CoL Teacher Inquiry: Teaching Phonemic Awareness in 2022 - A Guide for Educators

I found this guide an interesting read, especially as it focus on teaching phonemic awareness, rather than on a specific programme or approach to teaching phonemic awareness. 

I have highlighted a few points for myself below that will inform the design of my intervention in the coming weeks:

• Small daily doses (a few minutes at a time) in effective phonemic awareness instruction improves a child's ability to read and spell unfamiliar words independently. Most children will make progress with just a few minutes of daily instruction at the start of the literacy lesson.

• Emergent and struggling readers will benefit from phonological awareness instruction. Struggling readers have phonological weakness. Most children who struggle with learning to read have an underdeveloped phonemic awareness when they enter school.  At-risk and struggling readers enter school with poor phonological awareness, which indicates that their phonological processing is less developed than it is in children who are on track for typical reading development. 

• Comparison of present research indicate larger reading gains for students with lessons that include both phonemic awareness and phonics. 

• Each phonological awareness session should begin with a review of the previously taught concept first, then focus on the teaching the next sound position in the sequence (e.g. the final sound). 

• Many students learn new phonemic awareness tasks more quickly, and are more accurate, when
  they use manipulatives. For example, a child might use two small blocks or chips for first sound
  segmentation of the word “map.” First, he repeats the word “map,” pushing one square up under the picture of a map when he says /m/ and pushing another up when he says /ap/. In later lessons when he is able to fully segment words into phonemes, he would push up three chips as he segments each sound /m/ /a/ /p/, and then blends those sounds to say “map". Practice with manipulative  tasks further strengthens phonological processing, which facilitates mapping sounds to letters and, thus, supports memory for written words and instant word recognition.

• Most children pick up syllable awareness quite easily. We do not know if it is necessary to teach syllable-level and onset-level phonological awareness after preschool. BUT the point of phonological awareness activities with syllables is to prepare students for success with phonemic awareness tasks that focus on perceiving individual speech sounds.

• Teaching phonemic awareness separately from phonics and spelling seems to provide the best environment for focusing student attention on the sounds in spoken words.

The following is an example of a phonemics awareness lesson - I will refer back to this as an example of best practice when designing my intervention: 

In the graphic below it shows how manipulatives (like blocks or counters) are used to teach phonemic awareness. I was particularly interested by the way that the 'first sound' example uses only two blocks to segment off the 'first sound' in the words 'sat'. I would have previously used three counters for the three sounds in the words 'sat' and had the learners indicate that the first sound was /s/ by pointing to the first counter. I am curious to find out the 'why?' behind the two counters when segmenting off the first sound.

I found this statement interesting as it highlight where I am at in my journey with teaching phonological awareness. 

"Scripted programmes are great at the beginning BUT children who are at risk of reading problems will need an approach that is systematic and multimodal approach where each concept is taught for accuracy first and then practiced for automaticity."

For the past year, I have implemented the scripted phonological awareness programme 'Heggerty" with my learners. It has been great. It was so needed. I have seen growth in my learners phonological awareness. When I began using this programme, I didn't have the knowledge yet to teach phonological awareness without a scripted programme. It has supported me as a teacher to build my learners phonological awareness and build up my knowledge of teaching phonological awareness. BUT it makes total sense that our learners also need an approach to teaching phonological awareness that is is responsive to where they are at in their learning, that teaches until the learners can accurately achieve a phonological skill and then for automaticity. Unlike, within a scripted programme where the teacher works through the script without pacing the learning to the learners needs. I will be continuing on with 'Heggerty' as I believe it is a great tool for quick daily practice and for getting regularly coverage of all the phonological awareness skills. But I will be taking on board the recommendation to move away from just using a scripted programme when designing my intervention. 

I will definitely be going back and rereading this resource as I plan for my intervention as it is a wealth of knowledge!

If you're interested the Guide for Educators can be read here - Teaching Phonemic Awareness in 2022: A Guide for Educators - by Jane Ashby, Marion McBride, Shira Naftel, Lucy Hart Paulson, David Kilpatrick, Louisa Cook Moats