CoL teacher Inquiry - Profiling: Phonological awareness

Reflecting on my previous post about my dreams for literacy in 2023 in my new entrant classroom. I've decided to begin with a focus on phonological awareness as I want to create literacy learning for my tamariki that is based on the science of reading and meets their needs as learners. I believe phonological awareness is a great place to begin this inquiry. 

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is one of the foundational skills of spelling and reading. It is an awareness and understanding that speech consists of words, syllables, rhyme and individual speech sounds/phonemes in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify the first, middle and last sounds in words, segment and blend CV, VC, CVC, and words with digraphs. I discover this great graphic which gives a good overview of the pre-reading skills within phonological awareness.

Why phonological awareness?

When reflecting on my first year teaching literacy using the BSLA, I noticed along with my colleagues that our children struggled with phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is covered in part by the BSLA programme, but it does not include many of the foundational phonological awareness skills that our tamariki are yet to learn. 

BSLA teaches children to isolate the first sound in words, blend and segment sounds, and isolate the last sound in words BUT it does not teach children about explicitly teach children how to segment sentences into words, produce and discriminate rhyme, blend and segment syllables or delete syllables which are all basic phonological awareness skills.  After conversations with my team leader and our resource teacher of literacy, I decided to make phonological awareness my focus or starting point for teaching with my new entrants in 2023. 

Looking at the data...

I have used the "Phonological Awareness Screening Tool" by Liz Kane Literacy (this is available to download for free from her website).  I also used the data gathered by the Better Start Literacy Approach Assessment Tool which was administered at the beginning of the year. The knowledge I have gained from completing these assessments has given me clear areas of strength and areas of concern for my tamariki.  

Firstly, the Phonological Awareness Screening Tool" by Liz Kane Literacy covered a wide range of basic and early phonological awareness skills. I had included a screenshot of the Google Sheet assessment tracker (available for free download from Liz Kane's website). I can clearly see that all of my tamariki need explicit teaching of phonological awareness. The child listed at the top who has mastered some of the phonological awareness skills has been at school for the longest and last year took part in both the Heggerty Phonological Awareness Curriculum and BSLA.  It is recommended to repeat this assessment for all children who have areas of phonological awareness that need attention at the end of each term, so I will be repeating this assessment at the end of term 1. 

My initial BSLA assessment identified that only two of the children in my class could proficiently identify the initial phoneme in a word and one child could blend phonemes together to make a word. The remainder of the children are unable to identify the initial phonemes in words or blend phonemes together to make words. The BSLA assessment is completed again after 10 weeks of teaching or 40 sessions. 

Looking at the bigger picture, the BSLA phonological assessment task that has been used across hundreds of schools and with thousands of children has identified that maori, Pacifica and children from low-socioeconomic areas are more likely to enter school with lower phoneme identity (the ability to hear the first sounds in words).  This graph shared by the University of Canterbury shows the data they have gathered from all their 'baseline' assessments. 

Within the Manaiakalani cluster, I had a look at the shift in the achievement between the SEA data and the Six Year Net data. I noticed that our tamariki are making progress when you compare these two time points BUT on average our tamariki are scoring below the national average. I could also see that in the 2022 school year within our cluster only a small number of children took part in the BSLA programme so I am interested to see how teaching that is more closely aligned with the science of reading - which puts an emphasis on phonological awareness could have on student achievement. A second observation that I made was that when looking at the wider Manaiakalani programme as a whole the number of children participating in structured literacy in growing from the years 2021-2022. 

Looking at the science of reading...

I've had a look research to explore why a focus on phonological awareness is crucial for becoming a successful reader. 

Below is an infographic created by Dr. Hollis Scarborough, called the Reading Rope. It breaks down the five components of reading into their individual skills that need to be mastered to become skilled readers. The strands are woven together, this is really important as you need all of those strands to become a skilled reader. Phonological awareness is one of these strands. 

If you take a look at the lower part of the reading rope, the word-recognition strands, you can see how phonological awareness, alphabetic principle (decoding) work towards word recognition becoming increasingly automatic - which supports reading fluency.  This lower part of the rope covers three of the five components highlighted by the studies of the Science of Reading, Phonological Awareness, Alphabetic Principle and Fluency. 

This website: Dyslexia Evidence Based - provides a wealth of evidence based information about the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy.  

I found this particular paragraph from the document "Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2022: A Guide for Educators". I found interesting that the ability for our children to progress speech sounds in their minds can support or hinder their ability to map word, meaning our children need to have an understanding of the three forms of a word, the sounds, the orthography (the spelling) and the meaning.  If they are unable to process the sounds of words, they will struggle to learn to read. 

"Both struggling readers and beginning readers have poor phoneme awareness due to underdeveloped, inefficient phonological processing. When students do not process speech sounds precisely in their minds, they may not store spoken words with the level of detail for mapping letters to sounds in reading and spelling. Having crisp, sound-by-sound memories of spoken words is not necessary for speaking, but phoneme awareness is necessary for learning to read. Students who struggle with word recognition and phonics share weaknesses in phonological processing.The discovery and confirmation of this phonological core deficit in struggling readers is one of the most powerful discoveries in reading science. It is simple to identify poor phonemic awareness, relatively easy to provide

explicit instruction, and this instruction supports gains in reading."

I've also explored Liz Kane's website and she has a section called further reading that provides more research and explanation of the science of reading and structured literacy. Here is a link: Liz Kane's Website. 

In 'Building a Strong Foundation for Literacy' by Kathy Barclay, it states that: 

"While some children can develop phonological skills through informal exposure during interactive reading experiences, other children require direct instruction. Thus, it is important for preschool and kindergarten programs to have deliberate and purposeful instruction of these concepts" (p. 6).

I believe that explicitly teaching phonological awareness is the most catalytic area of learning for my new entrants class this year as strong phonological awareness will set them up for success in literacy.  This supports the Manaiakalani kaupapa of "empowering learners". It is so empowering for our five year olds, and their whanau, to experience early literacy success. I have observed this positive start to reading and writing in my classroom this year with BSLA and witnessed the pride in whanau as they see their tamariki succeed as readers and writers. 

Moving forward, I am interested to learn more about the link between phonological awareness, vocabulary development and oral narrative. 

I already know, from my BSLA learning, TESOL learning this year, and my observations as a classroom teacher over the years that these are gaps in learning for my tamariki. I am thinking back to our professional development with Dr. Jannie Van Hees over the years that our children enter school having heard less words and with less conversational practice compared to their peers from different socio-economic communities. I am interested to get stuck in and analyse the "oral narrative" data gathered as part of our BSLA baseline assessment. I believe I underutilized this data last year and I am hoping to make better use of it in my teaching practice in 2023! 

Until next time!