What is Phonemic Awareness Training?
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that syllables and spoken words are made up of specific speech sounds. It is possible to “tease out”, isolate or “sound out” these sounds in order to help a child spell or read.
Help your child develop good reading skills
It is well know that phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of success in learning to read. Furthermore, children who are able to sound out and isolate specific sounds in words are usually better at spelling.
When children struggle to hear or manipulate sounds in spoken words, they have trouble with decoding (the process of transforming information from one format into another; e.g. letter combinations to words while reading).
Unfortunately many people in the past were taught the whole language approach to reading. (Also known as “look-say” or “sight” reading.) In this approach children were taught to memorise whole words rather than sound them out. This has caused many issues with children learning to read.
Research has demonstrated that explicit training in phonemic awareness benefits all readers. Parents often do a great job at teaching their children the symbols (A, B, C, etc.) or even some whole words, but they often miss important steps in developing phonemic awareness.
What can you to improve phonemic awareness in your child?
You can teach your child to:
- Hear rhyme by singing rhyming songs, reading books that rhyme (Dr Seuss is wonderful!) and generate their own rhymes.
- Engage in alliterative language play by listening for, and generating, words that begin with the same initial sounds. E.g., “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
- Identify ending phonemes that are the same.
- Break words into syllables. E.g. clapping or tapping out syllables.
- Blend phonemes to make words. E.g. what word does “c” or “at” make?
- Segment words into phonemes.
- Make new words by substituting one phoneme for another.
- Track print when beginning to read.
- Sound out unknown or new words.
The more phonemic awareness we can develop in our children the better equipped they will be to learn reading, spelling and writing.
Reference:
Harwell, J, M. (2001). Complete learning disabilities handbook. John Wiley & Sons: San Francisco