Understanding the Importance of Early Phonemic Awareness
As children learn to read, they must have a basic understanding of phonemic awareness. To better educate young children, the educator must also have a clear understanding of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness “is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes--in spoken words.” (WriteExpress Corporation, 2011) It is the first communication skill set that children use. Phonemes are small sounds that make up a person’s language. These sounds resonate through verbal speech and in reading and writing. As it is true of all things, you must first understand the basics before you can learn the game. Examples of phonemic awareness are: phoneme isolation, phoneme identity, phoneme substitution, oral segmenting, oral blending, sound deletion, onset-rime manipulation (Wikipedia, 2011). Throughout my paper, I will be decoding these basic skill sets and notice how they apply to the acquisition of language, reading and writing.
Oral blending is one of the earliest phonemic skill sets a child acquires. Blending is just as it sounds. It required a person to take two or more sounds and blend, or merge, their sounds together in order. Blending also occurs when letters are grouped together to make a consistent sound such as /sh/. We can change the beginning sound to make new words. A great way to reinforce this skill set is by playing a game. I call this game the “Break Apart Game.” In this game I say a word slowly breaking it apart by chunks. “If I say /f/ /i/ /sh/ can you tell me what word I said?” The student would respond with fish. This game teaches students how to hear how words/sounds and how to break words apart.
This leads me to my next phonemic awareness skill set, phoneme isolation of first and last sounds. This is simply hearing and isolating beginning and ending sounds. To demonstrate this principle we work heavily on making connections between words based on beginning and ending sounds. Another helpful game is simply saying a word and having the student recall the beginning or ending sound. For example, “If I say fish, can you tell me the beginning sound? “ The student would respond with /f/. After the student has mastered isolating the beginning sound, an educator can then add the ending sound. I do not believe in teaching these skills at the same time because it leads to confusion. I believe that students should feel confident with a phonemic awareness skill set before adding another on. I would play the same game except ask the student to isolate the ending sound. “If I say cat, can you tell me the ending sound?” The student would respond with /t/. It is very important that the student can respond with the sound not the letter at first. While it is great that the student can isolate the sound and then transfer it to a letter, the main goal of this test is to determine if the student understands beginning, ending and sound.
The final phonemic awareness skill set vital to a student’s language development is sound deletion. This is breaking apart words and putting sounds together. An example of this is saying a word and having the student say the word without the beginning sound. For example, “If I say cat, can you say it without the /c/?” The correct response is /at/. This is the most difficult for students to comprehend because it takes them out of their comfort zone and really makes them listen to their sounds.
In summary, before students are able to understand written language they must first have vital knowledge of how sounds and letters work. If a child does not understand these basic phoneme skills “…a child is not able to take advantage of the alphabetic principle” (Hoover, 2002). The child will have a difficult time understanding the sound-letter relationship and therefore have a difficult time reading and writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment