Phonemic Awareness

Manipulation of the Sounds of the Oral Language  Phonemic awareness has been exhaustively discussed in the last decade in relation to how children begin to read (Hempenstall, 2003). The International Reading Association defines phonemic awareness as “an understanding about the smallest units of sound that make up the speech stream . . . ” (1998, p. 3). However, when a student is already literate in Spanish, direct teaching of phonemic awareness in the reading of English may be a waste of precious time.

The sound system of the Spanish language may influence how students learn English as a new language in articulation, auditory discrimination, and in oral reading. Children may enter school with varying degrees of English-understanding/speaking proficiency as well as different levels of Spanish literacy development in that language (Freeman & Freeman, 1996).

Implications

The sound system of the Spanish language may influence how students learn English as a new language in articulation, auditory discrimination and in oral reading. Children may enter school with varying degrees of English-understanding/speaking proficiency as well as different levels of Spanish literacy development in that language (Freeman & Freeman, 1996).

Components of Phonemic Awareness

Recent literature has focused on “phonemic awareness” as an important element in learning to read. To have successful phonemic awareness, an English-speaking student is able to:

• hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes; for example: she sells seashells by the seashore
• do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration); for example: cat/sit/hat: Which does not rhyme? Which rhymes?
• blend and split sounds; for example, blending - say /c/ plus “at” equals “cat” or splitting - listen to “cat” say /c/ plus “at”
• perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of phonemes in a word); for example: listen to the word “dig” and separate it into the sounds /d/ /i/ /g/
• perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder). For example: “cat” minus “c” add “h” equals “hat” or “tan” minus “n” plus “p” equals “tap”