Phonological Awareness is recognition that spoken language includes words that are composed of sounds (phonemes) and groups of sounds, such as dipthongs, digraphs and blends, and that through changing the order of these sounds or substituting them for others, the word will sound vastly different. Spoken language contains syllables that separate the sound clusters and rhymes. Phonological Awareness develops over time and can begin early, as it is oral. These children who express good phonological awareness early tend to have better word-reading ability.
Key Terms:
Recognition--a cognitive process of realizing that two words can begin or end with the same sound
Generation--coming after recognition, generation is the active process of identifying or creating words that begin or end with the same sound.
"Recognition before generation"--it is a logical progression to be able to recognize a pattern before one can create that pattern. For example, one notices that two words end in rhyming sounds before one can think of two words that end in rhyming sounds.
Blending-- the process of blending two or more sounds together in forming a word
Segmenting--the process of breaking words into meaningful sounds
Decoding--identifying sounds of individual letters or clusters of letters and blending them
Ex. In-class activity: decoding the word "bandiferous."
Analogy--recognizing a new word based on an already known word
Ex. 1 Child says "foots" instead of "feet" because she or he already has existing knowledge about plural nouns and transfers it to an instance where an irregular form is necessary.
Ex. 2 A kindergarten student sees that "unhappy" means "not happy" after seeing several examples of the prefix "un-"
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(Typical) Order of Acquisition:
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•-Syllables or beats before rhyming before individual phonemes or sounds
•-Recognition before generation
•-Beginnings before endings before middles
•-Blending before segmenting
•-Ability to move sounds around to create new words often one of the last skills acquired
Prediction--guessing what a word might be based on its initial letters, words before and after in the text, or contextual ones
Cueing Systems--(see Sound-Letter Relationships post)
| The ability to. . . | Will eventually help children to. . . |
| Separate words into syllables or beats | Break down a word into parts to spell or decode/read it -- for example, to spell the word chapter, break it into chap and ter |
| Recognize and generate words that rhyme | Use known words to read new words -- for example, to use catch to help them read batch |
| Recognize and generate words that start or end with the same sound | Learn to associate particular sounds with particular letters -- for example, knowing that Peter starts with p may help Peter recognize that purple also starts with p |
| Blend sounds into words | “Sound out” words -- for example, after saying a sound for each letter in the word nap (/n/ /a/ /p/), putting those sounds together to say nap |
alliteration-Ex. In the example from a class Power Point slide, there was an instance where Nell's son used alliteration, saying "Puncle Pike" instead of "Uncle Mike"
rhyming-
Phonemic Awareness-- a part of phonological awareness that encompasses the idea that individual sounds make up words
-a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound
-there are sounds (phonemes) that do not correspond to one letter. Also, there are variations of phonemes.
allophone- allophones of a phoneme are pronounced differently
Ex. The "p" in "pit" is aspirated while the "p" in "spit" is unaspirated
digraph-a sound (phoneme) that is not represented by one single letter but by a two-letter combination (grapheme) that make an entirely different sound than the two letters pronounced separately of each other (two-letter grapheme represents one-letter phoneme).
digraphs: /ch/, /sh/, /th/ (voiced), /th/(voiceless), /wh/, /ng/
/ōō/ (the "oo" sound) Ex. food, /ŏŏ/(sound of a short "u") Ex. shook
Ex. difference between voiced and voiceless /th/--one can vibrate their vocal cords in saying "th" to hear the difference. In the word "tether" the /th/ is voiced because one can hold out the "th" and hear the vibration, whereas for a word like "oath" the /th/ is pronounced with streams of air running around the tongue and involves no vocal cord vibration.
dipthong- with dipthongs there is a movement of the mouth between vowels, meaning that the letters are not pronounced as one sound, like a digraph, but more like one and a half sounds. The single vowel phoneme is represented by two letters, with a glide from one sound to another.
dipthongs: /oi/, /oy/, /ou/, /ow/
Mrs. Keane's classroom case of "Midstov" demonstrates the need for phonological awareness when teaching prepositional phrases such as, "in the midst of;" that the students mistook these four words for one is a sign of phonological unawareness of multiword utterances. Also, this shows that it is necessary to develop activities based on word discrimination and decoding sentences.
Associated Assessment:
Duke, Nell. TE301, Section 003, Fall 2007. Power Point slide.
Fox, B. J. (2005). Phonics for the Teacher of Reading, 9th edition. Prentice Hall.
New Standards Primary Literacy Committee (2004). Reading and writing grade by grade: Primary literacy standards for kindergarten through third grade. Washington, DC: National Center for Education and the Economy.
The New Brunswick Group (D. Strickland, C. Snow, P. Griffin, M. S. Burns, P. McNamara) (2002). Preparing our teachers: Opportunities for better reading instruction. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.
http://www.nifl.gov/readingprofiles/MC_Word_Analysis.htm
