Phonological Awareness http://www.fcrr.org/assessment/ET/essentials/components/pa.

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Phonological awareness involves the understanding that spoken language can be broken into smaller units: sentences into words, words into syllables, syllables into phonemes. Phonological awareness is a broad term that encompasses oral language skills in rhyming, alliteration, sentence segmentation, syllable blending and segmenting, onset-rime blending and segmenting, and phoneme blending and segmenting. Instruction in phonological awareness provides the foundational skills for understanding the relationship between letters and phonemes.

In typical schools, approximately 10-15 minutes per day should be dedicated to the development of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten. Schools that serve high proportions of students at risk for reading problems, because of poverty or lack of experience with the English language, may need to spend more time stimulating the development of phonemic awareness in order to ensure that all students make adequate progress in this area. Strong phonological awareness instruction incorporates explicit instruction, teacher modeling, guided practice, and independent practice of the skill. Phonological awareness skills progress from simple to complex by the difficulty level of the skill. At the highest, or most difficult, level of phonological awareness, which is referred to as phonemic awareness, students demonstrate the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in words. While students are working toward mastery of less complex levels, they may begin to show beginning levels of skill on more complex levels. Phonological Awareness Continuum As was explained above, phonological awareness exists on a continuum from simple to complex. This continuum has been illustrated below through examples of tasks that require different levels of phonological awareness.

Word Awareness

Clapping the number of words in simple sentences Using a block to represent each word in a sentence Clapping compound words

Syllable Awareness

(2 syllables) can + dee = candy / candy = can and dee (3 syllables) ham + bur + ger = hamburger / hamburger = ham, bur and ger

Within-Syllable Awareness

Rhyme production
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great ______. What word rhymes with wall?

Onset-rime blending
What word does /m/ /ad/ make? (mad)

Phoneme Awareness

Phoneme Comparison
Initial: Which two words begin with the same sound? pup, fall, fun (fall and fun) What is the first sound in man? (/m/) Final: Which two words end in the same sound? hop, tap, dog (hop and top) What is the last sound in man? (/n/)

Phoneme deletion
Intial: Say "cat" without the /c/: (at) Final: Say "fleet" without the /t/: (flee)

Phoneme segmentation
What sounds do you hear in drab? (/d/ /r/ /a/ /b/ 4 sounds); in foot? (/f/ /oo/ /t/ 3 sounds); in shoe? (/sh/ /oe/ 2 sounds)

Phoneme blending
What word does /b/ /i/ /t/ make? (bit) or What word am I trying to say? /b/ /i/ /t/ (bit)