Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington’s Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The first blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Jocelyn Seamer.

Phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) are the bridge between oral language and decoding (Kilpatrick, 2015).  Development in this area may be described in three broad areas including:

1. Phonological sensitivity  – rhyming, alliteration, syllable segmentation (Brady, 2020)

2. Basic phonemic awareness – identifying individual phonemes in words, phoneme blending and segmenting. Blending occurs when children combine the phonemes /c/ - /a/ - /t/ into the word ‘cat’. Every time we utter a word, we are engaging in oral blending. Taking the separate phonemes in a word and blending them is the vehicle by which we lift unfamiliar words from the page.  Segmenting occurs when we separate and isolate the phonemes in a word, such as being able to separate the word ‘dog’ into /d/ /o/ /g/. Spelling is what happens when we represent those phonemes with a written symbol.

3. ‘Advanced’ phonemic awareness – which develops once automaticity in basic phonemic awareness is established. This enables students to  delete, add and substitute phonemes in words.  

Some controversy in the nitty gritty

It is acknowledged that the above framework may be somewhat contested by readers.  This is not surprising considering the level of debate in the academic community about phonological and phonemic awareness. 

Regardless of whether you subscribe to a particular perspective on the ‘levels’ of phonological and phonemic awareness, there is ample evidence of the positive effects of instruction on later reading development. A recent surge in prepared, whole class oral programs has resulted in an increased awareness of phonological and phonemic awareness in our classrooms. However, the role of graphemes in this work has been difficult for some classroom teachers to establish in practice. This is made more challenging when we consider that the matter is still hotly contested by reading researchers. 

With letters or without letters?

While children can learn to blend and segment orally, the National Reading Panel (2000) found that the effects of phonemic awareness instruction were greater when graphemes were used than when they were not. Finally, it is important to note that phonemic awareness is a means to enable reading and spelling, not an end in itself.  That is, it is not a separate, stand-alone activity done for the entire time a student is in primary school. 

Putting it into Practice

Disagreements about instructional practices to help students develop phonemic awareness only serve to make it harder for teachers to know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in the classroom.  

Here are five suggestions for making your phonological and phonemic awareness instruction simple and effective. 

1. Don’t wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting. 

2. Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

3. Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

4. Monitor progress regularly

5. Identify and support strugglers early

(1) Don’t wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting

There used to be a school of thought that placed phonological and phonemic awareness on a continuum with the development of early phonological skills preceding phonemic awareness. This led many teachers to delay the introduction of blending and segmenting until phonological sensitivity had developed. Research indicates that children can develop blending and segmenting at the phoneme level before they acquire phonological sensitivity making it unnecessary to wait to introduce instruction into the Foundation year classroom (Brady, 2020). That isn’t to say that phonological sensitivity isn’t important, but rather we can introduce phoneme level blending and segmenting right at the start of the Foundation Year. 

(2) Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

We all know that teachers are time poor.  After differentiation, time management and ‘fitting everything in’ is the most common challenge faced by teachers.  Rather than creating a separate section of the literacy block especially for early phonological skills, it can be very useful to include phonological sensitivity in your day-to-day activities. For example, when you send your students off to wash their hands or collect their bags, engage them in a brief activity to practise segmenting syllables.  One by one, you call on the students to ‘chop’ their names before they leave the group. This prevents a stampede of students all headed for the same place and gives you the opportunity to check-in with each student. You can even use this as an opportunity for assessment, keeping a checklist nearby to note when students have demonstrated a particular skill. 

(3) Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

As with phonological sensitivity, it isn’t necessary to find time for separate practice in blending and segmenting.  The point of these skills is to enable the development of reading and spelling and, as such, should be put to work in the context of work with graphemes.  When introducing early phoneme awareness to young children, you might have a short oral activity focused on identifying phonemes as part of your phonics lesson. You would then include both blending and segmenting with graphemes as part of the daily, low variance routine in the phonics lesson. 

A note of caution on this.  Ensure that students have automaticity with phoneme/grapheme correspondence before asking them to read and spell words containing those graphemes.  ‘Wobbly’ phonemic skills combined with ‘wobbly’ phoneme grapheme correspondence only serves to overwhelm our young students.  Once students have acquired automaticity with blending a segmenting, you can include some short and sharp addition, deletion and substitution activities in your phonics lesson as well. Aim to keep this part of your lesson to less than 3 minutes. 

(4) Monitor progress regularly

As mentioned, assessment and monitoring does not need to only occur via a one-on-one assessment. You can maintain a checklist or spreadsheet manually during your various classroom activities.  An informal assessment in phonological and phonemic skills is sufficient monitor progress. You do not need to have a norm referenced assessment to inform your teaching.  You can find a very useful tool for this here.

Monitoring progress enables you to target instruction on the skills most needed at the time.  The National Reading Panel (2000) found that instruction that focused on just one or two skills yielded better results than instruction that covered a wide range of skills at once. Using your assessment to inform teaching will ensure that you are targeted and specific in your teaching to help students get the best results.  Assessment data also tells you when you can stop focusing on specific skills. If your whole class can segment syllables confidently, you no longer need to spend time on that skill. If you teach Year 1 and 2, it isn’t necessary to teach every skill on the list. 

(5) Identify and support at-risk students early

Assessment helps you provide more targeted instruction, but it also helps you to identify students at risk of reading difficulty.  Students with dyslexia very often have core phonological deficits which significantly impact their reading development (Kilpatrick, 2015).  Using our phonological and phonemic assessment data in the Foundation year means that we don’t have to wait until the Year 1 phonics screening check to identify students who need additional support.   Once we know that a student is struggling to acquire any of the necessary skills, we can provide Tier 2 support in the form of additional and more intensive instruction as needed. If you teach Year 1 and 2, your assessment data will help you keep on top of the ongoing support that may be required by students in these grades. 

Phonological and phonemic awareness instruction is a critical aspect of our teaching, but it need not take over our whole literacy block.  Focusing on activities that provide bang for your buck (such as including graphemes once known) will ensure that our students learn what they need to without instruction taking precious time away from other core undertakings. 

References

Brady, S (2020) A 2020 Perspective on Research Findings on Alphabetics (Phoneme Awareness and Phonics): Implications for Instruction (Expanded Version). Posted on The Reading League website: https://www.thereadingleague.org/journal/ https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf

(NICHD) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Kilpatrick, D. (2015) Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. John Wiley and Sons. New Jersey.

About Jocelyn Seamer

Jocelyn Seamer is a teacher, tutor and former school leader. She has led teams in some of Australia’s remotest schools to develop practice that reflects the evidence base of reading instruction. She shares simple yet effective strategies with classroom teachers in a variety of forums – learn more at Jocelyn’s website.

Her book, Reading Success in the Early Primary Years, can be purchased here.