Intervention for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Intervention for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words.

· Phonemic awareness is not phonics.

· Phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve words in print

Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Critical features of Phonemic Awareness instruction

Intervention: Reinforcing Alphabet Names/Sounds

Age: K-2

Materials: alphabet cards, music, hat

Intervention: The student will say the letter and something that begins with that sound to their neighbor. The children sit in a circle. Each child draws an alphabet letter out of a hat. Have them identify the letter as they draw it out of the hat and think of something that begins with that sound. Place letters on the floor and stand up. Play a musical march and children march around the circle until the music stops. When the music stops, the children sit down by a new letter and repeat the above procedure. You can spot check to save time and have the kids help each other if they don't know the letter. Repeat the procedure several times. You could use words, shapes, math facts, anything you want to reinforce.

Reference: Good, R. H., Simmins, D.C., Smith, S.B. (1998). Effective academic intervention in the United States: Evaluating and Enhancing the Acquisition of Early Reading Skills. School Psychology Review 27 (1) 45-56.

Website: http://www.usd.edu/cpe/schoolpsych/interventions.cfm

Intervention: Word learning activity to help children become very familiar with print.

Reading new texts and rereading familiar texts ensure that students in these programs engage in meaningful, connected reading. This program also includes activities that help students focus on and become familiar with printed words. For example, the Winston-Salem Project uses a procedure called "Making Words" (Cunningham, 1991; Cunningham & Cunningham, 1992). Students are presented with the letters that form a word from a selection they read. Words are selected because of their interest and because they contain word identification elements that will be useful to the students. For example, students might be presented with the letters a c e e h r t. (Students delight in trying to guess the "long" word, a word that uses all the letters and is from a recently read story.) Progressively longer words are built from the letters. A teacher might begin by asking students to take two letters and form the word at. Next, they might be asked to add a letter to form rat, to change a letter to form cat, to rearrange the letters to form act. Using similar directions they might move through eat, ate, tea, tear, rate, crate, create, to teacher. (See Cunningham & Cunningham, 1992, for further details and more examples.)

Resources: Cunningham, P. M. (1991). Phonics they use: Words for reading and writing. New York: HarperCollins.

Cunningham, P. M., & Cunningham, J. W. (1992). "Making words: Enhancing the invented spelling-decoding connection." The Reading Teacher, 46, 106-113.

From: Pikulski, J.J. (1997) Preventing Reading Problems: Factors Common to Successful Early Intervention Programs. Retrieved April 27, 2006 from http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/prevent.html

Tips:

1. Phonemic Awareness is a critical component of reading instruction but not an entire reading program. It absolutely needs to be taught, but should only be 10-15 minutes per day of your reading instruction.

2. If you focus on just a few types of phonemic awareness, you get better results. There are a lot of skills in phonemic awareness, but research has found that blending and segmentation are the 2 critical skills that must be taught. Instruction must focus on blending and segmenting words at the phoneme, or sound level. This is an auditory task.

3. Research has found that you get better results when teaching phonemic awareness to small groups of children rather than an entire class.

4. Phonemic awareness needs to be taught explicitly. The instructional program must show children what they are expected to do. Teachers must model skills they want children to perform before the children are asked to demonstrate the skill.

5. Teachers increase effectiveness when the manipulation of letters is added to phonemic awareness tasks. Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill, but once children start to become familiar with the concept, teachers can introduce letter tiles or squares and manipulate them to form sounds and words.

Teaching Sound Isolation:

Use Conspicuous Strategies

1. Show children how to do all the steps in the task before asking children to do the task.

Example: (Put down 2 pictures that begin with different sounds and say the names of the pictures.) "My turn to say the first sound in man, /mmm/. Mmman begins with /mmm/. Everyone, say the first sound in man, /mmm/."

Non-example: "Who can tell me the first sounds in these pictures?"

2. Use consistent and brief wording.

Example: "The first sound in Mmman is /mmm/. Everyone say the first sound in man, /mmm/."

Non-example: "Man starts with the same sound as the first sounds in mountain, mop, and Miranda. Does anyone know other words that begin with the same sound as man?"

3. Correct errors by telling the answer and having children repeat the correct answer.

Example: "The first sound in Man is /mmm/. Say the first sound in mmman with me, /mmm/. /Mmmm/."

Non-example: Asking the question again or asking more questions. "Look at the picture again. What is the first sound?"

Teaching Blending

Scaffold Task Difficulty

1. When children are first learning to blend, use examples with continuous sounds, because the sounds can be stretched and held.

Example: "Listen, my lion puppet likes to talk in a broken way. When he says /mmm/ - /ooo/ - /mmm/ he means mom."

Non-example: "Listen, my lion puppet likes to talk in a broken way. When he says /b/ - /e/ - /d/ he means bed."

2. When children are first learning the task, use short words in teaching and practice examples. Use pictures when possible.

Example: Put down 3 pictures of CVC words and say: "My lion puppet wants one of these pictures. Listen to hear which picture he wants, /sss/ - /uuu/ - /nnn/. Which picture?"

Non-example: ".../p/ - /e/ - /n/ - /c/ - /i/ - /l/. Which picture?" (This is a more advanced model that should be used later.)

3. When children are first learning the task, use materials that reduce memory load and to represent sounds.

Example: Use pictures to help children remember the words and to focus their attention. Use a 3-square strip or blocks to represent sounds in a word.

Non-example: Provide only verbal activities.

4. As children become successful during initial learning, remove scaffolds by using progressively more difficult examples. As children become successful with more difficult examples, use fewer scaffolds, such as pictures.

Example: Move from syllable or onset-rime blending to blending with all sounds in a word (phoneme blending). Remove scaffolds, such as pictures.
"Listen, /s/ - /t/ - /o/ - /p/. Which picture?"
"Listen, /s/ - /t/ - /o/ - /p/. What word?"

Non-example: Provide instruction and practice at only the easiest levels with all the scaffolds.

Teaching Phoneme Segmentation

Strategically Integrate Familiar and New Information

1. Recycle instructional and practice examples used for blending. Blending and segmenting are sides of the same coin. The only difference is whether children hear or produce a segmented word. Note: A segmenting response is more difficult for children to reproduce than a blending response.

Example: "Listen, my lion puppet likes to say the sounds in words. The sounds in mom are /mmm/ - /ooo/ - /mmm/. Say the sounds in mom with us. "

2. Concurrently teach letter-sound correspondences for the sounds children will be segmenting in words.

Example: Letter sound /s/ and words sun and sit. Put down letter cards for familiar letter-sounds. Then, have children place pictures by the letter that begins with the same sound as the picture.

Non-example: Use letter-sounds that have not been taught when teaching first sound in pictures for phoneme isolation activities.

3. Make the connections between sounds in words and sounds of letters.

Example: After children can segment the first sound, have them use letter tiles to represent the sounds.

Non-example: Letters in mastered phonologic activities are not used. Explicit connections between alphabetic and phonologic activities are not made.

4. Use phonologic skills to teach more advanced reading skills, such as blending letter-sounds to read words.

Example: (Give children a 3-square strip and the letter tiles for s, u, n.) Have children do familiar tasks and blending to teach stretched blending with letters.

Resources: Adams, M. J., Foorman, B. R., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). The elusive phoneme: Why phonemic awareness is so important and how to help children develop it. American Educator, 22(1-2), 18-29.

Felton, R. H., & Pepper, P. P. (1995). Early identification and intervention of phonological deficits in kindergarten and early elementary children at risk for reading disability. School Psychology Review, 24, 405-414.

Website: http://reading.uoregon.edu/index.php

Intervention for Teaching the Alphabetic Principle

Alphabetic Principle: The ability to associate sounds with letters and use these sounds to form words.

Teaching the Alphabetic Principle: Critical Alphabetic Principle skills

Teaching Sounding Out Words

Judicious Review

· Prior to reading the words, review the letter-sound correspondences that have been recently introduced or are problematic for learners.

· As you progress to each new phase of word reading (sounding out > saying whole word > sounding out the word in your head), students may need a reminder of the procedure.

· Once students learn a number of word types (e.g., CVC with continuous, CVCC with continuous, CVC with stop), include examples of all taught word types in the list.

· Keep the word lists to a manageable length (6-8 words per list).

Simple Regular Words - Listed According to Difficulty
Word Type / Reason for
Relative
Ease/Difficulty / Examples
VC and CVC words that begin with continuous sounds / Words begin with a continuous sound / it, fan
VCC and CVCC words that begin with a continuous sound / Words are longer and end with a consonant blend / lamp, ask
CVC words that begin with a stop sound / Words begin with a stop sound / cup, tin
CVCC words that begin with a stop sound / Words begin with a stop sound and end with a consonant blend / dust, hand
CCVC / Words begin with a consonant blend / crib, blend, snap, flat
CCVCC, CCCVC, and CCCVCC / Words are longer / clamp, spent, scrap, scrimp

Example: (Teacher points to the word map on the board, touches under each sound as the students sound it out, and slashes finger under the word as students say it fast.) "Sound it out." (/mmmmmmmmaaaaaaap/) "Say it fast." (map)

Instructional Design Considerations

Conspicuous Strategies

Use the following systematic progression to teach word reading so as to make public the important steps involved in reading a word:

1. Students orally produce each sound in a word and sustain that sound as they progress to the next.

2. Students must be taught to put those sounds together to make a whole word.

3. Students sound out the letter-sound correspondences "in their head" or silently and then produce the whole word.

Each step must be modeled and practiced!!

Mediated Scaffolding

For students to learn and apply knowledge of letter-sound correspondences and use that knowledge to reliably decode words, words must be carefully selected for both (a) the letters in the words, and (b) the complexity of the words.

Letters in words for initial sounding-out instruction should:

· consist of continuous sounds as these sounds can be prolonged in the voice stream.

· be ones students know.

Words in sounding-out practice and instruction should:

· progress from short vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel-consonant (2- or 3-letter) words in which letters represent their most common sounds to longer words (4- or 5-phoneme words) in which letters represent their most common sound.

· not contain consonant blends (e.g., /st/, /tr/, /pl/) until students are proficient with consonant-vowel-consonant configurations.

· begin with continuous sounds in early exercises to facilitate blending. Stop sounds may be used in final positions of words.

· represent vocabulary and concepts with which students are familiar.

Teaching Letter-Sound Correspondences

Example:
(Teacher points to letter m on board). "The sound of this letter is /mmmmm/. Tell me the sound of this letter."

Instructional Design Considerations

Conspicuous Strategies

· Teacher actions should make the task explicit. Use consistent and brief wording.

Mediated Scaffolding

· Separate auditorily and visually similar letters.

· Introduce some continuous sounds early.

· Introduce letters that can be used to build many words.

· Introduce lower case letters first unless upper case letters are similar in configuration.

Strategic Integration - Simple Before Complex

1. Once students can identify the sound of the letter on two successive trials, include the new letter-sound correspondence with 6-8 other letter sounds.

2. When students can identify 4-6 letter-sound correspondences in 2 seconds each, include these letters in single-syllable, CVC, decodable words.

Review Cumulatively and Judiciously
Use a distributed review cycle to build retention:

NKNKKNNKKKKN
N = new sound; K = known sound
Example (r = new sound; m, s, t, i, f, a = known sounds): r m r s t r r i f a m r

Teaching Reading Connected Text

Instructional Design Considerations

· A primary goal of beginning reading instruction is to prepare learners to read passages in order to communicate that print has purpose and meaning.

· Once students can accurately decode CVC and VC word types, these words should be introduced in short, highly controlled passages.

· Do not assume that learners will automatically transfer from reading words correctly in lists to reading words in passages. When introducing passage reading, they will need prompts and procedures for transferring word recognition skills to passages.

Conspicuous Strategies

The explicit teaching procedure consists of two components:

· In the first component, teachers provide direct wording for students to "figure out the word, say the sounds in the word to yourself." This component generally lasts 1-2 weeks.