The importance of phoneme awareness in beginning reading instruction is by now quite well-established. “Phoneme Awareness,” often abbreviated PA, refers to the ability of an individual to perceive the phonemes embedded in words. Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech sound that make a difference in the meaning of words, such as the sounds /b/, /t/, and /a/. English has over 40 phonemes (there is debate about the exact number). Our writing system is to a very large extent a symbolic representation of phonemes. Thus, the word “cat” has three letters because the spoken word has three phonemes, /k/ /a/ /t/. The /k/ sound is represented by the letter “c,” the /a/ sound by the letter “a,” and the /t/ sound by the letter “t.”
The “awareness” in “phoneme awareness,” refers to an individual’s ability to identify and manipulate these speech sounds. This ability can be manifested in any task that requires an individual to take apart or put together the sounds of a word. These tasks include:
recognizing rhyme (“Do ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ rhyme?”)
producing rhyme (“Tell me a word that rhymes with ‘cat.’”)
onset-rime blending (“Say /k/ /at/. What word do those sounds make?”)
identifying the first or last sound of a word (“What’s the first sound of ‘cat?’”)
blending isolated phonemes (“Say /k/ /a/ /t/. What word do those sounds make?”)
segmenting a word into isolated phonemes (“Tell me the sounds of ‘cat.’”)
There is a very strong correlation between a student’s PA skill at the start of kindergarten and his reading ability at the end of second grade. That is, students with high PA typically have high reading achievement and those with low PA have low reading achievement. We know also that teaching PA improves student reading performance. Logically, it is not at all surprising that PA might be helpful when learning how to read, since it gives the student access to much (though certainly not all) of the logic behind why a particular group of letters is used to represent a particular word.
While there are many kinds of performance that indicate the existence of PA, only two PA skills are directly related to reading and spelling: phoneme segmenting and phoneme blending.
Phoneme blending helps not only with sounding-out unfamiliar words, but it probably also helps makes it easier to learn to recognize words automatically without overtly sounding them out.
Phoneme segmenting helps students understand the logic of our spelling system (i.e., that letters represent sounds) as well as helps students with spelling. In addition, like phoneme blending, it might also help make it easier to develop the robust memory trace involved in recognizing known words automatically.
While these two skills are generally considered the most germane to beginning reading, they are also generally considered the hardest of the typical PA tasks.
This leads to an interesting and extremely important question. Given this hierarchy of PA skills, what is the most efficient way to develop skills at phoneme blending and segmenting. Is it most efficient in the long run to postpone addressing blending and segmenting until a student can perform some of these easier PA skills well, or can one start developing blending and segmenting skills from the very outset of instruction, even with young students who have very weak PA?
For preschool students, who are too young for formal reading instruction, PA activities clearly should focus on the simpler forms of phoneme awareness that can be stimulated by such activities as reciting poems and singing songs that have lots of rhyme and other language play. This approach is suitable for these very young children because the goal of pre-school should not be to teach children how to read, but to provide them with a variety of language experiences that will help them succeed in school.
The question about the right kind of PA activities for for kindergarten and first grade students, however, is not so obvious. If one surveys kindergarten and first grade reading curricula, it is clear that the conventional wisdom is that students need to develop the easier PA skills before tackling blending and segmenting. For instance, the Florida Center for Reading Research suggests that some students “may require segmenting and blending at the syllable level followed by onset and rime blending” (www.fcrr.org/assessment). The National Reading Panel Report of 2000 makes a very similar statement:
Among readers in 1st and 2nd grades, there may be variation in how well children can perform more advanced forms of PA, that is, manipulations involving segmenting and blending with letters. The best approach is for teachers to assess students’ PA before beginning PA instruction. This will indicate which children need the instruction and
which do not, which children need to be taught rudimentary levels of PA (e.g., segmenting initial sounds in words), and which children need more advanced levels involving segmenting or blending with letters. (NRP Report, p. 2-6).
My own experience, however, tells me that this conventional wisdom is wrong.
Carmen McGuinness has shown in Phono-Graphix, first of all, that it is quite possible to embed phoneme blending and phoneme segmenting within beginning reading and spelling activities rather than as a separate component. ABeCeDarian utilizes this very same embedding of phoneme segmenting and blending within every activity at the start of the program and, also like Phono-Graphix, eschews other types of PA activities. How is it possible for students with very poor PA to succeed in these lessons? The key is a lively and focused set of routines that have students saying the isolated sounds of all the words they are learning over and over and over, always in connection with the whole word. This dynamic repetition helps students recognize quickly how whole words are comprised of isolated speech sounds.
How do students do with such accelerated PA instruction? Amazingly well! ABeCeDarian’s multi-year project with low-performing kindergarten students in Delaware (www.abcdrp.com/support.asp) showed repeatedly that using this approach to teaching PA, groups of students who started the year a standard deviation below average in PA skills developed average PA skills by the end of the year.
The success of young students who use Phono-Graphix or ABeCeDarian suggests that phoneme blending and segmenting can be stimulated and developed in kindergarten and first greade students with very poor PA by providing the right kind of focus, explicitness, and practice, without spending times on easier PA activities, and that this sort of instruction is best able to improve the students’ reading skill. The implications for developing the most efficient reading instruction are quite profound.
The more general point beyond the relatively narrow matter of PA is that there are powerful efficiencies in instruction that careful curriculum design can achieve, and that seemingly small and nuanced differences in how material is presented can produce big differences in how quickly and easily students will learn.
In my next post, I will describe in some detail the way that ABCD teaches students how to blend isolated phonemes into words. Although none of the individual steps is original by any means, the way the steps are organized and sequenced is unique, and provides teachers with what I believe is the easiest and fastest way to teach phoneme blending they will ever find.
