| Performance on manipulation tasks such as substitution "have yielded strong predictions of or correlations with reading achievement." (Lundberg, Olofsson, and Wall, 1980; Mann, 1984; Rosner and Simon, 1971)
What Is Phonemic Manipulation? The last and most challenging of the five phonemic awareness tasks as outlined by Marilyn Adams (1990) is the ability of children to manipulate or work with individual sounds in spoken words. Children who can think about and manipulate phonemes become better readers and spellers. They distinguish and remember words that are similar such as fresh, French, and flesh. This topic will focus on the manipulation tasks of substitution and deletion.
Substitution requires children to be able to switch or substitute one phoneme for another to make a new word.
Deletion requires children to be able to remove individual or blended sounds from words or to identify words once a phoneme or phonemes have been removed. Words may include consonant blends, where two or more sounds are together as a cluster or blend (each consonant retains its own sound, for example, /sn/ in snail).
Putting Phonemic Manipulation to Work
You explored blending and segmenting phonemes, two very important phonemic awareness tasks. The remaining manipulation tasks—substitution and deletion—work to refine children's abilities to work at the phoneme level with words. Substitution and deletion can be difficult for many 1st and 2nd graders. For this reason, it is important for you to provide your children with the appropriate level of phonemic awareness instruction. Here are some examples of activities that support phonemic manipulation:
Initial sound substitution. Replace the first sound in baste with /p/. (paste)
Final sound substitution. Replace the last sound in gross with /z/. (grows)
Vowel substitution. Replace the middle sound in sow with /a/. (saw)
Syllable deletion. Say baker without the ba. (ker)
Initial sound deletion. Say sun without the /s/. (un)
Final sound deletion. Say mit without the /t/. (mi)
Initial sound in a blend deletion. Say snail without the /s/. (nail)
Final sound in a blend deletion. Say tent without the final /t/. (ten)
Second phoneme in a blend deletion. Say snail without /n/. (sail)
By the time most children reach second grade, they will be able to connect sounds to letters.
Special Education Focus: Identifying Struggling Readers
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The most significant problem for 90% of poor readers at any age is slow and inaccurate word recognition. Simply put, if they can't read the words quickly, they can't comprehend. Usually the problem with word recognition is related to a more basic problem associating individual speech sounds (phonemes) with symbols (graphemes). The tests that most readily identify this kind of problem are simple and quick. Try this:
- Get a series of leveled word lists from an informal reading inventory. Time the students as they read aloud from the lists below grade level and at grade level. Identify the list that each student can easily read; keep a graph of each student's progress in accuracy and speed on that list.
- Use a phonics survey to find out which sounds the students do not know. Usually they are very insecure with vowel sounds and syllable division.
- Listen to students read a passage from a grade-level textbook for one minute. Note their fluency and accuracy.
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