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Phonemic Awareness
- Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
National Reading Panel (NRP) Conclusion: "Phonemic Awareness Instruction helped all types of children improve their reading including normally-developing readers, children at risk for future reading problems, disabled readers, preschoolers, kindergartners, 1st graders, children in 2nd through 6th grades (most of whom were disabled readers), children across various SES levels [socio-economic status], and children learning to read in English as well as other languages." (p. 2-5)
| Further NRP Findings | How My Reading Coach Gold Meets NRP Research |
|---|---|
| "Teaching with letters is important because this helps children apply their PA [phonemic awareness] skills to reading and writing. Teaching children to blend phonemes with letters helps them to decode." (p.2-6) | My Reading Coach Gold provides explicit instruction in letter formation and blending phonemes with letters to help students decode. |
| "Teaching children phonemic segmentation with letters helps them spell." (p.2-6) | My Reading Coach Gold teaches and provides immediate remedies in phonemic segmentation with letters to help students spell. |
| "Teachers should recognize that acquiring phonemic awareness is a means rather than an end. PA is not acquired for its own sake but rather for its value in helping learners understand and use the alphabetic system to read and write." (p.2-6) | My Reading Coach Gold helps students apply learned phonemic awareness skills to reading, beginning with lesson 7. |
| "In these analyses, programs lasting less than 20 hours were more effective than longer programs. Single sessions lasted 25 minutes on average." (p.2-6) | The phonemic awareness instruction is limited to the needs of the student. That portion of the program is usually complete within 13 hours. The average session time dealing with phonemic awareness is 20 minutes. |
| "Although all of the approaches exert a significant effect on reading, instruction that focuses on 1 or 2 skills produces greater transfer than a multi-skilled approach." (p.2-4) | |
| Methods of Teaching Phonemic Awareness That Have the Greatest Impact | How My Reading Coach Gold Uses these NRP Suggested Techniques |
|---|---|
| "1. Phoneme isolation, which requires recognizing individual sounds in words, for example, 'Tell me the first sound in paste. (/p/)'" (p.2-2; 2-10) | My Reading Coach Gold provides explicit instruction to students in phonemic isolation in the Word Building Activity. Students must correctly identify each individual sound in a word. Students identify the sound and its associated grapheme. |
| "2. Phoneme identify, which requires recognizing the common sound in different words. For example, 'Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy and bell' (/b/)" (p.2-2; 2-10) | |
| "3. Phoneme categorization, which requires recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words, for example, 'Which word does not belong? bus, bun, rug' (rug)" (p.2-2; 2-10) | |
| "4. Phoneme blending, which requires listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word. For example, 'What word is /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/? (school)'" (p.2-2; 2-10) | In the Word Building Activity, My Reading Coach says a word, then dissects it into each phoneme sound /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/. Students are challenged to correctly identify each individual sound in a word and the associated grapheme. |
| "5. Phoneme segmentation, which requires breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound. For example, 'How many phonemes are there in ship?' (three: /sh/, /i/, /p/)" (p.2-2; 2-10) | As a remediation technique, My Reading Coach Gold automatically pronounces the word, sound by sound, in the phonemic awareness activities. Students are given specific remedies to help them hear each sound. |
| "6. Phoneme deletion, which requires recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed. For example, 'What is smile without the /s/?' (mile)" (p.2-2; 2-10) | |
