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Language Foundations Continuum for Reading and Writing
Grades 1–4: Overall Expectation B2
Phonemic Awareness
Overview
Phonemic Awareness
Phonological awareness refers to the ability to reflect on the sound structure of spoken language.
Phonemic awareness is a subcomponent of phonological awareness. It refers to the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest unit of sound in spoken words, called a phoneme. When students begin to identify, notice, segment, blend, and manipulate individual sounds or phonemes in words, they are developing and consolidating their phonemic awareness. Teaching these skills occurs largely in the context of teaching the decoding and spelling of written words.
Knowledge and Skills: Isolating, Blending and Segmenting Phonemes
Kindergarten /Grade 1
Isolating the phonemes they hear in words – an important skill to support segmentation
Grade 1
n/a
Grade 2
n/a
Grade 3
n/a
Grade 4
n/a
Kindergarten /Grade 1
Orally blending phonemes to form spoken words, starting with blending two to three phonemes into a word (with a simple syllable structure) and progressing to more complex structures(Note: C stands for consonant; V stands for vowel.)
Grade 1
Orally blending phonemes to form spoken words, beginning with two phonemes and progressing to words with up to five sounds with teacher support
Grade 2
n/a
Grade 3
n/a
Grade 4
n/a
Kindergarten /Grade 1
Segmenting spoken words into phonemes, starting with simple structures with two phonemes and progressing to more complex structures with more phonemes
Grade 1
Segmenting spoken words with structures that have more than two phonemes
Grade 2
n/a
Grade 3
n/a
Grade 4
n/a
Development
Some students pick up phonemic awareness easily. Others, especially struggling readers, including those with dyslexia, have difficulty acquiring phonemic awareness. They have difficulty perceiving and working with the oral sounds of language (Ehri et al., 2001), which has consequences for future reading development.
Why is this important?
Phonemic awareness plays a critical role in helping students to learn to read. Research has found that teaching phonemic awareness skills helps not only students’ reading skills, but also their reading comprehension. To understand what they read, students need to be accurate, fluent readers; teaching students phonemic awareness is one way to build strong word reading skills that allow students to focus their attention on the meaning of texts they read. Teaching phonemic awareness also helps students learn to spell; when students spell words, they use phonemic awareness skills to segment words into sounds before representing each phoneme with a grapheme (Armbruster et al., 2001).
Instruction
Phonemic awareness instruction should be started early and taught explicitly through direct modelling, guided practice and purposeful distributed practice.
Research suggests that phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when:
- Skills are taught in small groups
- Only one or two phonemic skills are taught in a lesson
- Instruction is brief (no more than 20 hours per year, which means less than 30 minutes per week)
- Letters are integrated
Assessment for Learning
“The primary purpose of assessment is to improve student learning.”
Growing Success, 2010, p. 28
Assessment of phonemic awareness is a powerful way for educators to support improved student outcomes. A variety of sources of insight into students’ phonemic awareness, including early reading screening, diagnostic assessments, and progress monitoring, can be used as assessment for learning to drive evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction of early reading skills.
Since phonemic awareness is a critical skill that predicts future reading skills, assessing students’ knowledge and understanding can be done through early reading screening. Many evidence-based screening tools include phonemic awareness subtests for young students, including first sound fluency or phoneme segmentation fluency measures.
For older, struggling readers, diagnostic assessments can be used to identify which specific phonemic awareness skills can be taught. This is an important component, often necessary to meet the needs of students who struggle with reading, including those with dyslexia, as a core phonological awareness difficulty is often at the root of many reading problems.
For students who are at-risk, progress monitoring with phonemic awareness subtests, such as phoneme segmentation fluency, is a powerful way to ensure that instruction or intervention is best meeting the needs of students.
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