Phonological Awareness

Why Teach Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness addresses the sounds of language. Awareness of the words and sounds in spoken language is the most important indicator of success in developing readers, according to research.

Phonological Awareness Packet Contents

Reading-Tutors provides 30 packets to teach the elements of phonological awareness. The packets/skills are organized from simplest to most difficult. Each packet includes:

• Lesson Plan/Tutor Tips - Lesson plans cover up to four separate phonological awareness skills.
• Picture cards - Designed for use in sorting activities.
• Read-aloud book - Helps children discriminate between various sounds, builds listening skills, and enables tutors to promote oral comprehension and model fluency.
• Game - A fun way to build phonological awareness knowledge.
• Workmat - Two- or three-box workmats used to build skills in blending and segmenting the sounds and phonemes in words.

Teaching Phonological Awareness

In effective instruction, children are taught to notice, differentiate, think about, and manipulate sounds--from sounds of words to sounds of individual phonemes. Instruction in phonological awareness includes the following:

• Word
  Word awareness is the knowledge that words have meaning. Students with word awareness can discriminate individual words in a passage read to them. Beginning readers must acquire this skill before they can extract meaning from what they read. For example, a student needs to know that the spoken word "dog" represents a creature that has four legs and barks before she or he can understand what is meant by the printed word "dog."
• Rhyme
  Rhyme awareness is the understanding that certain word endings sound alike and therefore contain the same sounds, such as the short /a/ and /p/ sounds in "cap" and "map" or the long /i/ and /t/ combination in "fight" and "kite."
• Onset and Rime
  Onset is the initial consonant in a one-syllable word. Rime includes the remaining sounds. For example, in "kite," the /k/ sound is the onset, and the /ite/ sound is the rime.
• Syllable
  This is the recognition that words are divided into parts, each part containing a separate vowel sound. A student with syllable awareness can identify "bat" as one syllable and "batter" as two syllables.
• Phoneme
  This is the student's awareness of the smallest units of sound in a word. For example, a student with phonemic awareness hears three sounds in the word "bat": /b/, /a/, and /t/. It is important that students learn to segment, blend, and manipulate the 45 sound units (phonemes) in the English language.

Assessment

Diagnosing student needs and monitoring progress are important to a successful tutoring program. Reading-Tutors provides phonological assessment forms that measure awareness of words, rhymes, onset and rime, syllables, and phonemes.