1. Early Reading Skills: Teaching
Phonemic Awareness
Brandy Clarke
CBC 2002

2. The Need for Early Reading
Interventions
 Poor reading ability correlates with long-
term negative outcomes.
 Reading is the cornerstone of academic
success.
 Students with poor reading skills in the
beginning are likely to have poor skills
in the future.

3. Learning in Steps
 Research has demonstrated a need for
children to learn to recognize words with
speed and accuracy to read with fluency and
comprehension.
 Progression of learning:
 Understanding the concept of words
 Alphabetic Awareness
 Phonemic Awareness
 Phonics
 Word Recognition
 Fluency
 Comprehension

4. What is Phonemic
Awareness?
 Phonemic awareness is an
understanding that speech is composed
of individual sounds.
 It is part of the hierarchy of reading
skills developed in early reading.
 It is not a unitary skill, but is comprised
of various components.

5.  Five
levels of Phonemic Awareness
(Adams,1990).
1 Appreciation of sound in spoken language
(recitation of nursery rhymes).
 Ability to compare and contrast sounds in words
by grouping words with similar or dissimilar
sounds (beginning, middle, and end of words).
3 Ability to blend and split syllables.
4 Phonemic segmentation or the ability to isolate
individual sounds in syllables.
5 Ability to manipulate phonemes by omitting and
deleting phonemes to make new words.

6. Why is it important?
 Itis necessary in learning to read and
spell the English language because
English is alphabetic.
 Sounds correlate with letters to make
words.
 Research has demonstrated a strong
link between phonemic awareness and
beginning reading.

7. Why Phonemic Awareness
over Whole-language?
 The Whole-language approach
 Focuses on teaching reading by immersing
students in literature while providing minimal direct
skill instruction.
 Provides students with ample opportunities to read
and write and provides guidance as needed.
 Students learn to read through whole-word
recognition which creates a guessing game when
presented with new words.
 Students taught with phonics instruction read
54% of new words correctly, students with
whole-language read 3%.
 However, balance is necessary.

8. What skills are taught?
 Early Reading Skills (Good III, Simmons &
Smith, 1998)
 Area 1: Phonological Awareness
 Awareness of correlation of sounds to words
 Area 2: Alphabetic Understanding
 Link between a letter and a sound
 Area 3: Phonological Recoding
 Use of relationship between phonemes and letters to
recognize printed words, then read and spell them
 Area 4: Accuracy and Fluency with Connected
Text
 Comprehending what is read

9. How to assess skills
 Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills (DIBELS), University of
Oregon
 Dynamic: continuing evaluation of skills
 Indicators: representative and correlated
with important skill areas
 Predictive: future reading performance
 Functional: related to reading aquisition

10.  DIBELS Assessments:
 Target age range: Preschool – Second grade
 Onset Recognition Fluency
 Late preschool through winter of kindergarten
 Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
children with low phonological awareness
 Letter Naming Fluency
 Fall of kindergarten through fall of first grade
 Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
children with low skills in letter naming

11.  DIBELS Assessments cont.:
 Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
 Winter of kindergarten through fall of first grade
 Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
children with low phonological awareness
 Nonsense Word Fluency
 Fall of first grade through summer of first grade
 Appropriate for monitoring progress of older
children with low skills in letter-sound
correspondence

12. How to teach Phonemic
Awareness
 5 Features of effective interventions (Good
III et.al., 1998)
1. Provide instruction at the phoneme level.
2. Scaffold tasks and examples.
3. Model skills prior to practice and provide
opportunities for students to produce isolated
sounds orally.
4. Provide systematic and strategic instruction for
identifying sounds in words, blending and
segmenting, and culminate with integration of
phonological awareness and letter-sound
correspondence instruction.
5. Use concrete materials to represent sounds .

13.  Modeling activities
 Teaching vs. practice
 The importance of scope and sequence:
 Larger units before smaller units (words before syllables)
 Continuous before stop sounds (cont.: f, l, m, n, stop:
b, c, d, g)
 Fewer sounds before more sounds (VC or CV before
CVC)
 Auditory blending before segmenting (e.g. foooot-baaaall
vs. mmm-aaaaa-t)
 Blending and segmenting before manipulation (e.g.
removing sounds to make new words)
 Oral before written language

14. Phonemic Teaching Methods
 Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A
Classroom Curriculum.(Adams, Foorman,
Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998)
 The use of language games
 Play regularly (15-20 min)
 Go in order of sequence
 Use both segmenting (analysis) and blending (synthesis)
activities
 Child should feel as though s/he is playing while learning
 Consistently pronounce words slowly and clearly

15.  The Language Games:
 Listening game: Listening to Sounds
 Rhyming: Poetry, Songs, and Jingles
 Words and Sentences: Introducing the Idea of
sentences
 Awareness of Syllables: Clapping Names
 Initial and Final Sounds: Guess Who
 Phonemes: Two-Sound Words
 Introducing Letters and Spellings: Guess Who:
Introducing Sounds and Letters

16. Reading Intervention Program
 Reading Recovery Program
 Goal: Help struggling students catch up to
peers
 Requires a lot of teacher monitoring (1:1)
 Daily sessions last 30-40 minutes per
session and run 10-20 weeks

17.  Reading Recovery Program Strategies
 Reading left to right
 Using a return sweep rather than a slow
return
 Monitoring whether story makes sense
 Searching for cues from context
 Rereading when unclear
 Self-correction

18. Important Resources
 http://dibels.uoregon.edu/
 Provides explanation of DIBELS research
and application
 http://reading.uroegon.edu/
 Big Ideas in Beginning Reading
 http://www.nifl.gov
 National Institute for Literacy
 National Reading Panel Update

19. Application for CBC
 It is important to understand what is needed
to promote early reading skills so that
problems can be identified and treated before
negative trajectory is established.
 Assessment techniques allow for problem
areas to be targeted and monitored
throughout interventions.
 Teaching techniques can be used across
settings to facilitate partnerships in learning.
 Consultants can provide consultees with
further resources to provide guidance
throughout reading development.

20. References
Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adams, M.J., Foorman, B.R., Lundberg, I, & Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic
Awareness in Young Children: A classroom curriculum. Baltimore, MD
: Paul H. Brooks Publishing Co.
Good III, R. H. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)
with CBM. Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth
and Development. Eugene, OR.
Good III, R. H., Simmons, D. C., & Smith, S. B. (1998). Effective academic
intervention in the United States: Evaluating and enhancing the
acquistion of early reading skills. School Psychology Review. Vol
27, No. 1, pp 45-56.

21. References cont.
Grossen, B. & Carnine, D. (1991). Strategies for maximizing
reading success in the regular classroom. In
Stoner, G., Shinn, M. R., & Walker, H. M. (Eds) Interventions for
achievement and behavior problems. Silver Spring, MD: NASP
Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that works: The case for
balanced teaching. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Snider, V. E. (1995). A primer on phonemic awareness: What is
it, why it’s important, and how to teach it. School Psychology
Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, 443-455.