Sound Practice

Phonological Awareness in the Classroom

Lyn Layton, Karen Deeny

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136631689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The second edition of Sound Practice looks afresh at how young children can be helped to discover basic facts about an alphabetic spelling system, within the context of their developing spoken language. It examines why children might fail to understand letter-sound links; the origins of severe and persistent difficulties with achieving functional literacy skills; and developmental processes underpinning the areas of learning identified in national initiatives for promoting children's learning. The book also discusses the need for differentiation strategies to respond to individual children's learning needs within national initiatives, and techniques and approaches that can be effectively applied to fulfil curriculum objectives.

Phonological awareness is the key to independent literacy and must be explicitly tackled in the classroom in order to promote early reading and writing and to address written language difficulties in older children. This book is a suitable resource for initial and in-service training for teachers and teaching assistants and includes photocopiable worksheets.

Chapter 1
Segmenting Words: The Rhyme and the Reason

This chapter provides a framework for the rest of the book by addressing a series of questions concerning the nature and origins of phonological awareness, and its links with spoken language. Phonological awareness has a firmly established role in written language use. We describe and illustrate this role, explaining key concepts and terms. In considering important concepts we identify issues relating to the teaching of reading which will be explored more fully in later chapters.

What exactly is phonological awareness?

Young children become aware of the sounds in the words they hear and say as they acquire spoken language. At an early stage the child's knowledge about these sounds and the patterns and characteristics which link them is implicit. That is, understanding and producing the sounds that make up the stream of speech does not require conscious effort. We can draw a parallel with the way that a child may learn to hop or to climb without being consciously or explicitly aware of all the physical and perceptual processes involved in these activities.

The earliest indications that children are reflecting on their own speech are heard in their word-play as in this example from a 3-year-old:

‘Shirley Hughes? [children's author]… Curly Shoes!’

This child has juggled the sounds within the words even though her awareness of the structure of the phrases and of the words within them exists only at an implicit level.

As children mature and extend their familiarity with spoken language they become more aware of the similarities and differences between words and sounds. Their experiences with word games and nursery rhymes encourage them to reflect more deliberately on words so that they might be able, for example, to tell us that two words rhyme or ‘sound the same’. These first demonstrations of explicit phonological awareness are usually evident well before children start to learn about ‘written down’ letters. Children delight in their early discovery of the similarities in sounds and this leads to a pleasurable repetition of the activity, so reinforcing the tendency to reflect on the intrinsic value of the speech sounds themselves, aside from their role in conveying sense and meaning.

Phonological awareness refers specifically to the child's realisation that the connected speech sounds that make up spoken language can be broken down into smaller segments, and that these segments can be manipulated. This sounds like a very formidable task for a child but, as we have seen, it is readily observed in the way that even pre-school children enjoy playing with whole words and speech-sounds. Adults notice word-play and smile, but they rarely recognise its significance.

Early word-play demonstrates phonological awareness

The sorts of variations that children introduce as they chant nursery rhymes are familiar to us all. For example:

Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the sock

By manipulating rhymes in this way, rather than reciting learnt rhymes, children show that they understand that language can be segmented. They have begun to realise that continuous speech can be broken down into the segments we know as words. They can also break into the sound-structure of the words themselves:

Eeny meeny miney moe
Eeny teeny tiney toe
Eeny weeny winey woe

Quite spontaneously this child has demonstrated a realisation that even smaller segments within words can be separated and manipulated; sounds can be deleted and others substituted.

All these games and the skills which underpin children's ability to carry them out arise from their experience of spoken language. Most young children can use these experiences, together with the knowledge gained from them, to reflect purposefully on the ways in which words can be divided.

Levels of phonological awareness

Mature users of spoken and written language demonstrate awareness of the sound structure of spoken language in a number of ways and at different levels. For example, many jokes, particularly puns, are the outcome of operating on the segments in words.

Teacher: Give me a sentence, using the word, ‘judicious’
Pupil: Hands that/judicious/ [do dishes] can be soft as your face

But phonological awareness starts to emerge before children encounter print.

The diagram below summarises some of the ways of segmenting English words, and indicates how easy or difficult it is for a non-reader to gain access to these segments.

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Segments of spoken words

SYLLABLES: bis/cuit tel/e/phone pic/nic Thom/as

syllables are very easily detected by most non-readers

ONSETS AND RIMES: b/ike fr/idge spr/ing

many non-readers are aware of the onset-rime division

PHONEMES: /c/.../a/.../p/;/s/.../o/.../k/;/b/.../r/.../u/.../sh/

most non-readers cannot divide words into single phonemes

Syllables are the easiest segments in speech to detect. So, young children who have not yet encountered print can indicate the syllabic structure of words by nodding and beating out the rhythm of words. Interesting findings from studies of people who do not have a written language confirm that they also find syllable tasks relatively easy (Alegria and Morais, 1991).

Similarly, non-readers spontaneously segment syllables into onset (any consonant sounds which precede the vowel) and rime — the portion that includes the vowel sound and any consonants following it. Linguists have noted this tendency in native speakers making errors which are known as spoonerisms. The linguists assert that errors arise when speakers transpose intact onsets onto intact rimes, thus:

‘Buy me some flandy coss!’

and not:

‘Buy me some fandycloss/flondycass’.

They regard this as evidence that the junction between onset and rime has special significance for both speakers and listeners. The following examples show how words divide quite naturally into onset and rime.

Onsets and rimes

Onsets	Rimes
p............................aw
p............................ort
sp..........................ort
sh..........................ort
sh..........................ore
str..........................aw
.............................or
.............................ought

Remember, we are concerned here with the sounds of syllables, not with their spellings.

We do not have to be literate to be aware that syllables divide in these ways because the syllabic divisions are created by peaks of acoustic energy which accompany vowel sounds in the speech stream. So syllabic and onset-rime divisions of the speech-stream are features of spoken language, and we register where these divisions are as part of the skill of understanding and producing speech, even though we are probably not directly aware that we have this knowledge. Unlike the syllable, however, individual phonemes cannot be acoustically isolated. That is, what appear to readers of alphabetic scripts as the smallest separate sounds in words cannot actually be separated without distortion. Try the following activity for yourself.

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Split the word ‘house’ into its separate phonemes. You should get three sounds which we will represent here by/h/.../ou/.../s/.

Now, put the three sounds back together again. You will find that you produce a poor approximation to the original word.

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It seems that phoneme-by-phoneme segmentation, where individual speech sounds are marked out as separate items, is a difficult task and yet it is one that beginning reader/spellers might be asked to try before anyone knows whether or not they can perform the easier tasks that illustrate pre-reading phonological awareness.

Early on, many researchers, for example, Lynette Bradley and Peter Bryant (1985) in the UK, investigated the impact of phonological awareness on a child's developing literacy skills. More recently, research has focused on how children can be helped to link sound and spelling patters (for example, see Hatcher, 1994). As we will describe in Chapter 3, Goswami (1995) has shown how children can then use this knowledge to help them to make analogies between words or parts of words which are familiar and words which are new to them. Information about the findings of this research has enormous practical implications for the ways in which early reading and spelling skills are taught. We must not assume, however, that these researchers have discovered a ‘new way for children to learn to read and spell’. Rather the research is discovering how children usually learn to read and to spell and is showing us more clearly the strategies which most children use. Our challenge, then, is to translate the knowledge about the process of learning to read and spell into strategies and programmes which will make the whole process easier and more

An awareness that spoken language can be broken into segments is obligatory if individuals are going to read and spell effectively. Research evidence only supports and explains what numerous teachers of pupils with literacy difficulties have been noticing for years.

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comprehensive for all children. Strategies based on our knowledge of what all effective, independent readers and spellers need to do will also equip us better for working with children who find the tasks more difficult than most.

It is fundamentally important, in the context of what this book sets out to achieve, to recognise that the terms ‘phonological’ and ‘phonics’ do not mean the same thing.

What is the difference between phonological awareness and phonics?

Phonology refers to a system of speech sounds. English, for example, uses only a small sample of the range of speech sounds which it is physically possible to produce. Native speakers of any language become implicitly aware of the sample of speech sounds which make up the system for their own language, and how they are combined and manipulated in meaningful speech. By the same token, ‘foreign’ or non-native wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Segmenting Words: The Rhyme and the Reason
• 2 Rhyme Awareness: A Pre-reading Skill
• 3 Poor Rhyming Skills in Young Children
• 4 Sound Patterns and Spelling Patterns
• 5 Early Reading and Spelling Problems: The Phonological Aspects
• 6 Persistent Problems and Useful Strategies
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Index