Phonemic awareness is the capability to focus on and manipulate sounds in spoken words. It is strongly related to success in reading and spelling achievement. Phonemic awareness is a more powerful predictor of reading achievement than nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, and listening comprehension. Students will not be able to learn to read unless they have phonemic awareness, it is a significant variable in both whole language and traditional classrooms.
Years ago, many researchers did not see the importance in phonemic awareness. Over the years teachers and researches have come to realize the importance of students learning phonemic awareness in order to become successful readers. It is essential that kindergarten and first grade teachers use tools and strategies to teach their students phonemic awareness and make sure they are successful in order to become successful and fluent readers.
There are many tools to assess phonemic awareness in students. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation was found to be the most successful. This assessment measures a child’s ability to separately articulate sounds of a spoken word in order. Students are orally given a word such as cat, they then need to be able to segment the words into sounds such as /c/ /a/ /t/. The test has 22 items in which students are to tell the administrator the sounds they hear in each word. The appropriate response for this assessment is letter sounds, not letter names. It is necessary that the administrator gives feedback to the students and let them know if they are correct or not and provide the appropriate response. Teachers should expect a wide range of scores when administering this assessment in kindergarten. This assessment also allows teachers to take notes on their students’ responses in order to better understand their students and their needs.
As a kindergarten teacher this article was very informative and relatable to my teaching. Phonemic awareness is a huge part of my every day teaching. One strategy that I want to incprporate in my classroom after reading this article is the guessing game, “What am I thinking of?” The teacher will give a category and then give the sounds in the word and the students have to guess the word by blending the sounds in together. I can see my students enjoying this game and at the same time practicing their phonemic awareness. In our district we use Reading Wonders program to teach reading. A big part of that in kindergarten is phonemic awareness and blending sounds together to make words. While reading about Elkonin boxes it reminded me of what I use with my students to teach phonemic awareness. I use a smart board activity where students have to drag chips (which have a sound) to a sound box, blend the sounds together, say the word, and then we spell the word in the boxes. I have found that this activity is a great visual for students when learning how to read and spell. Mid- year I would like to try this assessment with my students after incorporating some of the different phonemic awareness strategies and activities.
