Phonemic Awareness

The purpose of this article was to present a tool that can be used for assessing a student’s phonemic awareness and how to administer it. The article also presented strategies for improving a child’s phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is being aware that speech consists of a series of sounds. It is the best predictor of reading acquisition and spelling. It’s even better than an IQ test. Children lacking phonemic awareness will be unable to master print without proper intervention. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation requires students to separate sounds of spoken words in the correct order. A teacher models how to segment the word “old,” and then the student and teacher together segment the words: ride, go, and man. The teacher verbally prompts the student with 22 words for the child to segment. The teacher records accuracy. There isn’t currently any research for the effectiveness of this test for ELL students.

There were a few activities presented in the article to strengthen phonemic awareness skills. Read-aloud books that have rhyme and alliteration can be used. Teachers can prompt their question answers with phonemes. For example, one day last week when my class was learning about the moon, I asked which phase of the moon only shows a tiny sliver. Students were having trouble with the answer so I said /cr/ and students got crescent. Songs can also be used repetitively even if students are making up nonsense lyrics. Elkonin boxes can be used where a student slides a chip across the segments to the right in each box as they say them. Eventually, the student would write the segments in the boxes.

I used Elkonin boxes when I student taught first grade with my lower readers. I was just thinking about my two lowest guided reading groups, and I would be curious to see how well they could segment phonemes on this test. They read on a first grade level, but are in third grade. They thrive off books that rhyme. Many of their books are also still repetitive. If they aren’t successful, I would consider doing Elkonin boxes with them. Right now, we focus a lot on word patterns and chunks.