Introduction to Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness

What are they, and why are they important?

What is it?

All humans inherently have the ability to see, speak, hear, feel, and taste. We are born with the body parts needed for each of these in conjunction with specific areas of our brain dedicated to processing the information from each of these senses. However, reading and writing are artificial tasks created by humans that create the need for multiple parts of the brain to work together.    

           Reading is dependent upon there being a written form of language. There are three broad categories of written language: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic, and each of these can then be further broken down into subcategories (Schwanenflugel & Knapp 2017). In logographic writing systems, each character or symbol represents one word, and this is one of the oldest writing systems. Chinese is an example of a logographic language. Attuning to the differences in the sounds of the language is not necessary when learning to read since each symbol represents one word. However, learning to read and write requires many years of study as there are approximately 7,000 symbols used in the written language. In a syllabic writing system each character or symbol represents a syllable, and syllables are combined to create morphemes. Japanese and Cherokee both utilize a syllabic writing system. In alphabetic writing systems, each character or symbol represents an individual sound. This is the most common writing system.

An alphabetic system requires an individual to attend to the individual sounds in words in order to be a proficient reader and writer. This process begins long before students begin learning letters. This is where instruction in phonological and phonemic awareness connects to reading. So what exactly do these two terms mean. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate sound units within language and includes the skill of phonemic awareness (Reading Rockets 2020). Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds within language. Phonological awareness includes the skills of alliteration, syllables, rhyming, onset-rime, and phonemic awareness. When teaching these skills, it’s important to remember that these skills can be done in the dark, meaning that no letters are involved in this process. Children are being taught to attend to the sounds of the language. Here are two videos from Understood and The Reading League that help to further explain these terms.

Phonological Awareness: What skills are involved, and when do they develop?

The most foundational skills begin to develop before children attend school as they learn to attend to sounds and “play” with language. These skills can be developed in children through reading and reciting nursery rhymes and reading rhyming stories. Music can be instrumental in developing this skill through listening to rhyming songs or chants and incorporating movements. For example, think back to the song “Apples and Bananas.” This is a great song that teaches children to attend to vowel sounds and how to change the sounds in words. The National Center on Improving Literacy (2020) is a phenomenal resource! Their Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Toolkit has a plethora of resources for both educators and parents. They have videos, lesson planning resources, and tips for teaching and incorporating these skills. Take the time to explore this resource if you are looking for strategies to build children’s phonological awareness skills at home or in an educational setting.

Phonological Awareness Skills (in order of difficulty)

Skill	Explanation	Approximate Age Developed
Sentence Level	Ability to hear, recognize, and count words in a sentence	4
Alliteration	Ability to recognize similar sounds in words	4
Syllables	Ability to segment, blend, and delete syllables Ex. Say the syllables in peaches: peach-es (segmenting). I’ll say the parts peach-es, and you say the word: peaches (blending).  Say the syllables in basket: bas-ket. Now say it without the bas: ket (deletion).	4-5
Onset-Rime	Ability to segment and blend the initial consonant or consonant cluster before the vowel (onset) and the vowel and all following letters (rime). Ex. fl-ip (segment), sh-ut=shut (blend)	4-5
Rhyme	Ability to recognize, produce, and complete rhyme Ex. Which word rhymes with cat- pig or sat? What is another word that rhymes with cat?	4-5
Phonemic Awareness	Ability to isolate, blend, and manipulate the individual sounds in words	5-8

Phonemic Awareness: What skills are involved, and when do they develop?

Phonemic awareness is a sub skill in phonological awareness, but this is typically the last skill under the phonological awareness umbrella to develop. This is a skill that should be a daily part of any core reading curriculum in the early grades, and it should be taught to the advanced level. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes, or speech sounds, within words. Each language varies in the number of phonemes, and not all languages have the same phonemes. For example, some African languages utilize clicks as part of the phonemes in their language. These sounds are then connected to create spoken words. The english language has approximately 40-44 individual phonemes.

Our brains are naturally wired to attend to meaning in spoken language rather than to attend to individual sounds. For the vast majority of English speakers, our knowledge of the phonology of English is very implicit, and we have received very little direct, explicit instruction on the structure of our language (Moats 2000). Yet we can recognize when words are not native to english based on recognizing words with sound sequences that aren’t found in English even though native speakers may not be able to necessarily identify the individual sounds of the language (Moats 2000). Direct, explicit, and systematic instruction in the sounds of the english language is absolutely necessary for beginning readers, particularly for those students who are at risk. The National Reading Panel found that instruction in phonemic awareness is critical for beginning and struggling readers and that instruction in phonemic awareness improved both real and pseudoword reading and spelling skills (NRP 2000).

At the elementary level, phonemic awareness instruction typically begins in kindergarten and continues through the beginning of second grade. However, many struggling readers may continue to need phonemic awareness instruction after this. At the beginning of kindergarten students are typically developmentally ready to begin isolating phonemes at the beginning of words, and then move towards isolating final phonemes with the ability to segment medial phonemes being the last to develop. Instruction should begin with words with two phonemes building up to words with three and then four phonemes. Instructionally, it’s important to remember that blends are two consonant sounds that each maintain their own sound, and students should be taught to break these sounds apart instead of keeping them as one unit. For example, students need to understand that the blend bl at the beginning of block is two sounds, /b/ and /l/, rather than one sound /bl/. The ability to isolate beginning sounds is typically mastered by the middle of kindergarten, and isolation of beginning, final, and medial sounds is typically mastered in first grade. The next two skills to develop are blending and segmenting which are typically mastered in first grade as well. Unfortunately, in my experience this is where phonemic awareness instruction tends to end.

According to David Kilpatrick (2016), explicit instruction in phonemic awareness should continue until the end of second grade to the advanced levels. Deletion, addition, and substitution are much more complex phoneme manipulation skills frequently referred to as advanced phonemic awareness. Frequently, struggling readers never mastered these skills, and research evidence points to explicit instruction in these skills as a means of advancing reading skills in weaker readers.

Phonemic Awareness Skills (in order of complexity and development)

Skill	Explanation	Example
Isolation ●       Beginning ●       Final ●       Medial	Ability to identify individual sounds in words	What is the first sound you hear in cat? /k/ What is the last sound you hear in cat? /t/
Blending	Ability to take individual sounds and say the word	If I say /k/ /a/ /t/, what word? cat
Segmenting	Ability to break a word up into its individual sounds	Say the sounds in block. /b/ /l/ /o/ /k/
Deletion	Ability to remove a sound from a word and to say what is remaining once the sound is removed	Say the word six. Now say the word six without the /s/ on the end. sick
Addition	Ability to add a sound to a word and to say the new word once the sound is added	Say the word box. Now add an /l/ after the /b/ and say the word. blocks
Substitution	Ability to remove a sound from a word, replace it with a different sound, and to then say the new word	Say the word “cheap”. Now say the word with the /ch/ at the end and the /p/ at the beginning. peach

How does phonemic awareness connect to reading?

            There has long been a belief in education that printed words are stored in the brain through visual memory, and through multiple visual exposures a word becomes committed to memory. This belief persists in educational practices today (ex. sight word flashcards). However, research has definitively disproved this theory (Kilpatrick 2016). The discovery of orthographic mapping explains the process of how printed words come to be efficiently stored in long term memory. There will be another blog post that goes into orthographic mapping later. Essentially the phonological processor and the orthographic processor work together to store printed words. The phonological processor evaluates and stores meaningful sequences of sounds; whereas, the orthographic processor evaluates and stores meaningful sequences of letters (Moats 2016). These two processors work together to store and recognize printed words.

            The printed form of english is considered to be an alphabetic writing system. This means that each letter or group of letters is intended to represent the individual sounds of the language. The sequence of letters becomes meaningful because they are organized based on the order of the sounds in the printed words. These meaningful sequences of letters (i.e. words) become anchored in memory once the learner understands and recognizes that these sequences represent the order of sounds that they hear (Kilpatrick 2016). The foundation for this process is phonemic awareness.

Assessment

            As with any good lesson, instruction should always begin with assessment. At the elementary level schools typically utilize some form of a universal screener in reading. The purpose of a universal screener is to quickly and briefly assess mastery of a developmentally appropriate skill for a particular age or grade level. The results indicate whether or not a student is “at risk” based on attainment of the skills assessed. The results are not diagnostic in nature, but may indicate weaknesses in a broader skill such as phonemic awareness or phonics. Additional assessments are needed to determine exact skill area deficiencies and needs. North Carolina currently utilizes iStation’s ISIP assessment as the state’s K-3 universal screener for reading, and Reading 3D was the K-3 universal screener utilized for many years prior to the implementation of iStation. There is currently a lengthy court battle over the procurement process for the state’s universal screener that doesn’t appear will be resolved any time soon. Below is a list of resources that can be utilized to delve more deeply into a student’s specific needs in phonological awareness in order to guide instructional planning.

1. The Phonological Awareness Skills Test is a very comprehensive assessment and comes from the book Interventions for All: Phonemic Awareness K-2. Once the assessment has been completed, the book provides tiered interventions for each specific skill assessed.
2. The Phonological Awareness Screening Test by David Kilpatrick is designed for use with all ages and goes along with his remediation resource Equipped for Reading Success.
3. The Phonological Segmentation Test and Phoneme Segmentation Test from the CORE Assessing Reading Multiple Measures book are not quite as in depth as the first two assessments, but the Core Teaching Reading Sourcebook is a great professional resource for learning and intervention resources.

Closing

            The evidence is clear that if students don’t learn to read at grade level by the third grade, then these students have little chance of being able to read on grade level with their age appropriate peers, making the first four years of school absolutely crucial. Four years significantly impacts the remaining nine years of a student’s school career and impacts the potential paths a student’s life could take. Without the ability to read proficiently, an individual’s life choices become extremely limited. Research has shown repeatedly that proficiency in phonological awareness lays the foundation for proficient reading, and these skills can begin being taught before a child comes to school through word play, nursery rhymes, and exposure to print. Schools need to ensure that there is a focus on teaching this necessary component in the early grades and to ensure that teachers understand and are adequately prepared to teach these skills to students.

Works Cited

Kilpatrick, D. (2016). Chapter 2: Understanding phonological awareness. Equipped for Reading Success. Retrieved from https://www.cec.sped.org/~/media/Files/Professional%20Development/Webinars/Handouts/Excerpts%20from%20Equipped%20for%20Reading%20Success.pdf.

Kilpatrick, D. (2016). Chapter 4: Orthographic Mapping and Sight Word Learning. Equipped for Reading Success. Retrieved from https://www.cec.sped.org/~/media/Files/Professional%20Development/Webinars/Handouts/Excerpts%20from%20Equipped%20for%20Reading%20Success.pdf.

Moats, L. (2000). Chapter 2: Phonetics. Speech to Print.

Moats, L. (2016). Chapter 3 What the Brain Does When It Reads. LETRS, Module 1: The Challenge of Learning to Read. Retrieved from http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/208815/2014-15_SchoolYear/LETRS/169261_Letrs2E_M1_29-38.pdf.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Chapter 2: Alphabetics, Part I: Phonemic awareness instruction. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Retreived from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.pdf

Reading Rockets. (2020, April 6). Phonological and Phonemic Awareness. Reading Rockets. Retrieved from https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/phonologicalphonemic.

Schwanenflugel, P. and Knapp, N. (2017, April 24). On Writing Systems. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reading-minds/201704/writing-systems.

The National Center on Improving Literacy. (2020, April 7). Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Toolkit. The National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from https://improvingliteracy.org/kit/phonological-phonemic-awareness.

The Reading League. (2017, January 26). Phoneme vs. Phonological Awareness: Knowing the difference matters for assessment and instruction. The Reading League. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/-craxHFB37U.

Understood. (2019, December 20). What is Phonological Awareness? Understood. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/K0G6teawxls.