Article 1:
Phonemic Awareness
Every time you chant along to a favorite children's rhyme or read aloud from a book like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss, you are helping children develop phonemic awareness. Notice the rhyme in this excerpt:
Hop! Hop! Hop!
I am a Yop.
All I like to do is hop
from finger top
to finger top.
I hop from left to right
and then…
Hop! Hop!
I hop right back again.
What it means
When children identify that the words hop, Yop, and top rhyme, they are developing phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to understand and hear that a word is made up of a series of discrete sounds or phonemes. For example, the word did is made up of three phonemes (/d/ /i/ /d/). This skill allows children to take words apart, put them together, and alter them. Research indicates that phonemic awareness is a strong predictor of early success in reading (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
Marilyn Jager Adams outlines five basic types of phonemic awareness tasks tutors can perform with children (Adams, 1990).
1. Rhyme and Alliteration
2. Oddity Tasks
3. Blending Words and Splitting Syllables
4. Orally Segmenting Words
5. Phonemic Manipulation Tasks
What to look for
As you talk with, read to, and play word games with children, notice behaviors that indicate development of phonemic awareness. Children show progress with this skill when they can:
For a complete overview of children's development in this and other skill areas discussed in this article, refer to the LEARNS Literacy Assessment Profile (LLAP).
How to support learning
Practicing phonemic awareness can be fun and inventive and helps improve reading ability for young children at risk for reading difficulties (Brady, Fowler, Stone, & Winbury, 1994). Children enjoy language and word games. As you work with children, let them make up nonsense or silly words; while the word gog may not be a real word, it does rhyme with dog. Here are a few activities to get you started:
1. Rhyme Time
2. Round Robin Rhymes
3. Silly Riddles
For more information, see the LEARNS website for this article and bibliographical references at www.nwrel.org/learns/feature/index.html.
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