Relationship

How and when to teach phonemic awareness

Why is phonemic awareness important? If children cannot hear or manipulate the sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, it will be very difficult for them to learn to match these sounds to letters and letter combinations. Lack of phonemic awareness is the single most important causal factor contributing to children having reading problems. (Adam, 1990)

Homematic awareness is the most powerful predictor of reading success. It is more highly correlated with reading success than it is with socioeconomic status, general intelligence, or listening comprehension. (Stanovich, 1986, 1994; Goldstein, 1976; Zifcak, 1977)

How is phonemic awareness related to learning to read? Can it be taught with measurable success? Phonemic awareness is related to reading in two ways: (1) phonemic awareness is a prerequisite for learning to read (Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Yopp, 1985), and (2) phonemic awareness It is a consequence of learning to read. . (Ehri, 1979; Read, Yun-Fei, Hong-Yin, and Bao-Qing, 1986)

Several studies have shown that children can be successfully trained in phonemic awareness. (Cunningham, 1990; Ball and Blachman, 1991; Yopp and Troyer, 1992)

Phonemic awareness training has been shown to positively affect reading and spelling performance in kindergarten and first grade children. (Lundberg, 1988; Bradley and Bryant, 1983)

Who needs phonemic awareness training? The percentages of children requiring specific phonemic awareness training vary slightly across different research studies, but the number is still a significant percentage of beginning readers. Ehri (1984) found that 20% lacked the required phonological awareness, Lyon (1996) cited a figure of 17%, and Adams (1990) concluded that 25% of middle-class kindergartners lacked this ability.

Fletcher et al., (1994) found that poor readers almost always had poor phonemic awareness. Longitudinal studies from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) support this conclusion, stating that the main problem that predisposes children to reading disabilities is a lack of processing ability. phonological. (Lyons, 1997)

When should phonemic awareness training take place and how should it be introduced? Children should be diagnosed in mid-kindergarten to see if they can identify and manipulate phonemes. If early learners do not have this ability, they should be given more intensive training in phonemic awareness (Ehri, 1984).

Research shows that if schools delay intervention until age seven for children who struggle with reading, 75% will continue to struggle. If detected in first or second grade, reading difficulties can be remedied 82% of the time. Those detected in grades 3-5 can improve 46% of the time, while those identified later can only be successfully treated 10-15% of the time. (Forman, 1996)

There seems to be a consensus in the research that a specific sequence of phonemic awareness instruction is most effective for young children. Treiman (1992) found that children learned to be aware of and could manipulate onsets and rhymes more easily than individual phonemes.