| "Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds [or phonemes] in spoken words" (Put Reading First, 2001)
Making Sense of Sounds Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill and a prerequisite for phonics. Phonics requires the understanding and manipulation of sound-letter correspondences and written words. Phonics is visual. Before children can sound out words themselves, they must be able to hear and recognize the individual sounds and relate those sounds to letter or spelling patterns. When children can quickly and accurately connect sounds to the letters that stand for those sounds, and string together the sounds that each sound-spelling stands for in a word, they have a greater chance of becoming fluent readers.
Phonemic Awareness Tasks Marilyn Adams (1990) identifies five basic phonemic awareness tasks:
- Rhyme and alliteration: Identify words that rhyme. Identify alliterative words in a phrase or line of poetry.
- Oddity: Identify the pictures that begin (or end) with the same sound.
- Oral blending: String sounds together to make words, preparing children to read or decode.
- Oral segmentation: Break words into sounds. Doing this helps children spell or encode.
- Phonemic manipulation: Substitute a sound to make a new word. For example, identify the first sound in a spoken word. Replace the first sound in that word with another sound.
Blending to Build Fluency Blending exercises make effective warm-up activities for phonics instruction. "Two blending procedures that have the greatest payoff are final [sound-by-sound] blending and successive [whole-word] blending (Resnick and Beck, 1976)". Both these blending procedures are best introduced in phonics lessons using simple CVC words.
Sound-by-Sound Blending Each letter is sounded out, stated, and stored. The final task is blending all the sounds to say the word. Say the first sound. Say the second sound. Say the two sounds together. Say the next sound. Slowly say all the sounds together, then say them quickly.
Whole-Word Blending The individual sounds are blended in sequence without pause. Extend the sound of each letter in the word, then slowly compress the extension. |
