreaking when you talk to scientists about how the human brain reads. Researchers estimate that somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of children, most of whom have developmental disorders or profound neurological problems, will never learn to read. The rest? If they are given what experts say is the right kind of instruction, they will learn to read, and most of them will be able to read well.

Reading casualties

But what happens to these kids if they don't get the right kind of instruction? Reading experts call them "instructional casualties." Most of them don't have neurological problems. They are not disabled. Their schools and, specifically, their primary school teachers have failed them.

In terms of outcomes, longitudinal research, the kind that follows kids for decades, tells a sad story. If your child is experiencing reading failure, it is almost as if he has contracted a chronic and debilitating disease. Kids who are not reading at grade level in first grade almost invariably remain poor fourth grade readers. Seventy four percent of struggling third grade readers still struggle in ninth grade, which in turn makes it hard to graduate from high school. Those who do manage to press on - and who manage to graduate from high school - often find that their dreams of succeeding in higher education are frustratingly elusive. It won't surprise you to know that kids who struggle in reading grow up to be adults who struggle to hold on to steady work; they are more likely to experience periods of prolonged unemployment, require welfare services, and are more likely to end up in jail.

Even if your child is one of the lucky ones and is doing fine in reading, students who are poorly served by their primary schools end up being a drain on the public education system. Reading problems are the overwhelming reason why students are identified as having learning disabilities and assigned to special education, often an instructional ghetto of the worst kind.

The right way to teach reading

It doesn't have to be this way. No area of education has been as thoroughly studied, dissected, and discussed as the best way to teach students to read. Seminal research and longitudinal studies from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, combined with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and computerized brain modeling from the nation's top academic labs, provide a clear prescription for effective reading instruction. And yet that information is virtually unknown among teachers, parents, and those who serve on school boards.

In nearly every conversation about reading instruction, educators talk about different pedagogical approaches and different philosophies, as if one is equal to another. And perhaps because some kids seem to learn to read like they learn to run, from observation and for the sheer love of it, it can appear like almost any kind of reading instruction can work with varying levels of success - for at least some kids. But researchers say they've come up with a straightforward formula that, if embedded into instruction, can ensure that 90 percent of children read.

What does the research show? It turns out that children who are likely to become poor readers are generally not as sensitive to the sounds of spoken words as children who were likely to become good readers. Kids who struggle have what is called poor "phonemic awareness," which means that their processor for dissecting words into component sound is less discerning than it is for other kids.

In practical terms it works like this: a child destined to become a poor reader and a child destined to become a good reader can both understand the word "bag," but the poor reader may not be able to clap for each of the three sounds in the word or to know that the last sound is what distinguishes "bag" from "bad." If a child struggles to hear individual sounds that make up words, that child is likely to stumble when you try to teach her, for example, that the letter t makes the "tuh" sound. This becomes a real problem when we ask those kids to execute the neurological triple backflip known as reading.

And here's a critical fact you need to know: scientists have shown again and again that the brain's ability to trigger the symphony of sound from text is not dependent on IQ or parental income. Some children learn that b makes the buh sound and that there are three sounds in bag so early and so effortlessly that by the time they enter school (and sometimes even preschool), learning to read is about as challenging as sneezing. When the feeling seizes them, they just have to do it. Other perfectly intelligent kids have a hard time locating the difference between bag and bad or a million other subtleties in language.

Many studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a skill that can be strengthened in kids. And following that instruction in phonemic awareness, about 100 hours of direct and systematic phonics instruction can usually get the job done and ensure that about 90 percent of kids have the fundamentals they need to become good readers.

Reading lessons

Many school districts have adopted what they call a "balanced literacy" approach to reading. If administrators at your child's school describe their reading program that way, you'll need to ask a few more questions.

In some schools, balanced literacy means that preK teachers work on letters and letter sounds. Kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers deliver an orderly progression of explicit phonics lessons and, as the children become competent and confident readers, push them to discover the best that literature and nonfiction have to offer while doggedly building up their comprehension through weekly word study, spelling tests, and story analysis.

In other schools, balanced literacy can mean something very different and something that looks a lot like what is called the "whole language" approach - which is now largely discredited. At these schools, teachers provide a portion of the kids with a smattering of phonics (most schools now concede that some kids do need phonics to help figure out the code) and also encourage them to guess words from illustrations, and later, from context. As the children (hopefully) get more competent at reading, teachers minimize the study of language and devote their time and energy to getting kids excited about words, reading, and books. If you care about your child's school success, you'll want more of the former kind of instruction - phonics and word study - and less of the latter.

Once you've seen science-based reading instruction delivered well, you'll want it for your kids. For six years, Kristina Matuskiewicz, a kindergarten teacher at Edna C. Stevens Elementary School in Cromwell, CT, believed that, like all the teachers at her tidy suburban school, she was helping to make good readers. She read them stories, she identified words and described their meaning, she offered them a variety of good books and worked to shift them to independent reading. "Each teacher had their own approach to teaching reading," says Matuskiewicz.

The problem was, none of their approaches were working very well. In 2007, only 70 percent of the third graders were proficient in reading. Not only that, each year about 33 out of 489 kids in the preK through second grade classes required outside support in reading - a program that was costly for the school and for the district.

What the "right way" looks like

The principal, Lucille DiTunno, decided the school needed to take another approach. First, she asked her teachers to establish a "literacy block" - 90 minutes a day dedicated to reading. Three years ago, DiTunno paid $28,000 to Literacy How, then a division of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, to bring consultants to the school every week for a full year to teach teachers about the scientifically proven methods that help kids learn to read.

The first meeting, says Literacy How consultant Wendy North, was a disaster. "We got off on the wrong foot," says North. The teachers felt like they were being blamed for the struggles of kids they hadn't taught in years. Instead of directing the anger at the inadequate instruction they had been given at teachers college, she says, they felt humiliated and angry that outside experts were being brought in to teach what they already knew - how to teach reading.

North persevered. These days, kindergartners in Matuskiewicz's class get a different kind of instruction than their older brothers and sisters did. During the first week of kindergarten, Matuskiewicz sits with each child and determines if he or she knows the letters and their corresponding letter sounds. The skill levels of the children are variable. So, class work in the autumn has to do with "sorting" - identifying letters and connecting them to sounds.

Some of the kids with a keen sense of phonemic awareness are already moving on to what is called in teacher-speak "decodable text" - little books with single lines of text made up of words that can be sounded out with ease. After about thirty minutes, all the children stop their work and, using a broad hand motion for each sound, sing what is known as "the vowel song" with great gusto. When the chorus of cheerful voices begins to die away, North and Matuskiewicz look pleased. "The rap against phonics is that there is too much drilling," says North. "But look at this classroom. No one is suffering here."

First grade teacher Angela DiStefano, a 12-year teaching veteran, says the Literacy How approach to reading has changed her professional life forever. "Before that, I thought it was my job to teach kids to share my enthusiasm for reading." Now, she teaches them to read with explicit instruction on how to sound out words. Not long ago, she gave a seminar for first grade parents to teach them some rules about vowels (for example: vowels make their short sound in closed pattern words like tap and the long sound in open pattern words like hi, so, and my) so parents could reinforce the lessons at home.

The Literacy How approach has increased the scores on interim tests, and results from the first third graders who learned to read this way are expected to be high. Already, only three children per year are now being referred for the costly reading support, a massive savings for the district.

DiStefano says that the new program has made her relationship with parents more straightforward. "Before, we might say, 'That child isn't reading!' And we'd shrug. We didn't know what to do. Now we can sit with a parent and say, 'Your child is struggling to understand the rule that when a word ends with e, the middle vowel says its own name.' And we can describe our plan to reteach that and get parents to emphasize that at home and get that child back on the path to reading success."

Seven tips for reading success

Remember that learning to read and to read very well are crucial to your child's well-being.

Find a school that uses scientifically based reading instruction. Find out what that is, and make sure your child's school is doing it.

Make it clear to your child's teacher that you expect frequent, detailed reports on your child's progress in basic reading skills.

If your child is not moving forward steadily, be prepared to take action. "Wait and see?" Nope. Watchful waiting is a good practice for many aspects of child rearing. Progress in early reading is not one of them.

Be prepared to encounter some confusion and defensiveness from the people you'd think are the experts. Do not be deterred.

Throughout elementary school and middle school, teachers should be engaging in increasingly sophisticated forms of word study.

After second grade, surround your child with all kinds of books and make what she's reading a topic of dinnertime conversation. Listen to the way she talks about books to ensure that her comprehension continues to deepen.

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Yes, there's a right way to teach reading | Parenting

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Some time, usually between the ages of 5 and 6, most children begin to read. Watching a child transition from a nonreader to one who can both entertain and educate herself with a book is, for many parents, one of the milestones and miracles of family life.

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A teacher details her experience and thoughts.

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Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill for preschoolers and kindergarteners to develop. It is the ability to play with sounds in a variety of ways to manipulate, substitute, and hear isolated sounds. It is also an essential skill to develop before a student can learn to read.

Many of the kiddos in my second grade classroom who had phonics difficulties also had an underdeveloped phonemic awareness. They could not isolate and blend sounds. They just didn't have enough practice in listening to and playing with sounds, apart from the letters.

As my five-year-old has entered kindergarten this year, his phonemic awareness skills have been something I've paid attention to more and more. He is at the right place to learn all the skills below and it's something I'm monitoring, because, well, he has a teacher for a mom.

This post contains affiliate links. Read my disclosure policy for more information.

In the simplest of terms, it is an awareness of sounds. It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound that have meaning.

One very important thing to emphasize is that phonemic awareness is done without letters. It is all sound. Once you add letters, it becomes phonics. Students need a strong phonemic awareness foundation before you add phonics on top of it.

Rhyming / Alliteration

Rhyming is one of the earlier phonemic awareness skills to develop. It is present in most of our nursery rhymes and songs for young children. Alliteration is similar to rhyming, but on the other side of the word.

Rhyming is a difficult skill to learn for some readers, especially for English learners. Although rhyming is a phonemic awareness skill, I wouldn't focus intervention on it. Teach it, yes. Do songs, poems, and rhymes in your classroom, yes. However, if a student is not able to produce rhyming words after some instruction, I would move into the other phonemic awareness skills. Is Rhyming Ability Important in Reading? is a great article about how much emphasis to put on rhyming. The basic conclusion is that the other components of phonemic awareness are more influential in reading success than rhyming.

Oral Blending & Segmenting

Oral blending is the ability to put units of sounds together. Oral Segmenting is the ability to break a word apart into the units of sound. For example, say the word cat. Tell me the sounds in cat. /k/ /a/ /t/. Both segmenting and blending should be practiced regularly.

Start with (1) compound words, like pancake, then move onto (2) two-syllable words, then onto (3) cvc words with continuous sounds. Finally do (4) open syllables, (5) cvc with stop sounds, and (6) long vowel patterns.

When I teach students to segment into syllables, we often use our hands, putting out a hand for each syllable. For blending, we often use slinkies to emphasize elongating the word.

Initial, Final, Medial Sound Isolation & Identification

Consonant isolation is the ability to tell the first sound of a word. For instance, say the word cat, tell me the first sound, /k/? Teach and practice the initial, final and then medial sounds. Start with consonants in the initial and final positions before you work on the vowels.

Deletion

Deletion is the ability to remove a sound from a word and tell what is left. For instance, say the word cat. Remove the /k/. What is left?

Substitution

Substitution is similar to deletion, but a little more advanced. It requires a student to remove a sound and place another sound in it's place. For instance, say the word cat. Replace the /k/ with /b/. What do you have?

Most phonemic awareness actives should be done daily for short intervals of time throughout the day. The point is short, frequent interactions with the sounds to build competency, moving from simple cvc words to more complex blends. Also move from simple rhyming and identification tasks to segmenting, blending, deletion and substitution tasks.

Which words do you choose? Choose words based on the activities that you're doing in class and stories that you're already reading with students. Pull words that are familiar to students and play around with the words. Having some familiarity with the words will help students break them apart into their sounds.

Each of the above components above can be done with almost any set of words. Simply choose a few words from a recently read story and find some rhyming words, segment the sounds, identify the initial and final sounds, delete a sound, replace a sound.

One of the tried and true methods for developing phonemic awareness is the use of Elkonin boxes, also called sound boxes. They are basically just boxes for each sound. Students move an object into the box when saying the sound. In the above picture, using the word, cat, the /k/ has already been said. As I say the /a/ sound, I move the middle circle into the box and then move onto the last sound, /t/ when I say it.

You use the amount of boxes needed for the number of sounds in a word and the boxes are touching each other. Combining the boxes with picture clues, is also useful. Likewise, draw spaces or lines for each sound in a word and have students point to the lines as they say the sounds. The idea is that there is one space for each sound in the word.

Be sure you are pronouncing the sounds consistently and accurately. The stop sounds are the most difficult, because we want to put an /uh/ sound after them, like buh. Do your best to isolate the sound. Like for /p/, put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the air. It's quick. Likewise, exaggerate the continuous sounds more than usual. Like, /m/ should be mmmmmmmmmmmm . . . emphasize that it's a continuous sound. This over emphesis will pay off when you get to blending.

Use the letter sound, not the name, when you're working on phonemic awareness skills. Using the sound consistently helps students form a pattern isolating the sound.

Do not use letters or symbols. I said this earlier, but this is an important distinction. Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sound without letters. When you add letters, it becomes phonics.

Pictures help, especially for English learners or students with speech problems. If you can find a good source for pictures of common cvc words. Picture Sorting for Phonemic Awareness has some good pictures in it.

Use the full body. I often had students hold up their fist and then fingers to isolate sounds. I would have them put their hands together with the finger tips touching and draw them apart to blend sounds slowly. ( Slinkies are a great tool for this, too!) Have students hop each sound. Draw some boxes or dots onto floor and have students hop or walk the sounds. Clap hands for sounds or syllables.

Pay attention to your students. Assessments help to understand where a student is in their phonemic awareness journey. Can they rhyme? Identify initial, final, and medial sounds? Can they delete sounds? Substitute sounds? I know assessments are a lot of work, but they also give you a lot of information, if they're the right assessment, and can guide your instruction to make it meaningful, focused and valuable for the majority of students in your classroom. Assessments will also tell you which students are not successful so you can focus more targeting instruction with them in small groups.

Whatever works for your students, use it. If something is not working try something else. There is no right way to teach phonemic awareness for all students. Some things will click for some students and other things for other students. The point is that students are learning to play with sounds and learning how to blend and segment sounds, so that they can apply those skills to reading and phonics instruction.

These have been a few of my favorite resources over the years. They have a ton of fun activities or are great for small group instruction.

Phonemic Awareness: Playing with Sounds to Strengthen Beginning Reading Skills is one resources I keep going to year after year for word lists, activities, and games.

Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum is just a classic phonemic awareness book. It has lessons and sequences of instruction for preschool / kindergarten classrooms. I tend to pick and choose what I use from it, but it's a very good book to learn more about phonemic awareness.

Picture Sorting for Phonemic Awareness is a great resource for pictures, if you don't have access to clipart.

Do you have any favorite phonemic awareness activities that you do in your classroom? I'd love to see and hear about them. As I'm working with my son at home this next year, I aways on the look out for good ideas.

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Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill for preschoolers and kindergarteners to develop. It is the ability to play with sounds in a variety of ways to manipulate, substitute, and hear isolated sounds. It is also an essential skill to develop before a student can learn to read.

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Background & Strategies for using students' ears to learn to read

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Background & Strategies for using students' ears to learn to read

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A valuable resource to teach students who struggle learning how to read.

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To access a fun activity, word list, & phonological awareness survey, don't miss our Teacher Tips, Fun Facts, Check It Out!, and Word of the Week at the end of the blog!

What is Phonemic Awareness?

What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Kilpatrick, 2015). Phonemic awareness is a subset of the broader category of phonological awareness, which is one's conscious awareness of and ability to "play with" the sound structures in oral language (Paulson & Moats, 2010).

Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Improve Students' Reading Using Their Ears

Reading With Your Ears? What if we told you that you could improve your students' ability to read unfamiliar words without showing them a single printed letter? As crazy as it sounds, it's true! This is because one of the major skills underlying the successful decoding of printed words, phonemic awareness, is a purely auditory and oral skill. It may not be "reading with your ears" in the literal sense, but the sounds we hear and play within words are what allow us to ultimately pull the print off the page with our eyes when we decode.

What Is the Difference Between Phonological Awareness & Phonemic Awareness?

Let's start with phonological awareness. Your phonological awareness is what enables you to hear the sentence "My dog ran away" and immediately determine that it contains four spoken words. It allows you to quickly identify that bat and mat rhyme, while bat and boat do not. And it enables you to determine that the spoken syllables /pic/ and /nic/ together make the word picnic and that the spoken word parts /spl/ and /ash/ put together make the word splash. Identifying and manipulating speech at the word, syllable, and onset-rime level are the marks of phonological awareness.

Your phonemic awareness, on the other hand, is what enables you to hear and manipulate the smallest units of speech, called phonemes. Your phonemic awareness gets the credit when you identify that the word map has three sounds, /m/ /ă/ /p/, while the word split has five, /s/ /p/ /l/ /ĭ/ /t/. Your phonemic awareness allows you to hear the individual sounds /f/ /r/ /ŏ/ /g/ and know right away that this is the word frog. And it is what tells you that stop without the /s/ is top, that adding /s/ to the beginning of mash gives you smash, and that changing the /ĭ/ in quick to /ă/ gives you quack.

These phonemic exercises are not only fun, but they are also essential to proficient word recognition and decoding. Seidenberg (2017) tells us that, "we read with our eyes but the starting point for reading is speech." In fact, researchers have found that "among poor readers, 70-80% have trouble with accurate and fluent word recognition that originates with weaknesses in phonological processing" (Fletcher, Lyon, & Fuchs, 2007). We know that "when children lack awareness of the role that sounds play in words, [they] rarely learn to read easily" (Henry, 2010, p. 76). Strong phonemic awareness skills lead to strong readers because phonemic awareness lays the underlying framework for reading (decoding) and writing (encoding) (Trehearne, 2003). Although playing with words at the larger levels of syllable and onset-rime is fun and helps to develop an ear for the sound structures in words, we want to get students as quickly as possible "to where it really matters, the individual phoneme level" (Tolman, 2018).

What is the Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Decoding?

Kilpatrick (2015) tells us that phonemic awareness is an essential part of the process of storing words in one's sight word vocabulary; that is, the body of words (high-frequency or not) that an individual can decode quickly and effortlessly. "Phonemic awareness is what allows us to anchor the sounds in a word to the written sequence of letters that represent those sounds" (Kilpatrick, 2015). This process is called orthographic mapping. Studies have shown that students with better phonological awareness skills can handle this mapping process more proficiently than those with weaker phonological awareness skills (Kilpatrick, 2015). The goal of decoding is to build words into our sight word memory, and phonemic awareness allows this to happen!

Why Are the Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness Essential to Learning to Read?

Adams (1994) emphasizes that while phonemic awareness is essential for learning to read, it is not easily established, and children need explicit instruction to gain the necessary skills. This makes it extremely important for teachers to understand that there are various layers of phonemic awareness and that each of these layers represents a skill that can be developed through targeted instruction and practice. These layers build from the simplest phonemic awareness skills at the bottom of the pyramid to the most complex at the top. These are skills that can be modeled, practiced, and established through oral wordplay.

The Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Definitions & Examples of Instruction at Each Layer

Phoneme Isolation: Hearing and isolating the individual phonemes (sounds) in spoken words represents the first layer of skilled phonemic awareness. Isolating phonemes entails knowing that a word is made up of a sequence of sounds and that the individual sounds in words can be differentiated from one another. Beginning sound isolation activities are a great way to help students develop their phoneme isolation skills. Beginning sound isolation is simply pulling the first sound off of a spoken word. Students can isolate the first sounds in words, as in /b/, bear, or /s/, soap.

Blending: Moving up the pyramid, we come to a slightly more complex phonemic awareness skill, phoneme blending. Phoneme blending, which is basically combining sounds, involves listening to and pulling together isolated phonemes to create words. This process requires a student to hold the individual elements in his/her mind as the word is created, thus challenging a student's active working memory. When beginning readers sound out a word, they use letter-sound knowledge to say each sound in a word (/b/ /ă/ /t/), and then blend the sounds quickly together to read the word (bat).

Segmenting: The third layer in the pyramid is phoneme segmentation. This is the ability to divide a spoken word into its component sounds (phonemes). In a segmentation activity, students are given a word like mad, and then they segment it, or "stretch" the phonemes, /m/ /ă/ /d/. As they are saying the sounds, they can extend a single finger for every phoneme that they hear, starting with the thumb: /m/ (extend thumb), /ă/ (extend index finger), /d/ (extend middle finger). Lastly, they blend the phonemes together as they bring their hands back to their chests and say the word, mad.

Manipulation: Truly refined phonemic awareness includes even more advanced skills, like phoneme addition, deletion, and substitution, all three of which are considered phoneme manipulation. These are the top three layers of the pyramid. Phoneme manipulation is generally more challenging than segmenting and blending phonemes. Manipulation requires students to hold phonemes in their working memories long enough to isolate specific phonemes, add, delete, or substitute (delete and then add) specific phonemes, and then blend the phonemes back together to form a new word. These types of activities are an excellent way to build refined phonemic awareness, particularly for students who may have already mastered phoneme segmentation and blending.

Phoneme Addition: Phoneme addition involves adding phonemes to a given word to produce a new word. For instance, starting with the word we and adding the phoneme /k/ to the end turns it into week. Phoneme addition can be done with more complex words as well; starting with the word bell and adding the phoneme /t/ at the end turns it into belt.

Phoneme Deletion: Conversely, starting with the word guide and deleting the final phoneme, /d/, creates the new word, guy. A more complex example of phoneme deletion might include removing one phoneme from a two-sound blend. Starting with the word blast and deleting the initial phoneme, /b/, results in the new word, last.

Phoneme Substitution: Phoneme substitution, the most advanced of all the manipulation skills on our pyramid, requires that a student knows how to both delete and add phonemes. In a phoneme substitution exercise, a student might be asked to drop the short i sound in kit and replace it with the long i sound. When they do, kit becomes kite. This is done through a few intricate steps that are performed automatically and without conscious thought for strong, fluent readers. These steps include recognizing the component parts of the known word (segmenting the word into its phonemes), isolating a specific phoneme, deleting that phoneme, adding the new phoneme, and blending the phonemes together to say the new word. Did you notice that these steps include every one of the lower five layers of the pyramid? That's right -phoneme substitution, our top layer, encompasses every single layer of the phonemic awareness pyramid. If even one of these lower skills is weak, students will struggle to substitute phonemes.

The Importance of Phoneme Substitution

Teachers are often comfortable with and therefore put the instructional focus on the phonemic awareness skills toward the bottom of the pyramid, particularly phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation. Although these skills are undoubtedly important in helping students as they are learning to decode, it is actually the top of the pyramid, with the more complex phonemic skills, that is often left out of classroom instruction, where we need to pay the most attention, particularly as students move beyond the primary classroom. Kilpatrick (2015) tells us that research suggests that "phonological manipulation tasks are the best measures of the phonological awareness, skills needed for reading because they are the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency" (page 155) because phoneme manipulation (adding, deleting, and substituting) is actually the layer of phonemic awareness that is the most closely related to reading connected text (Kilpatrick, 2015).

Phoneme substitution is the critical breakthrough skill a child needs to teach themselves how to read new words. As illustrated in the images above, if a student encounters a new unfamiliar word, like moth, they can use their knowledge of a word that they already know (like math) to teach themselves how to read this novel word. Remember that manipulation activities require students to hold phonemes in their working memory long enough to isolate specific phonemes, add, delete, or change specific phonemes, and then blend the phonemes back together to form a new word. Kilpatrick (2015) states that "training in phonemic manipulation has substantial long-term impact on reading."

Fun Strategies to Use
Sneak some advanced phoneme manipulation practice into the school day!

"Reading problems can be prevented if all students are trained in letter-sound skills and phonological awareness, starting in kindergarten."

- Kilpatrick (2016)

When I first learned about phoneme manipulation, I thought there is no way that my kindergarten students will be able to do that this year. I was AMAZED at how quickly my students caught on and they had so much fun doing it. They're more prepared for 1st grade than any other class I've ever promoted, and I have DIBELS data to prove it!

-Jenna K, Teacher, New York

Download our complimentary Teacher Resources
Phonological Awareness Survey.

This survey enables one-on-one assessment of phonological and phonemic awareness skills that are essential underpinnings of accurate and automatic decoding.

Discover Reading at the Word Level

Click here to link to a word chaining activity we call Word Math>> Add word chaining activities to your day and help students practice their advanced phonemic awareness skills. Use deletion, addition and substitution to chain these words:
strap → trap → rap → rash → ash → lash → latch → batch → botch → blotch
This activity can be done as a pure phonemic awareness exercise without showing students any letters. However, in our illustrate that these advanced phoneme manipulation skills can also be used with word chaining activity we letter tiles to help students encode and decode complex single-syllable words with digraphs, 2-sound blends, and 3-sound blends.

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References

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Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness - Really Great Reading Blog

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Subscribe to our Blog To access a fun activity, word list, & phonological awareness survey, don't miss our Teacher Tips, Fun Facts, Check It Out!, and Word of the Week at the end of the blog! What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Kilpatrick, 2015).

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Useful information on phonemic awareness and strategies on how to teach it.

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Hello! I'm back with another blog post about one of my favorite topics. I've blogged about phonemic awareness a few times already, but it's such an important topic that we're going for it again!

Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of smaller parts and these parts can be pulled apart into individual sounds.

The first step is recognizing that words can be broken down into their individual sounds (phonemes). Students must then be able to isolate sounds (identify the 1st/last/medial sound in words,) blend sounds together to make a word, segment (break apart) sounds of a word, and manipulate sounds.

Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. Think about the word chip. You can break this word into three sound parts: ch-i-p.

When a child has phonemic awareness, he can break that word up into its individual sounds like I just did. He can also identify the first, middle, or last sound in chip (called phoneme isolation).

Next comes phoneme manipulation.

Deleting a sound: Say "chat". Take away the /ch/. What is left? (at)

Substituting a sound: Say "chip". Change the /i/ to /o/. What's the word? (chop)

Adding Sounds: Say "lap". Add /s/ to the beginning. What's the word now? (slap)

Manipulating phonemes comes later. Initially, we want our soon-to-be readers to be able to blend sounds (ch-i-p=chip), segment sounds, and isolate sounds (first kids can identify beginning sounds, then ending sounds, and last middle sounds.)

When talking about phonemic awareness, you are not involving print. It's all about the in words. When a child is able to break apart a word into its smallest units of sound, he/she is ready to read.

This is exactly how I felt when I first heard these two terms. I'm pretty sure I used them interchangeably for my first couple years of teaching. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around it!

Phonological awareness is a more general term. It is having an awareness of larger parts of words, such as syllables or word endings like -at in cat. Having the ability to recognize rhymes and count syllables are two examples of having phonological awareness.

Phonemic awareness is specifically understanding that words can be broken down into individual sounds. I think of phonological awareness as the umbrella and phonemic awareness is underneath it, along with rhyming, alliteration, and syllables.

Click here for a printable version of PHONOLOGICAL skills.

In order to read, a child must be able to break apart the sounds in words.

A phonological weakness will impair a child's ability to decode words (Shaywitz 2003).

Research: Adams, 1990; Juel, 1988; Share, Jorm, Maclean, and Matthews, 1984; National Reading Panel2000; Scanlon & Vellutino, 1987

Developing phonemic awareness leads to success with the next step in learning to read: phonics. Once a child has developed a strong phonemic awareness, he is ready to connect letters to those sounds and blend them together to read words. He is also ready to break apart sounds in a word and connect these sounds to letters to write words.

Phonics is an instructional method that involves matching letters to their sounds to decode words. Have you ever had a student who struggled with phonics. You asked yourself, Why can't he sound out words? The answer is he most likely has not developed phonemic awareness. You need to throw the letters out the window for a bit and focus on strengthening his ability to hear the sounds in words. When applying phonics strategies, a child must first look at the word and identify the letters in that word. Then he connects the sounds to those letters. All the while, he is having to hold in his memory the previous sound. After matching the letters to their sounds, he is ready to blend the word together. But wait. He isn't able to blend! I've had several students who seemed like they were ready to read because they had the letters mastered. They knew their sounds perfectly well too. But they still couldn't blend those sounds together. Both letter/sound knowledge AND phonemic awareness must be present in order to begin phonics. Once those pieces of the puzzle are put together, the child is ready to decode!

How to Teach It

Phonemic awareness comes more naturally to some kids. With others, it needs to be explicitly taught, modeled, practiced, and practiced some more.

All children benefit from phonemic awareness instruction, but it is absolutely crucial for kids who are lacking this skill.

Instruction can begin as early as 4, but it should be in every kindergarten classroom.

Before you can dig into phonemic awareness instruction (breaking apart the individual phonemes in words,) make sure your kids have a general phonological awareness: Start with rhyming, alliteration, and syllables. Here are some tips for developing these skills:

Click here to download a printable version of the following ideas:

Once those skills are solid, you are ready to move into instruction to develop phonemic awareness.

I always have several puppets ready to use. I tell them that the puppets talk slower than we do and I need help translating. I even found a sloth puppet which is sort of perfect! Have the puppet talk in individual phonemes and have students "translate" for you.

Here is a link to an older blog post with some specific tips and ideas about awareness. It is packed with information, so I hope it helps! It's a long post, so get some popcorn and a cup of coffee. 🙂

You can click here or on the picture to read this post.
If a child continues to struggle with phonemic awareness, this may be a sign of dyslexia. I will blog more about dyslexia in a later post. For now, just know a lack of phonemic awareness IS a sign of dyslexia. They will need more specialized help.

Now that your students have developed a strong phonemic awareness, phonics is a natural next step.

I made this to illustrate how phonics cannot happen without both pieces to the puzzle: phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle. I will be blogging more about phonics soon! In the meantime, email me or comment with any specific questions you have so I can make sure I include it in my post.

Resources:

If you are looking for some RTI resources, I have a few available too:
You can find these here.
If you are looking for some RTI resources, I have a few available too:

This is how I store these:

Some of the bigger things go in this:

Looking for a FREE assessment? Look no further!

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All about Phonemic Awareness - Sarah's Teaching Snippets

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Hello! I'm back with another blog post about one of my favorite topics. I've blogged about phonemic awareness a few times already, but it's such an important topic that we're going for it again! Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of smaller parts and these parts can be pulled apart ...

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Important resource for teaching phonemic awareness to dyslexic students. This can be beneficial to students with other reading issues.

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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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Useful resources from a reading specialist. Powerpoint really valuable.

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, called phonemes , in spoken words. Phonemic awareness activities can be done with eyes shut.

Phonemic awareness is not phonics, rather, phonological awareness forms the basis of phonics. Phonics is the understanding that sounds and print letters are connected; this is the first step towards "reading."

Before children learn to read, they need to become more aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, called phonemes .

Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that makes a difference in a word's meaning. Listen to the word ball. It has 3 sounds /b/ /aw/ /l/. If we switch (or manipulate) /b/ for /w/ we have a whole new word wall. Change /aw/ to /e/ and we have another new word well.

Phonological Awareness, however, encompasses a number of sound related skills necessary for a person to grow as a reader. As a child develops phonological awareness he not only comes to understand that words are made up of small sound units (phonemes), he also learns that words can be segmented into larger sound "chunks" known as syllables and each syllable begins with a sound (onset) and ends with another sound ~ Rimes.

When measuring a child's phonological awareness, we look at his ability to apply several different skills. A child with strong phonological awareness should be able to recognize and use rhyme, break words into syllables, blend phonemes into syllables and words, identify the beginning and ending sounds in a syllable and see smaller words within larger words (ie. cat in catalog).

Phonemic awareness is just one aspect of phonological awareness.

While phonological awareness encompasses a child's ability to recognize the many ways sounds function in words, phonemic awareness is only the understanding of the tiniest sound units in words.

Because phonemic awareness is a subskill under the phonological awareness "umbrella," not all of the measures for determining a reader's skill level are applied when assessing phonemic awareness. A reader with strong phonemic awareness will demonstrate the ability to hear rhyme and alliteration (the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several different words used in a sentence or paragraph, such as sweet smell of success), find the different sound in a set of words (ie. bat, ball, wet) and blend and segment phonemes .

Why is Phonemic Awareness Is Important? Phonemic awareness improves a child's word reading, comprehension, and ability to spell. ACTIVITIES TO DEVELOP PHONEMIC AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS Play These With Your Child! Listening Games: To sharpen the child's ability to attend selectively to sounds.Think of: environmental sounds, storytelling and sharing activities, read alouds, following oral directions, sequencing of events, and being a listening detective ~ detecting the mistake heard.

With eyes closed, have the child identify the sound of clapping, a bell, a drawer opening/closing, a book slamming, crackers smashing, paper crumpling, marbles in a jar, paper ripping, a zipper going up and down, scissors cutting, etc.

Have the child identify a sequence of sounds.

Can the child locate the source of the sound?

Practice, from a familiar nursery rhyme, detecting what is said out of order. For example, Humpty Dumpty wall on a sat, or swap the word parts as in one, two, shuckle my boo. Also, can the child detect that the story order is incorrect, as in mixing up the order in the Three Little Pigs? If he/she can ~ that is being a good listening detective!

Have the child listen to and participate in storytelling, listen to read alouds, follow oral directions, and sequence events.

Identify animals by the sounds they make.

Rhyming :To use rhyme to introduce the child to the sounds in words.Think of: nursery rhymes, text variations where a rhyming word can be inserted, rimes ~ see my Rime page, poetry and finger plays.

Round Robin Game: I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a pet, net, jet, etc. Rhyming words need to be given by the child.

Rhyme Hunt: I see something in this room that rhymes with rock. Continue in this manner.

Say two words, and the child gives thumbs up/thumbs down if the words rhyme or not.

Ask What rhymes with top and starts with /h/? What rhymes with rack and starts with /t/? Continue with these riddles.

Sing new words to the tune of If You're Happy and You Know It: Did you ever see a bear in a chair ? (Replace bear and chair with different words the next time around.) Did you ever see a bear in a chair? No, I never. No, I never. No, I never. No, I never. No, I never saw a bear in a chair. Did you ever see a bell in a ______.. . . " Continue the song in this manner.

Read lots of Mother Goose rhymes to your child.Teach your child to use meaning and meter to notice and predict rhyming words

Have the child sit with friends/family in a circle with fists up as in One Potato, Two Potato. As a group, say a nursery rhyme, with fists being tapped one at a time in a circle. If the child's fist is the rhyming word, the fist goes behind back. Continue in this manner.

Evoke the realization that almost any word can be rhymed. Say a word, and have the child say a rhyme for it, even if it is a nonsense word.

Say rhyme phrases, and have the child fill in the blank, such as A cat is wearing a ____. A mouse lives in a _____.

ing rhymes for action play ~ barking/parking, ringing/singing, wishing/fishing ~ have the child give a rhyming word and act these out.

Add A Sound (Synthesis) to introduce the child to synthesize words from their separate phonemes. To Add a Sound, explain that if we put a sound at the beginning of a word, we can have a new word, as in ox, add /f/, now we have fox. A t add /c/, now we had cat. Say a vowel with consonant and have the child add a sound.

Different Words, Same Final Phoneme: Gather objects in your house, and ask the child which 2 objects end with the same sound, or even say a word such as fork, and ask the child to find something in the room that ends with the same sound. Cake ends like fork.

What Is Missing? Say 2 words and ask the child what sound was taken away, such as rice/ice ( the r sound is missing), same/aim (s sound), thick/ick (th sound), or do this in reverse ~ what sound was added?

Use alliteration in silly sentences, such as six silly snakes sat soaking up some sun. Ask what sound was heard most often. Big bears bake bread, etc. Jiggle,Joggle,Jee by Laura Richards and Chicky Chicky Chook Chook by Cathy MacLennan are two books focusing on alliteration that preschoolers enjoy.

Round Robin Game: I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a pen, pencil, peanut, parrot. . . . Continue this game using various letters.

Create story titles and a story for a character such as Robert the Running Rabbit. This is a form of alliteration.

Do discrimination activities. Listen for which word starts with the same sound as take. Say three words such as pencil, tub, pan. The child should recognize tub as having the same beginning sound as take. Which word does not belong: mat, leg, had ~ it would be leg because of the short e sound ~ the other 2 words are alike because they both have short a. This would be more advanced. You can play which word does/does not belong using beginning letter sounds, vowels, ending letter sound.

Blend onset and rimes such as g-ame is game, n-ight is night, tr-uck is truck. (The onset is beginning letter sound or blend, the rime is the vowel and string of letters that comes after.) Have the child segment the onset and rime on own. See my Rime page.

Sounds In Words: You can use 4 different colored blocks for this activity ~ green, yellow, blue, orange. Each color represents one sound, but not a particular sound. For example, on the word rice, the child may represent /r/ with a green block, /i/ with a yellow block, and /s/ (the actual ce in the word sounds like /s/) with a blue block. When the green block is taken away, it becomes /i/ /s/ ~ ice, a whole new word. It is important for your child to segment words into their phonemes. Ask your child to change rice to mice. Your child should swap out the green /r/ sound with a different color ~ perhaps orange, for /m/. To change mice to mitt, the blue block is slid out, and the green block can now represent /t/.

After modeling, and asking the child to listen to syllable counts, have the child clap the syllables in his/her first and last name. Have the child feel his chin move to the various syllable amounts. Count syllables in various words.

Blend and Segment Syllables: Have the child blend the 2 word parts heard sun/shine, up/stairs, ta/ble. Say a word, and have the child segment the syllables.

Play Syllable and Sound Deletion: Say table. Say it again but don't say /ta/. The answer would be ble. Any 2 or more syllable words can be broken down in this manner. Say computer. Say it again but don't say er. It would be compute.

Phonemes : To develop the ability to analyze words into a sequence of separate phonemes and to develop the ability to synthesize words from a sequence of separate phonemes.

Blend the sounds in a word into a word as in /s/ /a/ /d/. Talk like a robot, segmenting each sound, and have the child blend the sounds into a word.

Say a sentence leaving a word out that you deliberately segment, such as where did I leave my /p/ /e/ /n/? This is a fun way for the child to blend.

Say a word, and have the child segment it on own. Use Elkonin boxes, which look like this:

The sounds of the word /f/ /i/ /sh/ fit nicely in the 3 squares because fish has 3 sounds. Ask the child to point to the box where he/she hears /i/ for example. The answer would be the middle box.

Have the child work on sound discrimination ~ does boy start with /b/ or /v/? Say various words and give 2 sound options.

Have the child do manipulation activities with plain blocks, crayons, or ziti which are used to represent sounds: Show the child 3 pieces of ziti. Say this says map, /m/ /a/ /p/. Now change map to mop. The child should know to swap out the middle ziti. Then say, now change mop to cop. Now change cop to cot. The child should be swapping out the correct ziti. You can also do this orally without the ziti. Say change the /a/ in map to /o/. What is the word? Mop! Now change /m/ in mop to /c/. What is the word? Cop!

Play "Sound of the Day" by renaming common items with the same sound for example, mamper, mesk, mencil. . . .

Consonant Blends ~ Adding and Subtracting Initial Sounds: The child should have plain blocks or pieces of ziti ~ any item ~ small, uniform, and plain. Say a simple word such as lay. The child must represent the phonemes heard by using the plain blocks or ziti. Lay has 2 phonemes /l/ and /a/. Now say a rhyming word play.That has 3 phonemes to be represented /p/ /l/ /a/. Continue in this manner.

Building Sounds in Words: Start with a 2 sound word such as pie, a 3 sound word from that is spy, a 4 sound word from that is spice. Here are some 2 sound words. . . .good luck my, an, at, in, ice, ate.

Guess A Word: Have the child find a secret object in the room. You guess what the object is while he says it phoneme by phoneme such as /ch/..../ai/..../r/.

Ask riddles such as What ends with /d/ and is a color?

Guess What ~ Introducing Sounds and Letters: I'm think of something in this room that starts with /sh/. Say the SOUND, not the letter name(s).

Initial Sounds and Letters: Use pictures from a book, objects in a room, or just say words from your head. Say 2 words and ask the child if they begin with the same sound. Does dog and deer begin with the same sound? What about milk and nest?

Final Sounds and Letters: Say 2 words such as dress and glass. Ask the child if the words end with the same sound. What about box and hill? Continue playing in this manner.

Word Search Initial or Final Consonants: Ask the child to find something in the room that starts with. . . and say any letter of the alphabet ~ NOT the sound, but the actual letter. The child must determine the sound of the letter to find the object. Play the same game with ends with. . . again say the letter name, not the sound.

Introduction to How Words Are Spelled By Adding A Letter: Start with writing down 2 letters such as at, ad, or even sa or ma. Add a 3rd letter for the child to decode such as mat, sat, pat in the at example or in the sa example sat, sad, sag.

Graphic posted with permission from Kathy Schumacher at http://www.tunefulteaching.com. Check out her great site!
Please watch my presentation: PhonemicAwareness (2) Would you like this page in Microsoft Word and/or to add this page to your website? Please email me the pages you want at judithearaujo@gmail.com and send $10/page to the "BUY NOW" LINK PROVIDED UNDER MY CONTACT INFORMATION ON THE FAR LEFT. Thank you! Word versions do NOT come with the images. COPYRIGHT 09/05/2012. PLEASE CITE AS FOLLOWS: Adams, Marilyn Jager. Phonemic Awareness in Young Children. Brookes Publishing: Baltimore, 1998. Araujo, Judith E., M.Ed., CAGS. "Phonemic Awareness for PreK, K, and 1." Mrs. Judy Araujo, Reading Specialist. N.p., 5 Sept. 2012. Web. <http://www.mrsjudyaraujo.com/phonemic-awareness-for-prek-k-and-1/>. Page Views as of 8/29/18:
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Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, called phonemes , in spoken words. Phonemic awareness activities can be done with eyes shut. Phonemic awareness is not phonics, rather, phonological awareness forms the basis of phonics. Phonics is the understanding that sounds and print letters are connected; this is the first step towards "reading."

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Advice for working with students learning disabilities

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Advice for working with students learning disabilities

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Tips to improve literacy in students who have reading comprehension issues.

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The majority of students identified with learning disabilities (LDs) are primarily impaired in reading ( Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007). Many students who have other high-incidence disabilities (e.g., behavioral disorders) also have serious reading difficulties ( Benner, Nelson, Ralston, & Mooney, 2010). Although some students with disabilities are impaired in reading comprehension even though they can read words fairly accurately, the most commonly occurring reading disability is characterized by inaccurate word reading (Torgesen, 2000; 2005). In this paper we will describe evidence-based word identification instruction for students with reading disabilities and for those with serious word reading difficulties who have not been identified as having reading disabilities, as students in these two groups have been found to respond similarly to kind of instruction we will describe ( Benner et al, 2010; Fletcher et al., 2007). We will refer to this group of students collectively as students with serious word reading difficulties (RD).

The need to teach students with RD to read is urgent, as the consequences of low reading proficiency are serious. Students who do not learn to read adequately are more likely to have pervasive academic difficulties and are at high risk for school dropout ( Alliance for Excellent Education, 2002). Poor reading has also been related to a higher incidence of delinquency ( Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture, 1997) and suicide ( Daniel et al., 2006). Adding to the urgency of this situation is the fact that, with typical instruction, the vast majority of students who do not learn to read adequately in the early elementary grades remain impaired in reading as long as they are in school ( Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Juel, 1988; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). In addition, early difficulties with basic reading skills typically result in limited time engaged in text reading ( Juel, 1988; Stanovich, 1986); because of this lack of exposure to text, a decoding problem may eventually become a generalized reading deficit characterized by low fluency, poor vocabulary, and limited world knowledge, all contributing to impaired reading comprehension (Stanovich).

Unfortunately, traditional approaches to special education services often fail to close the gap between students with RD and average readers; at best, special education programs tend to stabilize the reading development of students with disabilities so that they do not fall farther behind. For example, in a study of special education reading instruction for students in Grades 3-6, Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (1998) found that students' standard scores in reading rose by an average of only 0.04 standard deviations per year. If a student performing at the 5th percentile progressed at this rate, he or she would perform at only the 9th percentile 8 years later ( Torgesen, Rashotte, Alexander, Alexander, & MacPhee, 2003).

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of evidence-based instructional practices for teaching word reading to students with RD. We define evidence-based practices in word reading instruction as instructional processes and routines that have been shown to be effective in teaching most students with RD to read words. Although no instructional approach is effective for every individual student, the practices we describe are supported by converging research findings from multiple studies. To provide a foundation for this discussion of word reading instruction, we begin with a description of the reading process. Then we describe the role of assessment in teaching word reading. Next, we describe evidence-based reading instruction and intervention for students with RD, including a set of general principles for effective instruction. The next section addresses additional considerations for the implementation of effective word reading instruction.

The Reading Process

Reading is a complex endeavor that is made up of multiple components, all of which must be executed and orchestrated by the reader with the goal of making meaning from printed text. The reader must quickly and accurately recognize printed words, understand the meanings of the words, and create a cohesive mental model of the meaning of the text (e.g., make sense of the text by making inferences based on connections within and beyond the current text; Snow, 2002). Gough and Tunmer (1986) proposed a simple model of the reading process that suggested that effective reading is the product of the ability to decode print and the ability to comprehend language. In other words, students must learn to recognize known words immediately, quickly and efficiently decode unknown words, and read connected text quickly and accurately. They must also develop a sufficient vocabulary, a body of world knowledge, and oral language skills that will enable them to comprehend increasingly complex language. To read advanced text, they must command a large body of general and subject-specific vocabulary and background knowledge, sophisticated syntax (i.e., language usage), and text structures (e.g., narrative, compare and contrast) commonly used in written text, including text that addresses specialized domains such as chemistry or English literature. Mature, proficient readers are able to execute many of these processes automatically, without direct attention, while simultaneously building a mental representation of the meaning of the text, monitoring their own understanding of the text, and thinking critically about the text they are reading (e.g., Ehri, 2002).

Basic Reading Skills

At the most basic level, beginning readers must become aware of individual sounds and groupings of sounds within the oral speech stream. Spoken language consists of words composed of syllables that are in turn composed of individual sounds; however, when a person listens to oral speech, these words and word parts tend to run together. The beginning reader must become aware that oral language is made up of these components, a competency commonly referred to as phonological awareness ( Blachman, 2000). Phonemic awareness, a subcategory of phonological awareness, is the recognition that orally spoken words are composed of individual sounds, or phonemes. The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds within words has been found to be highly predictive of reading proficiency (Blachman; Schatschneider, Fletcher, Francis, Carlson, & Foorman, 2004), and deficits in this area are characteristic of persons with dyslexia ( Shaywitz, 2003). In addition to this awareness of sounds in spoken language, beginning readers of alphabetic languages must understand that letters and letter combinations represent spoken sounds. This is commonly called the "alphabetic principle." Although the awareness of phonemes and an understanding of the alphabetic principle normally develop in preschool through grade 1, some older students with serious word reading difficulties benefit from instruction in these basic competencies (e.g., Calhoon, 2005; Lovett et al., 2000, Torgesen et al., 2001).

Word Recognition, Fluency, and Comprehension

Accurate and quick word recognition is necessary-though not sufficient-for making meaning from print. For the most part, word recognition is accomplished in two ways-through phonological decoding (i.e., applying phonics to "break the code") and by recognizing intact words or parts of words "at sight" ( Ehri, 2002). Although proficient readers use context, or the meaning of the text, to monitor their reading accuracy and to refine word identification, there is evidence that they do not rely on context as a primary way to identify unknown words (Ehri). Weak readers overrely on context in order to compensate for inadequate word-level reading ability, which is inefficient as only about 10% of the words that are important to the meaning of passages can be inferred correctly from context alone ( Gough and Walsh; 1991). As students increase in reading proficiency, they are able to recognize more and more words instantly and automatically, and reading becomes more fluent. Essentially, fluent readers have very large "sight word" vocabularies ( Torgesen et al., 2003). Reading fluency is affected not only by the speed of word recognition but also by the reader's ongoing comprehension of the text, and fluent readers are able to interpret the phrasing and inflections in the text appropriately ( Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). Fluency is highly predictive of how well students in the elementary grades will comprehend the text they read (Fuchs et al.). Researchers have had mixed findings about the relationship between fluency and comprehension in older students; in general, this relationship weakens as students progress through the upper grades ( Denton et al., 2011).

Reading comprehension, the ultimate goal of the reading process, is affected by many factors, including word reading accuracy, reading fluency, vocabulary, world or background knowledge, and the ability to make inferences and strategically process text ( Sweet & Snow, 2002). This means that students with reading comprehension difficulties differ in their needs related to word reading instruction. Young children who are at risk for or experiencing reading difficulties in Grades K-2 almost always need a full program of instruction in basic decoding and word recognition, as these are the years in which children are expected to master the code and learn to recognize many high-frequency words at sight. Students in Grades 3 and above who have reading difficulties may need (a) a full program of instruction in basic decoding and word recognition, (b) short-term concentrated word identification instruction focused primarily on multisyllable words and structural analysis, or (c) ongoing word study that provides only minimal support in basic word recognition but equips students for decoding and spelling complex words as well as using morphemic analysis to determine word meanings (i.e., using knowledge of meaningful word parts such as affixes and roots).

The Role of Assessment in Word Identification Instruction

Four types of assessments serve important purposes in an effective reading program. Three types of assessments are formative, meaning they are designed to provide ongoing information to educators to inform their instruction decisions: screeners, diagnostic assessments, and progress monitoring assessments. These formative assessments are used to identify students with reading difficulties, design instruction, and gauge whether students are responding adequately to instruction. The fourth type is summative assessment, designed to assess whether students have met important goals and benchmarks, typically at the end of the school year. Summative assessments include outcome measures and statewide accountability tests. All of these assessments are important, but our primary focus will be on formative assessment because of its key role in word reading instruction.

Screening and Progress Monitoring Assessments

Screening assessments are brief assessments designed to identify students who may be at risk for RD or require supplemental intervention. These brief assessments always have some degree of error; they overidentify students who do not actually need supplemental intervention (i.e., false positives) and/or fail to identify some students who do need additional intervention (false negatives) ( Jenkins, Hudson, & Johnson, 2007). There is a trade-off between false positive and false negative errors. If a screener is made more rigorous, more students will fail it, but some of these will not actually be at risk for RD; conversely, if a screener is less difficult, many students will pass it, but some of these actually do require additional instruction to become proficient readers. Most published screeners are designed to have a low false negative error rate since the consequences of this kind of error is that students who need intervention do not receive it. For this reason, it is important to follow screening assessments with other kinds of assessments, including progress monitoring assessments, which are brief tests that are administered repeatedly on a regular schedule in order to track students' development of key skills and competencies over time.

The purpose of screening is to determine which students are not performing on grade level or are not making appropriate growth on key skills within the scope and sequence of the reading curriculum so that their instruction can be modified or supplemental intervention can be provided. Such assessments are therefore deliberately related to the curriculum and may include a general approach known as curriculum based assessment (CBA). Shapiro (2004) described CBA as incorporating several steps: (a) assessing the academic and behavioral instructional environment, (b) determining the level of performance of a student relative to classmates, (c) identifying placement within the curriculum and identifying appropriate accommodations or differentiated instruction, and (d) monitoring ongoing progress within the differentiated instructional curriculum. The use of timed measures that are closely aligned with the curriculum, or curriculum-based measurement (CBM; Deno, 1985), to monitor students' progress toward important goals has a long and rich tradition in special education across many domains, including reading ( Jenkins, Graff, & Miglioretti, 2009).

As an example, in a school applying CBA to inform early reading instruction, kindergarten teachers may screen all students using brief curriculum based measures (CBMs) of key skills such as phonological awareness and letter knowledge. This step helps identify individual students who enter school with weaker initial skills and informs placement within the reading curriculum. Subsequently, ongoing progress monitoring using CBMs allows teachers to (a) rule out general problems within the instructional environment, (b) target students who are not performing as well as classmates, and (c) plan instructional goals and devise homogeneous small groups for supplemental intervention. First grade teachers may then assess key skills that develop a little later in the sequence, such as phonemic awareness, word identification, phonemic decoding, word reading fluency, and oral reading fluency (ORF) in connected text. There is evidence that brief measures of ORF are good indicators of growth in general reading ability in the primary grades, reflecting the development of quick and accurate word identification and closely related to reading comprehension outcomes ( Fuchs et al., 2001). Despite the long history of using CBMs like ORF to inform instruction across the primary grades (e.g., Fuchs, Deno, & Mirkin, 1984; Stecker, Fuchs, & Fuchs, 2005), recently, some researchers have cautioned that measuring progress through repeated measurement of ORF may be unreliable when individual passages are not equally difficult, unless the scores are statistically adjusted ( Francis et al., 2008).

Diagnostic Assessments

The effective use of data from diagnostic assessment is critical to the delivery of word reading instruction to students with RD. Diagnostic assessments are most often individually administered and may be either standardized or informal. The purpose of diagnostic assessment is to inform a teacher about a student's specific strengths and needs so that instruction can be designed to address these needs. Some assessments provide general information that indicates that a student needs instruction in word reading, fluency, and/or comprehension. For example, low performance on ORF CBMs would likely indicate a need for fluency instruction and possibly word identification instruction. Other individually administered tests are norm referenced, such as the widely-used Woodcock-Johnson Reading Mastery Test-Revised ( Woodcock, 1987), which includes an array of reading skills, or the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999). The TOWRE assesses the speed and accuracy of reading sight words and pseudowords (as measures of phonological decoding) presented in list format in order of increasing difficulty; students have 45 seconds to read as many as they can. Norm-referenced reading tests such as these allow teachers to determine a student's reading performance relative to same-age or same-grade peers and to establish a general profile of strengths and weaknesses. For example, using the TOWRE would allow a teacher to know if a student was performing below grade level and to understand whether the student performed relatively better on sight words or on decodable pseudowords.

Other diagnostic assessments can provide teachers with precise and reliable information about students' levels of performance on important subskills in reading, data that is necessary to provide instruction designed to accelerate student progress. For example, it is necessary to know which specific phonics elements (e.g., letter-sound correspondences, silent- e word patterns) and which high-frequency words have been mastered and which need to be taught or retaught. This type of diagnostic assessment can include simple letter-sound inventories, sight word inventories, or criterion-referenced standardized assessments such as the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading (DAR; Roswell, Chall, Curtsi & Kearns, 2005) or the Quick Phonics Screener ( Hasbrouck, 2008), which can help teachers distinguish which phonetic patterns (e.g., CVC, CVCe) have been mastered and which have not been mastered. Valuable information to guide instruction and the pace of movement through published instructional programs may also come from placement tests and mastery tests that accompany these programs, if these assessments are administered frequently and the results are interpreted carefully. Essentially, the critical question answered by diagnostic assessment is, "What does this student already know and what does he/she need to learn?" Teachers who have precise information to answer this question can make informed decisions about what to teach during the very limited instructional time that is available to them.

Providing Effective Word-Reading Instruction

For students with RD, attaining benchmarks for proficient reading can be highly challenging. In order for students who perform below grade level to attain average levels of reading proficiency, they must make faster progress than their typically-developing peers. (Consider that, if someone is trailing in a footrace, they must run faster to overtake runners who are ahead of them.) This thought may be overwhelming to their teachers, but accelerated word reading progress is possible for students with RD. To accomplish this goal, instruction must be both effective and efficient.

To make accelerated progress, students with RD generally require more instruction and more practice than their typically-developing classmates, so it is recommended that they receive both daily classroom reading instruction and supplemental small-group reading intervention. The US Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse suggests that students with serious reading difficulties who have not responded adequately to regular classroom reading instruction and lower-intensity interventions should receive daily, intensive small-group reading intervention in addition to daily classroom reading instruction ( Gersten et al., 2008).

Studies that have demonstrated the best outcomes for students with RD have been conducted in the context of small-group supplemental interventions. A substantial body of converging evidence supports the effectiveness of instructional reading interventions provided to students with reading difficulties in the primary grades ( Benner et al. 2010; Cavanaugh, Kim, Wanzek, & Vaughn, 2004; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, & Moody, 2000; Torgesen, 2004; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007). Studies of reading interventions provided to students with identified learning disabilities have also demonstrated that it is possible to intervene successfully with these students ( Swanson, 1999). For example, Torgesen et al. (2001) showed that students in grades 3-5 with severe RD can be remediated through highly intensive intervention. In studies of this type conducted with elementary-aged students, group outcomes have been generally positive, but some students have demonstrated little growth even with highly intensive intervention (e.g., Denton et al., 2006). These students may need a different instructional approach, or they may need intensive instruction over a period of years rather than months.

Reviews and meta-analyses have revealed larger effects for reading interventions provided in the early stages of reading acquisition than for those provided in Grades 3 and higher. For example, Wanzek and Vaughn (2007) found larger effects for intervention provided in Grades K-1 than 2-5. Although the reading difficulties of students in Grades 3 to 5 can be remediated through intensive small group or one-on-one (1:1) interventions, this may be more challenging than providing intervention at early stages of reading acquisition ( Torgesen, 2004; Wanzek, Wexler, Vaughn, & Ciullo, 2010). For students with RD at the secondary level, intervention can be even more challenging (e.g., Vaughn et al., 2010), particularly for those with poorly developed oral language skills ( Denton, Wexler, Vaughn, & Bryan, 2008). Denton et al. speculated that such students may require highly intensive interventions over the course of several years to become adequate readers. In contrast, in the context of a brain imaging study, Simos et al. (2002) demonstrated that severely impaired readers ranging from age 7 to 17 years could be brought to average levels of word reading performance through 8 weeks of individually designed and delivered, highly concentrated reading intervention provided about 2 hours per day in a reading clinic setting, and that these changes in word reading scores were accompanied by changes in the ways the students' brains functioned when reading.

Although current research cannot assure educators that all students with RD will be able to read on grade level, a strong research base has emerged related to effective word reading instruction for these students. These findings were synthesized in the reports of the National Research Council ( Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) and the National Reading Panel ( NRP; 2000). These reports, along with more recent meta-analyses and research summaries ( Foorman & Torgesen, 2001; Gersten et al., 2008; Swanson, 1999; Torgesen, 2004; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007; Wanzek et al., 2010) have identified a set of principles for effective instruction of students with or at risk for RD, derived primarily from common characteristics of reading instruction, that has been found to be effective in multiple scientific studies. The instructional approaches used in these studies differed in some ways, but they had important features in common.

In general, explicit instruction that is purposefully designed to target the critical content that students need to learn based on ongoing assessment data has been shown to be effective for students with RD. This instruction is most effective when it is delivered within structured, carefully sequenced, well-organized lessons and when it includes daily opportunities to read and respond to connected text at an appropriate level of difficulty. Students with serious RD also require intensive instruction, meaning that it is delivered to small groups of students in highly interactive formats over extended periods of time. These principles apply to both general education and classroom reading instruction for students with RD and to supplemental intensive interventions specifically designed to accelerate their reading development. In the next section we describe these evidence-based principles for providing effective instruction to students with RD.

Provide Explicit Instruction

Instruction that accelerates word reading development is highly explicit, which means that teachers use direct instruction, modeling, and timely corrective feedback so that students do not mislearn, misinterpret, or mistakenly repeat their own errors. When students with RD receive clear, explicit instruction, they are not left to infer information or guess what the teacher wants them to do. On the other hand, if points of confusion are not addressed and foundational skills are not mastered, students will likely continue to perform below grade level. Explicit instruction in word reading skills is a common theme in programs that have reliably produced substantial growth in students with RD. For example, Iverson and Tunmer (1993) added explicit instruction in phonics and phonemic decoding to the Reading Recovery ( Clay, 1993) program, which has traditionally focused less on explicit instruction. The researchers found that even a small amount of explicit instruction in phonics increased the efficiency of the Reading Recovery program by nearly 40%.

A teacher who provides explicit instruction (a) conducts frequent assessment to identify student needs and evaluate mastery of key objectives; (b) plans lessons focused on clear instructional objectives guided by assessment results; (b) clearly models or demonstrates skills and provides clear explanations of new concepts; (c) provides guided practice, checking for understanding and providing timely feedback; (d) monitors independent practice, providing feedback if needed and gradually releasing responsibility to students; and (e) monitors student progress and mastery of key objectives, providing reteaching or extended practice as necessary. illustrates an explicit instruction cycle that is likely to support the progress of students with RD.

Plan purposeful instruction to target student needs, including phonics instruction

Instruction that is purposefully directed at key skills related to word identification (e.g., letter-sound correspondence, irregular word recognition, recognition of commonly occurring patterns in words) leads to improved word reading performance ( NRP, 2000; Snow et al., 1998). In explicit instruction frameworks, teachers administer diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments regularly, and they use the results of these assessments to determine and/or refine the instructional objectives for the lessons they deliver.

Students with RD benefit from instruction in phonics, and some benefit from phonemic awareness instruction, if they have severe word reading deficits and weaknesses in phonemic awareness. Phonics instruction teaches students to decode unfamiliar words. There are two basic approaches to phonics instruction, and both have been found to be effective for students in the primary grades ( NRP, 2000) and for older students who need it (e.g., Abbott & Berninger, 1999; Bhattacharya and Ehri, 2004). In a synthetic phonics approach, students learn the sounds of individual letters, then how to blend these sounds together to read words and word parts (e.g., syllables). The progression is generally from smaller to larger units. In an analogy phonics approach, students learn to recognize larger word parts and patterns by analogy to a group of known keywords. For example, students may learn the word cow as a keyword and use this knowledge to enable them to read the words now and plow. Wanzek and Vaughn (2007) completed a meta-analysis of studies of extensive small-group reading intervention (i.e., lasting over 100 hours) for students with RD in the primary grades. Results suggested that studies with the highest effects emphasized phonics instruction that incorporated either letter-sound identification with word blending or instruction in recognizing word patterns. There are examples of highly effective word reading programs for students with RD that utilize both synthetic (e.g., Mathes et al., 2005) and analogy (e.g., Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O'Hara, & Donnelly, 1997) approaches, as well as combinations of the two (e.g., Denton et al., 2010). Ehri, Satlow, and Gaskins (2009) found evidence that teaching students with RD to use analogies to keywords to decode unfamiliar words along with instruction in letter-sound correspondences resulted in better outcomes than analogy phonics instruction alone.

Regardless of the approach selected, word reading instruction that is likely to accelerate the reading development of students with RD must be efficient, particularly for students who are in Grades 2 and above who may be a year or more behind. When teachers use precise diagnostic reading assessments like those described above to guide instruction, they are able to determine how time is best allocated during the reading lesson. For example, if a fourth grade student who is receiving basic decoding instruction has already mastered the majority of the letter-sound correspondences for the single consonants, time may be wasted on lessons that teach these skills. A better choice might be to focus on vowel sounds and letter combinations, including vowel patterns (e.g., ea, ai, igh, or) and more complex word patterns, including prefixes and suffixes (e.g., tion, dis). Students who are performing below grade level do not have time to waste, and effective teachers keep this in mind as they plan for and implement lessons. Scripted and other highly structured published reading programs can be adapted to individualize instruction if they include well-designed placement and mastery tests. Results from these tests can inform decisions to move quickly through or even skip over lessons or activities that focus on skills the students have already mastered, or to reteach or supplement lessons that focus on skills the students need to master ( Denton, Anthony, Parker, & Hasbrouck, 2004; Denton et al., in press).

Provide clear demonstrations and explanations

Students who are easily confused are more likely to be successful when teachers provide clear demonstrations and explanations. When teaching a skill or strategy, such as decoding a multisyllable word or reading a silent e word, effective teachers first demonstrate or model by showing the students what they want them to do. When teaching strategies, teachers can "think aloud," talking through each step of a process that will ultimately be performed "in the head." When teaching concepts or items of knowledge, teachers can provide clear statements and explanations, providing both examples and nonexamples of a concept.

Provide extended opportunities for guided and independent practice

After teachers model new skills or explain new concepts, students practice, first with teacher support and feedback, and then independently. Students with RD typically need to spend more time practicing skills they have learned than typically developing readers do. Because students with RD must practice the very skills that are most challenging for them to learn, evidence shows it is vital that teachers provide frequent opportunities for both guided and independent practice, including cumulative review. This is important in light of research showing that students with reading disabilities require more opportunities to correctly pronounce new words before they are able to recognize them automatically ( Reitsma, 1990). Repeated practice reading individual words, as well as repeated practice reading connected text, leads to improved reading fluency ( Levy, Abello, & Lysynchuk, 1997; Meyer & Felton, 1999, particularly when it is accompanied by teacher feedback ( Chard, Vaughn, & Tyler, 2002).

During guided practice, students practice newly taught skills in isolation, as well as the application of these skills in reading and writing, with teacher feedback. Students with RD particularly benefit from supportive feedback that is immediate, be it corrective or positive. Corrective feedback prevents students from practicing and habitualizing their errors. Powerful praise statements incorporate comments that attribute a students' improved reading performance to his or her own hard work and sustained effortful attention. Rather than offering a generic "Good job," a teacher might say, "You must feel proud that your practice on this set of words is paying off. You did not miss any today when I timed you. You achieved your goal of 40 words per minute .... Way to go!" Note how this targeted praise can be paired with tracking growth towards a goal or benchmark on progress monitoring assessments.

Students also need independent practice, during which they implement skills and strategies without teacher support (but with close teacher monitoring and reteaching when necessary). During the guided-to-independent practice sequence, responsibility for performance is gradually released from the teacher to the student.

Guided and independent practice should include not only newly taught items, but also previously taught items in the form of cumulative practice over time. Proficient reading requires that key skills are practiced to the point that they are both firm and fluent. In other words, students should consistently demonstrate mastery of basic word reading skills and be able to apply them automatically, with little conscious attention. This principle can be illustrated with a high-frequency irregular word. When the word is first learned, students may be inconsistent in identifying it, remembering the word at times and forgetting it or confusing it with other words at other times. It may also take several seconds for students to recall the word during this phase of learning. In order to read fluently and accurately, students must be able to identify this frequently occurring word just as automatically as a proficient adult reader does. Cumulative practice also provides students with RD with the opportunity to discriminate between previously and newly learned items such as letter-sound correspondences and high-frequency irregular words. For example, imagine that a student has previously learned to recognize the words was and what. In a new lesson, the student learns the word when. The student may become confused when the new word is introduced, and accuracy on the previously learned words may decline. The student will benefit from opportunities for practice integrating new and prior learning.

Monitor mastery of key objectives and reteach if needed

It is important that students with RD master reading skills and strategies before they are introduced to new skills and strategies ( Gersten et al., 2008). Effective reading instruction for students with RD is designed so that easier skills form a foundation for more difficult skills. If students attempt to learn the more advanced skills before they have mastered essential pre-skills, they may experience great difficulty or failure. Many high-quality published reading programs designed for students with reading difficulties include mastery tests designed to assess student proficiency on taught skills. Teachers can also monitor mastery through frequent administration of criterion-based informal assessments such as letter-sound or sight word inventories.

While teaching to mastery is important, this consideration must be balanced with the need to move students through the curriculum at a pace that will enable them to "close the gap" with typically-developing readers. On one hand, students with RD should experience a high level of successful or accurate responses in every lesson. Students with RD tend to progress more quickly when instruction is designed so that they can achieve success with teacher support, much like Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development" (1978). However, it is also important that instruction does not progress at so slow a rate that students progress through only a small part of the curriculum during a school year, as this will likely be ineffective in accelerating their reading development ( Denton, 2010).

Judgements about insisting on a high level of mastery may be particularly challenging when instruction is delivered in small groups rather than individually. In our professional development sessions, teachers frequently ask whether an entire group should be kept on a lesson for an extended period of time because one student in the group has not passed a mastery test. We advise one of these approaches:

If a student occasionally struggles to master objectives, provide 5 to 10 minutes of extra 1:1 instruction to that student so that he or she can achieve mastery and the group can progress at an appropriate rate.

If one student consistently requires considerably more time to master key skills than others in his or her group, and if there is another small group that moves at a pace that is more appropriate for that student, rearrange the intervention schedule so that the student can be moved to a different group.

If it is not possible to move the student to a different group, go on to the next lesson or unit, but modify instruction to incorporate additional instruction and practice on the items the student failed to master. This kind of modification can be made even within a scripted reading program.

If none of these approaches is successful, the student may require 1:1 instruction for a time rather than small-group instruction.

Provide Carefully Sequenced, Well-Organized Lessons

Effective word reading instruction for students with RD is carefully sequenced, so that easier skills are presented and mastered before more complex skills are introduced, and potentially confusing elements are separated. Skills and concepts are taught in a predetermined order according to a logical scope and sequence so students are not asked to perform challenging tasks when they lack the necessary subskills. A well-sequenced beginning reading program that implements a synthetic phonics approach would introduce new letter-sound correspondences in a sequence designed so that letters are separated from each other if they are visually similar (e.g., b and d; p and q; v and w) or have similar sounds (e.g., "short" e and i). In most effective reading intervention programs, the amount of new information introduced at any one lesson is limited to ensure that students master the key objectives. Much of each lesson consists of practice of previously introduced skills, strategies, and concepts and the integration of these with the newly taught material.

Published reading programs that are developed in this way are typically called systematic programs. It is important to note, however, that systematic does not mean scripted. Some reading programs are highly prescriptive, or scripted, and are also systematic. However, unscripted programs can also be well-organized based on a carefully constructed scope and sequence.

A carefully developed scope and sequence for teaching basic word reading using a synthetic phonics approach typically follows a developmental trajectory that begins with teaching high utility consonant letter-sound correspondences. For students who struggle to master these letter-sound correspondences, initial instruction may focus on helping students learn to recognize and be aware of the spelling of their own names ( Ehri, 2002). Then, as students begin to master letter-sound correspondences, teachers may deliberately introduce high-frequency initial and ending sounds (e.g., m, s, t, n) and short vowels (e.g., a). Teachers teach students how to blend sounds together in order to phonemically decode words (/D/ /a/ /d/ is "Dad") and teach how to segment in order to encode or spell "Dad." Students are also taught a small number of very useful high-frequency irregular words. Thus, children are able to begin to read simple words and sentences very early in the instructional sequence. Next, teachers introduce consonant digraphs and long vowels, followed by vowel digraphs and variant vowel digraphs and diphthongs. It is important to note that even when letter-sounds are taught in isolation, it is essential to quickly offer opportunities for students to practice reading words using those letter sounds. For more advanced students, teachers provide instruction in recognizing word patterns such as syllable types and in using morphemic analysis to read and determine the meaning of multisyllabic words.

Instruction in high-frequency words and irregular words is also important. Oftentimes, teachers use the terms sight words, high frequency words, and irregular words interchangeably. Strictly speaking, irregular words are those that cannot be decoded using the most common sounds of the alphabet letters (e.g., was, of), or that do not follow typical phonics rules (e.g., love, give). These must be recognized as units, "at sight." However, it is important to remember that, to children who know only a small group of letters, many other words are nondecodable. The important determinant of which words are taught as early "sight words" is how frequently they occur in children's text and their usefulness in producing meaningful text that the students will be able to read using the skills they have been taught. To be fluent readers, students need to ultimately be able to recognize a large group of frequently occurring English words "at sight" without having to decode them, even if they are decodable.

Provide Daily Opportunities to Read and Respond to Connected Text

Students with RD spend much less time reading connected text than typically developing readers ( Juel, 1988). Lack of reading practice is related to low reading fluency, as well as limited world knowledge, all contributing to impaired comprehension. Just as when learning any skill, such as dribbling a basketball or playing the trumpet, practicing text reading leads to proficiency and automaticity.

Students who are learning to decode need to practice reading connected text in order to apply the isolated skills they are learning. Teachers cannot assume that these skills will generalize automatically ( Levy et al., 1997); students who are able to recognize words in word-reading drills may not apply the same skills when they are reading connected text. Particularly older students, who tend to habitualize ineffective ways of interacting with text (e.g., guessing words using the initial letters, skipping difficult words, waiting to be told unknown words), may struggle to replace old habits with newly learned strategies and processes. For this reason, at least a portion of daily text reading should be guided by the teacher, who can prompt the students to apply what they have learned and provide instructional scaffolding to support them as they learn to apply new skills and strategies and "orchestrate" the complex processing that contributes to proficient reading. Teachers can incorporate a discussion of the content or meaning of the text during this reading experience so that students understand that comprehension is the goal of reading. Having students construct oral or written responses to text can also help to focus their attention on the message of the text. Moreover, students with RD need instruction in text-level processes such as vocabulary and comprehension in addition to word identification instruction. For example, teaching middle school students a strategy for summarizing text at their instructional reading levels can prepare them to comprehend more complex text as decoding proficiency increases.

Text selection

Two considerations are important to text selection for students with RD: text difficulty and decodability. In order to increase the likelihood that students with RD will be successful when they read text, it is important to provide them with text on their instructional or independent reading levels. Throughout most of their school experience, students with RD are asked to read textbooks and other materials that are too difficult for them, which often results in frustration, feelings of helplessness, and problem behaviors.

Students with RD may be provided with three types of text: (a) decodable text that is aligned with a reading program's scope and sequence, (b) "phonics readers" that can provide students with practice reading text that contains many examples of elements they are currently learning (e.g., a story containing many "silent e words"), and (c) nondecodable text at students' instructional reading levels for practice generalizing reading strategies beyond decodable text. Decodable text can be read using the phonics elements (e.g., letter-sound correspondences) and intact words (i.e., sight words) that have been previously taught; strictly speaking, text can only be termed "decodable" in relation to a particular instructional sequence (e.g., the scope and sequence of a specific reading program). These texts are constructed so that they will provide ample repetition of high-utility, high-frequency words and newly learned phonics patterns contextualized within thematic structures.

Particularly in the early stages of reading acquisition, there are advantages to using texts with a high density of known high-frequency words and decodable words: These texts (a) allow students to apply skills and strategies (e.g., "sounding out" words) in contexts in which these strategies will "work" for most of the words in the text, increasing the probability of successful reading experiences, and (b) ensure that students receive many opportunities, within a single reading of the text, to pronounce important words multiple times ( Hiebert & Fisher, 2002). A disadvantage of text that is specifically written to be decodable is that it may lack rich vocabulary and content to support the development of reading comprehension. This problem should become less salient as students master a larger pool of phonics elements and recognizable words.

Despite some advantages of using decodable text in early decoding development, some effective early reading intervention programs do not use decodable text. For example, in one of the first-grade interventions tested by Mathes et al. (2005) and later by Denton et al. (2010), students read text that was not designed to be decodable but was leveled according to difficulty using the text leveling system developed for the guided reading approach ( Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). Outcomes for this intervention were strong, both when implemented by members of the research team (Mathes et al.) and by regular school district employees (Denton et al.). In a study that experimentally compared the effects of decodable vs. nondecodable text in early reading intervention, Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, and Vadasy (2004) found no significant differences in student outcomes when the same intervention was provided to at-risk first graders with decodable and nondecodable text. Decodable text may be best thought of as a form of scaffolding that can be gradually phased out as students develop the ability to read more complex words, and teachers may purposefully incorporate nondecodable text and phonics readers when they are appropriate to promote generalization of skills to more authentic reading experiences.

Provide Instruction to Small Groups of Students with Similar Needs

Students with reading difficulties benefit from instruction delivered to small groups of students with similar instructional needs. The primary advantage of this instructional arrangement is that it potentially increases the percentage of time in each lesson in which students are actively involved in activities that address their instructional needs.

Classroom reading instruction

A growing but converging evidence base indicates that classroom reading teachers who group their students homogeneously for instruction and who individualize or differentiate what they do in small group instruction have students with significantly greater reading outcomes ( Al Otaiba, Connor et al., in press; Connor, Morrison, Fishman, Schatschneider, & Underwood, 2007). In a meta-analysis of the effects of within class grouping in regular education classes, Lou et al. (1996) found that across different subject areas, group sizes of 3-4 yielded effect sizes that were twice as large as those for groups of 8-10 (ES = .22 vs. ES = .11, respectively). Moreover, low-ability students benefited more than medium- or high-ability students (ES = .37 vs. ES = .19 and ES = .26, respectively). In a study that specifically examined outcomes in reading, Taylor, Pearson, Clark, and Walpole (1999) found that first- through third-grade teachers in more effective schools spent more than twice as much time as those in less effective schools in small-group instruction for reading.

Supplemental reading intervention

Gersten et al. (2008) recommended that supplemental intervention for students with severe RD that is resistant to remediation be provided 1:1 or in very small groups. An advantage of such small-group instruction is that each student has many opportunities to respond and the teacher is able to monitor and provide appropriate feedback to every student. A meta-analysis by Elbaum et al. (2000) found strong effects for 1:1 instruction provided to students with reading difficulties, and in their synthesis of studies of extensive reading interventions for students in the primary grades, Wanzek and Vaughn (2007) found that higher effects were demonstrated when interventions were provided 1:1 or in very small groups (e.g., groups of 2 or 3) relative to interventions provided in larger groups.

Specifically, in studies that experimentally manipulated group size, Iversen, Tunmer, and Chapman (2005) and Vaughn & Linan-Thompson. (2003) both found that reading interventions delivered in groups of two or three were as effective as the same interventions delivered in 1:1 formats. Some students with serious RD may require 1:1 instruction, although some studies have indicated that interventions for students with RD provided in very small groups were successful. For example, Denton et al. (2006) provided highly intensive intervention to severely impaired readers in groups of two, finding that, on average, students made considerable growth in decoding, fluency, and comprehension; however, some students did not respond adequately to this intervention. It is probably advisable to make individual decisions about intervention group size based on the nature and extent of a student's impairment in reading, as well as any accompanying attention or behavior challenges. Naturally, resources will also be a consideration.

Providing Effective Instruction: Other Considerations

In addition to the principles for effective instruction discussed previously, it is important that educators carefully select instructional programs implemented in reading instruction and that teachers who will deliver instruction have the necessary professional development to do so successfully. Finally, educators must understand how to increase the intensity of supplemental interventions to address the needs of students who do not respond readily to less intensive instruction.

Selecting Published Programs

Since government initiatives such as No Child Left Behind began to stress the use of reading programs with scientific evidence of effectiveness, publishers have promoted nearly all programs as "research based." It can be challenging to evaluate these claims or the quality of the research that is purported to support these programs. It may be helpful for practitioners to consider two categories of programs-those that are "evidence based" and those that are "research validated." Evidence-based programs typically incorporate the principles of effective instruction for students with reading difficulties that were described earlier in this article. Thus, they are based on research evidence, but the effects of these specific programs may not have been evaluated in scientific studies. contains a list of characteristics that can be used to determine the extent to which a program is evidence based.

In contrast, research validated programs have been shown to be effective in studies that specifically evaluated those programs. The "gold standard" for a research-validated program is that it has been studied in more than one randomized, controlled experiment in which some students received the program and others did not, and it has produced consistently positive results with different groups of students. Several programs with this level of evidence are currently available for providing supplemental intensive reading intervention to younger students. Appreciably less research has been conducted to evaluate core reading programs used in classroom instruction and intervention programs designed for secondary students with RD, although some evidence-based intervention programs are available. If a research-validated program is unavailable, practitioners can determine whether a program is evidence based and likely to have good results by applying standards like those discussed in this article (i.e., Does the program provide explicit instruction? Is it organized according to a clear scope and sequence?) However, the greatest likelihood of success is associated with the use of programs that have undergone rigorous research.

Core reading programs for classroom instruction

Researchers have demonstrated that reading outcomes are stronger when classroom teachers use an explicit core reading instructional program that is well organized and that emphasizes teaching code-focused skills than when teachers use less explicit and less systematic programs. Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, and Mehta (1998) directly tested the effectiveness of core reading programs in a large study involving roughly 70 first and second grade classrooms. Specifically, children whose teachers used core reading programs that emphasized direct instruction and that included controlled vocabulary text showed more significantly more word reading improvement than children taught with a core program that was less direct and less explicit. A second large-scale study conducted by Foorman and colleagues also examined the effect of explicit and systematic core reading programs in conjunction with professional development ( Foorman et al., 2003). This multiyear study involved three cohorts and over 4,800 students who attended struggling schools. Foorman and colleagues reported that children whose teachers used systematic and explicit reading curricula that explicitly linked phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle in kindergarten achieved reading performance that was at the national average. Most commercially available core reading programs published after the NRP (2000) report that claim to be evidence based contain instructional materials and provide routines that support explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and word recognition, at least in the early grades ( Al Otaiba, Kosanovich-Grek, Torgesen, Hassler, & Wahl, 2005).

Programs for supplemental intervention

Research-validated programs are available for providing supplemental intervention to students with RD, particularly in the primary grades. A smaller number of programs have been adequately tested with older students. One characteristic that differentiates these programs is that they may be more or less prescriptive.

In highly prescriptive programs (e.g., Osborn, 1995) lessons are preplanned, and the verbiage used by the teacher during the lesson is scripted. An advantage of scripted lessons is that students receive carefully constructed instruction delivered using consistent language. From the teacher's point of view, lesson preparation consists primarily of reading and practicing delivery of the lessons so that they do not appear to be reading the scripts while they teach and so that they are freed up to observe the students and provide them with effective feedback. A disadvantage of scripted programs is that it may be difficult for teachers to individualize instruction when students already know content that is included in future lessons or when they fail to master content that has already been taught. These programs are normally designed so that students progress through each lesson in sequence, but completing the entire sequence can take from 1 to even 2 years.

Less prescriptive programs can also be used to provide well-organized, structured intervention. The key is that they must have a recommended or incorporated scope and sequence to guide the order in which skills are introduced. Some unscripted programs (e.g., Sprick, Howard, & Fidanque, 1998) provide sequential, structured lesson materials such as daily lesson sheets and teacher guides that carefully describe each lesson. One less prescriptive research-validated program ( Denton & Hocker, 2006) provides a framework for the daily lesson, carefully described teaching activities, and a sequence for introducing phonics skills and high-frequency words, but it allows for considerable flexibility so that teachers can plan lessons based on ongoing diagnostic assessments that are included with the program.

Reviews of reading programs

Several groups have published reviews of currently available reading programs. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), sponsored by the US Department of Education, provides ongoing reviews of programs by applying rigorous standards to evaluate the quality of research conducted specifically to evaluate the programs. A tutorial about how the WWC works is available at: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/help/tutorials/tour.asp. The Florida Center for Reading Research ( www.fcrr.org) has posted reviews of many programs. Finally, expert committees have reviewed the quality of research supporting specific reading assessment tools and intervention programs for the National Center for Response to Intervention ( http://www.rti4success.org).

Teacher Preparation

Selecting an evidence-based or research-validated instruction program does not ensure success; it matters what teachers do with the programs they implement. The first step toward ensuring evidence-based instruction and intervention are well implemented is to ensure that teachers have the requisite knowledge to use data to inform instruction ( Al Otaiba & Lake, 2007; Al Otaiba, Lake, Gruelich, Folsom, & Guidry, in press). Al Otaiba et al. demonstrated that students whose kindergarten teachers were provided data, coaching, and web-based guidance to individualize instruction outperformed the reading performance of students whose teachers did not receive this support by a half a standard deviation. Another recent study conducted by Piasta and colleagues ( Piasta, Connor, Fishman, & Morrison, 2009) showed that delivering more instruction, when classroom teachers had very little knowledge about how to teach code-focused skills, was associated with lower student scores than delivering less instruction. This finding emphasizes that no program is "teacher-proof" and that teacher knowledge matters.

Supplemental reading interventions for students with serious RD should be provided by well-qualified teachers with the training necessary to implement intervention programs with high fidelity and to respond appropriately to the needs of the students. Students with RD may be difficult to teach; they have been found to have problems in phonological processing, processing speed, and verbal working memory, and they often have challenging behaviors and/or attention deficits ( Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2002; Fletcher et al., in press; Nelson, Benner, & Gonzalez, 2003). Providing effective, individualized intervention to these students places large demands on teachers' knowledge and skills and requires the capacity to make quick instructional decisions in order to respond appropriately to struggling learners.

Increasing the Intensity of Supplemental Intervention

Students who do not respond well to regular classroom instruction and typical interventions (e.g., small-group tutoring) need interventions of increased intensity. The intensity of reading interventions can be increased by reducing group size and by increasing the amount of time in intervention by either extending the length of daily lessons, providing lessons more frequently, or providing intervention over an extended period of time. Intervention intensity can also be increased by raising the percentage of each intervention session during which students are actively involved in focused instruction that is aligned with their instructional needs. Pacing of instruction within lessons is quick but responsive to student needs for "think time," feedback, and reteaching, and every lesson incorporates many teacher-student interactions ( Vaughn, Denton, & Fletcher, 2010; Warren, Fey, and Yoder, 2007).

An important determiner of the intensity of an intervention is the dosage of the intervention students receive. Dosage, or the hours of intervention provided, is determined by the length of individual teaching sessions, how many times per week they are provided, and the overall duration of the intervention. Gersten et al. (2008) recommended that interventions for students with RD who have been previously unresponsive to lower intensity interventions should consist of individualized, "concentrated instruction" delivered in "multiple and extended instructional sessions daily" (p. 10). The number of months spent in intervention will depend on the needs of the students and other aspects of instructional intensity such as group size, the length of daily lessons, and how time is used during each lesson. Researchers have provided interventions to students with severe reading difficulties at the elementary level for 50 to 60 minutes per day over an entire school year, with generally positive group outcomes (e.g., Blachman et al., 2004; Vaughn et al., 2009); however, some students with reading disabilities will need more extensive intervention, perhaps over several years.

Conclusion

Many students in both the elementary and secondary grades struggle with word reading. Fortunately, a strong research base evaluates effective word reading instruction for these students. For students with severe word reading problems, intervention may be challenging and require considerable resources, including daily small-group targeted intervention provided over the course of years. Given the consequences of continuing reading failure to both students and society, we suggest that the effort and resources are justified. Implementing the approaches and tools identified by research may make a life-long difference for many individuals. McCray, Vaughn, and Neal (2001) interviewed middle school students with serious reading problems; in a response that reflected a major theme of the research, a girl expressed a strong desire to learn to read, "I would love to learn my letter sounds again and learn how to pronounce words right. It would be good if I could figure out what words mean and could figure out what those stories mean" (p. 26).

​

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Teaching Word Identification to Students with Reading Difficulties and Disabilities

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The majority of students identified with learning disabilities (LDs) are primarily impaired in reading ( Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007). Many students who have other high-incidence disabilities (e.g., behavioral disorders) also have serious reading difficulties ( Benner, Nelson, Ralston, & Mooney, 2010).

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Reading lessons to support students with reading difficulties.

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NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction. The reading lessons are examples of brief instructional routines that may be used to supplement reading interventions, programs, or curricula that are currently in place. These lessons are designed to illustrate concepts and supplement, not supplant, reading instruction and interventions for struggling readers. They do not represent an exhaustive reading curriculum. It is expected that teachers would customize these lessons to meet the needs of their target students.

The NCII reading lessons are organized around the five components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (2000): phonemic awareness, alphabetic principal or phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Intervention programs for struggling readers may focus on just one or a few of these components, or may include all five components.

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Literacy Sample Lessons to Support Intensifying Intervention

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NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

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Activities used to support struggling readers

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Activities used to support struggling readers

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Fun activities to do with students to improve reading ability.

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8 Tips for Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Struggling Readers

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By Sarah Maze, M.S. Ed., Guest Blogger Do you know the difference between phonemic awareness and phonological awareness? What about effective strategies to support students in their mastery of these skills? As teachers, we sometimes need to use these terms, but we also may forget what they mean. In this post, after identifying the difference between phonemic and phonological awareness, I’ll share some helpful tools and tips that will help struggling readers become confident readers. Let’s begin with a definition of each: Phonemic awareness is the understanding of isolated phonemes (units of sound) and includes identifying, isolating, and manipulating phonemes. Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a broader term that includes phonemic awareness but also includes identifying, isolating, and manipulating units of language (not just sounds) such as syllables, rimes and onsets, and rhyming words. Common Core State Standards for Language Arts include a strand called Reading Foundational Skills. Nestled within this strand are standards to address phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. Kindergarten students begin this journey of building the foundational skills of phonemic awareness when they practice letter identification and begin learning the letter sounds of the alphabet. Students in this grade are also expected to apply phonological awareness by producing rhyming words and demonstrating syllable skills, such as counting and blending syllables. Once these foundational skills are mastered, your students will continue developing both phonemic and phonological awareness. Here are a few tips you can use that can build both phonemic and phonological awareness during shared reading or a guided reading lesson. 1. Letter Introduction List - When you introduce letters and their corresponding phonemic sounds, consider using word examples to connect to the sound. For example, when you introduce the letter D , students can brainstorm a list of words that begin with /d/, such as door , dinosaur , desk , etc. You can record their responses on chart paper, and then read Letter Buddies Letter Books . Boost student engagement by making a game where students see if the word they thought of is included in the book. You can also develop writing skills by having students write letters with different materials, such as a crayon, dry erase marker, pencil, sidewalk chalk, or water-soluble paint. 2. Connecting Letter Sounds with Text - As students begin to learn sight words while they master specific phonemes, pairing Letter Buddies Starters with the letter books is a natural and effective way to build phonemic awareness. After reading the letter book, try using the corresponding starter book. These books include repetitive and simple sentence structure with many sight words. This is great for practicing several skills: phonemic awareness of the letter being taught, acquisition of vocabulary words beginning with that letter, and recognition of sight words. 3. Letter Tracking with Songs - Have students track letters with finger pointers or their own fingers as they sing the alphabet song. There are many songs that explore the letter sounds, so students can sing the song while practicing each sound. When I taught first grade, some students didn’t know all their letters and sounds. I modeled singing an alphabet song while tracking each letter and its sound with an alphabet on paper that showed pictures of the objects named in the song. I sent students home with an individual CD player, headphones, and an alphabet page. This helped students quickly learn the song, letters, and phonemes with their families. Some examples of these songs can be found here and here . 4. Alphabet Manipulatives - An easy way to engage young learners with hands-on activities is by using a set of alphabet manipulatives. These can be magnetic letters, foam letters, or tiles from Scrabble. You can have students match upper- and lowercase letters to build letter identification, practice spelling words, or create a new word by changing the initial letter to improve blending skills. I used cookie sheets from the dollar store when students used magnetic letters. Hameray offers magnetic lowercase letters and magnetic uppercase letters , too! 5. Picture Sorts and Games - Students begin to differentiate between phonemes by sorting pictures. Create a page of pictures with two columns. One column could be for words that begin with /s/, and the other column can be for words that begin with /m/. The headers of “Ss” and “Mm” should be placed at the top of their respective columns. Then instruct students to say each picture word aloud, listen for the beginning sound, and place pictures in the correct column. Choose words from books students have read, and include a few new words that begin with each of these letters. You can also choose to have a column for oddballs that is labeled

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Overview, how to teach, how to assess phonemic awareness, and activities to implement.

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Overview, how to teach, how to assess phonemic awareness, and activities to implement.

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A strong resource with background information and an excess of activities.

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What the experts say about phonemic awareness:

Without phoneme awareness, students may be mystified by the print system and how it represents the spoken word.
~ Louis Cook Moats & Carol Tolman

No matter the level of phonemic awareness, to make use of it he or she [the student] must learn to visually identify the individual letters.
~ Marilyn Jager Adams

Explicit instruction in sound identification, matching, segmentation, and blending, when linked appropriately to sound-symbol association, reduces the risk of reading failure and accelerates early reading and spelling acquisition for all children.
~ Learning First Alliance

Read more about phonemic awareness!

Test your Understanding of Phonemic Awareness

Test 1

Test 2

OVERVIEW of phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is an oral language ability that students demonstrate when they can play with the sounds in words. For example, they can change a sound in word to make a new word, blend sounds together to make a word, or break words into individual sounds. Phonemic awareness helps students read by sounding out and blending letter sounds together, and to spell by breaking apart the sounds in a word.

TEACHING phonemic awareness

Teachers can use a number of brief and engaging activities such as songs and games to facilitate students' phonemic awareness. Teachers can model key skills and provide opportunities for review. They can start with simple phonological awareness activities, including rhyming words, and move toward those that involve the identification and/or manipulation of the sounds in words.

ASSESSING phonemic awareness

Teachers can assess phonemic awareness in many ways. They can observe how their students respond to various phonemic awareness tasks and complete informal assessments of important phonemic awareness skills such as blending and segmenting. Gathering this information can aid in lesson planning and the identification of students at risk for reading difficulties.

Featured Videos

Push That Sound: Foundations for Phonemic Awareness

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All Phonemic Awareness Recipes

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Without phoneme awareness, students may be mystified by the print system and how it represents the spoken word. ~ Louis Cook Moats & Carol Tolman No matter the level of phonemic awareness, to make use of it he or she [the student] must learn to visually identify the individual letters.

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An article that explains the importance and differentiation of phonemic awareness and phonological awareness.

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Why Pre-Phonics Skills Could Be Holding Back Your Child's Reading & Comprehension

If reading is your child's door to the future, phonemic awareness is the key to unlock that door. Without phonemic or phonological awareness skills, phonics are hard to master, making learning to read, reading fluency and reading comprehension challenging.

These are sometimes referred to as pre-phonics skills - they are essential foundational skills required for phonics and all that follows.

What Exactly Is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is a broad term, describing an awareness of the phonetic or sound structure of words. Some call this phonics or phonetic awareness. There are three lengths of sound bite: (a) syllables such as /mic/ in phonemic, (b) onsets (vowels at beginning of words) and rimes (vowel and consonant blends at the end of words, such as /ic/ in phonemic) and (c) phonemes (each individual sound, such as /ph/ in phonemic).

The most powerful indicator of sound phonological awareness skills in a young child is rhyming skill. Not being able to rhyme at 3-4 years of age shows an inability to identify the sounds - the rime - at the end of words. It shows a lack of phonological awareness.

What Exactly Is Phonemic Awareness?

The phonemic awareness definition is narrower. It describes the ability to pick out phonemes - the sounds that make up words - in spoken words. By pick out we mean hear each unique phoneme, and to identify and manipulate each phoneme.

Before children learn to read the written language, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. This is phonemic awareness.

Why Phonemic Awareness Matters

From birth, we build our vocabulary and semantics (meaning) through listening, through oral language. The brain identifies every phoneme in every word, stores it in oral word memory and attaches a meaning.

Then, when we read, we translate the text symbols we see on the page to phonemes and thereby connect to words and understanding in our oral word memory. For instance, if your child's word memory has "dog" stored as having phonemes: /d/ /o/ /g/, then she sees d-o-g as text, she will recognize it immediately.

Phonemes are the connectors of text symbols back to our oral language. Phonemic awareness is the connection skill.

How Weak Phonemic Awareness Undermines Reading Comprehension

If however your child's oral word memory is muddy, text will not always be instantly recognizable and written English looks like a whole new language. If your child does not hear the phonemes in "dog," the text d-o-g makes no sense. It's a word your child doesn't know.

This is the case for millions of 4-7 year olds. When the brain's recognition of phonemes is muddy, unclear, learning to read is much harder.

In later grades, as language processing skills mature, phonemic awareness skills improve. But oftentimes that improvement is incremental only. Sounding out is accurate, but it still requires concentration. It is not automatic, effortless. This lack of automaticity and need to concentrate when decoding, when sounding out unrecognizable words, slows reading down and gets in the way of reading comprehension.

The general lack of reading proficiency in 8th grade as per the NAEP test is a measure of the nation's reading comprehension problems. It is in large part due to a lack of automaticity in decoding and phonemic awareness. It's a difficulty that affects millions.

What Causes Phonological Awareness Delays?

Phonological awareness difficulties (and the subset, phonemic awareness) come from language processing delays, exacerbated by the challenges of learning English.

Being able to process language is one the brain's most challenging functions since natural language is lightning fast. The processing of words as whole sounds for listening and speech is not so hard. It's the additional processing clarity skills - think, auditory pixels - needed for phonemic awareness that are challenging. Many children do not fully develop so called natural language-speed processing until after the age at which they are expected to read.

And so, an inability to master phonics because they are not biologically and cognitively ready puts many children behind in reading from the outset. And in today's standardized system, with annual reading milestones, it's a stress point for parent, teacher and child.

Furthermore, there is a reason many English language learners struggle with English, Its so-called orthographic depth makes it a hard language to read with a higher incidence of dyslexia than most other languages. English is a phonetic language that requires great precision, making the basic and essential starting skill of sounding out difficult:

Phonemic awareness skills require language processing at 40 sounds a second

Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings (e.g., /f/ as in ph, f, gh, ff)

These sound units (phonemes) over-lap, i.e., they are not distinctly different

Most Struggling Readers Have Phonemic Awareness Issues

It is not surprising that 64% of 4th graders read at below grade level in the NAEP reading test, the nation's report card. Most struggling readers, 88% according to a 10-year NIH study, share one common problem, weak phonemic awareness.

A great number of research studies identify phonological awareness as a reliable predictor of reading fluency and comprehension. In addition, National Reading Panel research focuses on phonics and phonological awareness training as the most powerful way to improve reading.

As children get older language processing improve, therefore phonemic awareness improves and therefore reading improves, naturally. But to the extent that phonemic awareness is not automatic, decoding is not automatic.

This becomes the impediment to the ultimate reading goal, reading with comprehension. The distraction and concentration on the mechanics of decoding take away from and compromise reading comprehension. This means reading at grade level will always be a challenge, explaining the poor NAEP results.

Helping Your Child Develop Phonemic Awareness

Because phonological awareness does not fully mature in many children until the age of 7, many countries delay reading instruction until that age. Unfortunately, that is not an option in North America.

If your young child is off to a slow start with reading, bear in mind that the natural cognitive skills required for phonological awareness may still be developing. And so it probably wise not to exert too much pressure and risk turning your child off reading until these skills develop. Some call it g o slow early in reading to go fast later. It may be better to work on oral language at home - rhyming games, rapid naming, lots of conversation, etc. - rather than text. In addition, you can exercise and improve phonological awareness with sound-based exercises or phonics instruction.

What Does the Lack of Phonological Awareness Look Like?

The most reliable sign of a lack of phonological awareness is a lack of rhyming skill at 3 years of age. If your just-turned-4-year old child is not able to rhyme, you should start looking at ways to accelerate language processing skill growth.

Once your child is 5 or older, and reading a little, here are some other signs of difficulty to look for. Your child may have a language processing delay (weak phonological awareness) if he has difficulties such as:

Identifying rhyming words

Perceiving the difference between similar sounds (for example, m and n)

Identifying the first sound in a word

Remembering the sequence of sounds in a word

Break words down into a sequence of phonemes (e.g., dash has three phonemes: /d/ /a/ /sh/)

Manipulating sounds within words (change r in rush to b)

Famous researcher, Reed Lyon from NIH put it like this."The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness)." (Lyon, 1995)

Children with auditory processing problems tend to encounter reading problems at the decoding stage or with reading comprehension later on. While many reading programs deal with this issue by loading on additional reading practice and word drills, etc., a better approach is to first exercise the language processing skills and develop phonemic awareness. This replicates the path taken by good readers. Once there is phonemic awareness mastery, natural growth in reading should take place.

Summary of Phonological Awareness Terminology

Phoneme:
A phoneme is a speech sound - it has no inherent meaning.

Phonemic Awareness:
The ability to hear language at the phoneme level, i..e, to hear the individual sounds that make up words.

Auditory Processing:
Auditory processing is a cognitive skill for detecting and manipulating sound and language. Most phonological awareness deficits stem from a weakness in auditory processing.

Phonics:
Use of the text to break down and recognize words.

Phonological Awareness:
This is a broad term that covers processing sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level.

Onset-Rime:
The onset is the part of the word before the vowel; not all words have onsets. The rime is the part of the word including the vowel and what follows it.

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Phonemic Awareness, Phonological Awareness | Why They Matter

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If reading is your child's door to the future, phonemic awareness is the key to unlock that door. Without phonemic or phonological awareness skills, phonics are hard to master, making learning to read, reading fluency and reading comprehension challenging. These are sometimes referred to as pre-phonics skills - they are essential foundational skills required for phonics and all that follows.