A Work on Phonological & Phonetic & Phonemic Awareness of Children

          Q. The importance of phonological awareness skills in supporting emergent literacy

          To discuss the importance of phonological awareness skills in supporting emergent literacy, at first I want to try to explain what is phonological awareness and then what is emergent literacy. Because I am not qualified enough about “language development”, I think, I should prefer not only to make some comments due to my knowledge and poor life experience but also to use some articles as being references while describing what they are.

          Firstly, if I am to start with phonological awareness, it is an awareness of sound features in spoken language and it involves rhyme recognition, syllables, onset, and rime. Phonological awareness skills are distinguished by the task which is performed and by the size of the unit of sound that is the focus of the task. Examples of different phonological awareness skills that are distinguished by the type of task performed include blending sounds together, separating (segmenting) words into their constituent sounds, recombining sounds of words, and judging whether two words have some sounds in common (Anthony & Francis, 2005). According to McGuiness (1998), phonological awareness is the awareness that words are made up of smaller units. Also, according to Virginia Department of Education (1998), types of phonological awareness include: phonemic awareness, syllable awareness, word awareness, and sentence awareness.
          Secondly, emergent literacy refers to "the reading and writing behaviors that precede and develop into conventional literacy," notes Sulzby (1989). Sulzby and Teale (1996, p. 728) state, "Emergent literacy is concerned with the earliest phases of literacy development, the period between birth and the time when children read and write conventionally. The term emergent literacy signals a belief that, in a literate society, young children--even 1- and 2-year-olds--are in the process of becoming literate."
          Thirdly, I will try to explain why of phonological awareness skills important for emergent literacy. If I make a brainstorm about this relationship, I can say that developing phonemic awareness in young children helps build a more meaningful connection between oral and written language as they begin to learn to read. That’s to say, phonological awareness is important for learning how to read. It teaches children to recognize sameness, difference, number, and order of speech sounds (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998). It makes spelling-sound correspondences more learnable when they are taught (Adams et al., 1998). When children develop their phonological awareness, they are able to think about how words sound, apart from what the words mean. For example, they appreciate that the word “kitchen” has two spoken parts (syllables), that the word “bed” rhymes with “bread,” and that the words “cat” and “king” begin with the same sound (Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999). Before a child learns how to decode and encode written language, she/he must first be able to hear and manipulate individual sounds within words. This ability is as called phonemic or phonological awareness (not phonetic awareness). It develops over time as children’s oral language becomes more sophisticated, their vocabularies expand, and they become more skilled at auditory discrimination.
          To sum up, phonological awareness plays an important role in literacy acquisition. Also, phonological awareness may have significant implications for diagnosing educationally relevant cognitive and achievement weaknesses, early intervention aimed at preventing some problems such as dyslexia. In other words, phonological awareness may be a developmentally appropriate intervention to young children at risk for reading problems before they actually struggle with learning to read.

          Q. Distinguish between phonological awareness and phonetic awareness

          ‎There is a distinction between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Thanks to my readings I understood that these two terms are often used interchangeably. For the most part both are used to refer to what is technically phonological awareness. The more common term, which is used to include both these skills, is phonemic awareness. In most literature on my article readings I saw “phonemic awareness” used. After my readings, I knew when I saw this term usually the writer is actually referring to “phonological awareness”. So, I realized that phonetic awareness and phonemic awareness are not same.
          According to my readings, I understood that both phonological awareness and phonemic awareness focus on the SOUND elements of spoken words. However, whereas phonological awareness includes broad term, and it identifies and manipulates larger parts of spoken language => alliteration, rhyme, words, and syllables; phonemic awareness is narrower, subcategory of phonological awareness; and it identifies and manipulates individual sounds of spoken words.
          As I learned before from my pred 214 lectures notes, phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that holds meaning. Almost all words are made up of a number of phonemes blended together. If I consider the word “ball”: this is made up of three phonemes /b/ /aw/ /l/. Each of its sounds affects the meaning. If I take away the /b/ sound and replace it with /w/ and I have an entirely different word. If I change the /aw/ for an /e/ sound and again the meaning changes.
          To sum up, phonemic awareness is just one aspect of phonological awareness. While phonological awareness encompasses a child’s ability to recognize the many ways sounds function in words, phonemic awareness is only her understanding of the minutest sound units in words.

          Q. An example of an activity for enhancing each type of awareness
          Everything should be playful, engaging, interactive, social, deliberate, and purposeful, stimulate curiosity, and encourage experimentation with language and comprehensive language and literacy programs (Yopp & Yopp, 2000).


          First: Phonological Awareness Activity
          Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear (Adams et al., 1998). 
          This activity promotes the identification of words that have identical final sounds:

(do the actions with the words)
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Turn around.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Touch the ground.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Show your shoe.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
That will do.

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear
Go Upstairs.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear
Say your prayers.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Turn out the light.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Say good night!

          Second: Phonemic Awareness Activity
          Rhyming Words Activities
          Children identify words that rhyme in a series of activities. For example, "Put your thumbs up if these two words rhyme--pail-tail or cow-pig?" or "Finish this rhyme, red, bed, blue, ______."
          1. Snap and Clap Rhymes
          2. Begin with a simple clap and snap rhythm.
          3. Get more complex as children move along in rhyming.

Clap  Clap	Snap  fall	Clap  Clap	Snap  ball
Clap  Clap	Snap  hall	Clap  Clap	Snap  small

          4. A variation is the "I say, You say" game:

I say fat.

You say _____.

I say red.

You say _____.

          5. Rhyming Word Sit Down
          6. Children walk around in a big circle taking one step each time a rhyming word is said by the teacher.
          7. When the teacher says a word that doesn't rhyme, the children sit down:

she

tree

flea

spree

key

bee

sea

went

          8. Rhyming words in songs, poems, and big books
          9. As you do shared reading with the students, pause at the end of phrases and let the students supply the rhyming words.
          10. After you have read the poem together ask students to find the rhyming words.
          11. Generate other words that rhyme with these rhyming words.
          12. Silly Rhymes Big Book
          13. Use rimes (roots of word families) and rhyme charts around the classroom to create silly poems with the class.
          14. Write the one line rhyme with the whole class in big letters on large chart paper (Shared Writing).
          15. Read aloud several times.
          16. Use different voices. Have children sound and clap words.
          17. Have a child illustrate the rhyme.           18. Repeat each week for another set of rimes.


Retrieved from:http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/patti/k1/activities/rhyming.html         

          Third: Phonetic Awareness Activity
          Beginnig & Ending Sounds
          Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Word
          Tell your child you are going to teach them a song that will help them discover new words by taking off parts (sounds) of the word. Teach this song and let them fill in the last word. After a few verses using new words, invite the children to sing along. Other possible words to use include: 
          Beginning Sounds: boat (oat), farm (arm), meat (eat), bus (us), sled (lead), hand (and), & sit (it). 
           Ending Sounds: hammer (ham), soap (so), little (lit), meat (me), & boat (bow).

Retrieved from:http://www.readingresource.net/phonemicawarenessactivities.html

          Q. Why a child’s use of invented spelling is important for emergent literacy actions?

          What is “invented spelling? Invented spelling refers to young children's attempts to use their best judgments about spelling (Lutz, 1986).  It is the practice of allowing or encouraging beginning readers to write any way they want. The idea is that the act of writing, for the beginner, is more important than correctness of form (correct spelling). Eventually, the student will learn and use the correct form. Phonological awareness probably plays a central role in invented spelling (McBride-Chang, 1998).  There are some benefits of inventive spelling. It encourages learners to produce their own creative writing patterns and to write and experiment with letters and shapes without being expected to follow the rules.

          Adams (1990) notes that encouraging beginner readers to use inventive spelling benefits them more in spelling and word recognition than does encouraging the use of conventional spelling.

          Some of the examples for invented spelling: "iz" for "is", "flawrs" for "flowers", "prpul" for "purple", "culrs" for "colors", "difrint" for "different". Interestingly I realized that even us as adults may do invented spelling.

          Q. A writing sample of a preschooler and analyze the characteristics of the writing sample

           This child has begun to cluster letters together to make word forms. These words do not look like or sound like “real” words. This is an interesting sample. My initial reaction to this piece of writing was - it’s a string of letters. However, when I asked the child to read it to me I could easily read what the student had written. And even though I had identified where to start writing from by a dot in the corner of the page for this student, the child still started on the other side. This is not unusual and is a teaching point for this child. The sentence the child wrote is: I went to the football with my own ball. I liked to (omission) to football. It’s actually an excellent piece of writing by the child. Cementing the use of lower case and upper case letters will be addressed many times as will full stops.

References

               Adams, J. M., Foorman, R. B., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic awareness in young children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

               Adams, Marilyn Jager. 1990.Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Reading Research and Education Center. 148 pages. 0262011123. Location: Dallas SIL Library 372.4 A215. Interest level: general.

               Burns, M. S., Griffin, P., & Snow, E. C. (1999). Starting out right: A guide to promoting children’s reading success. Washington: National Academy.
          

               Development of Phonological AwarenessAuthor(s): Jason L. Anthony and David J. FrancisSource: Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Oct., 2005), pp. 255-259

               Lutz, E. (1986). Invented Spelling and Spelling Development. ERIC Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills.

               McBride-Chang, Catherine(1998) 'The Development of Invented Spelling', Early Education & Development, 9: 2, 147 — 160

               McGuiness, C., & McGuiness, G. (1998). Reading reflex: The foolproof phono-graphix method for teaching your child to read.  New York: Simon & Schuster.

               Sulzby, E., & Teale, W. (1996). Emergent literacy. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 2, pp. 727-757). Mahway, NH: Lawrence Erlbaum.

               Teale, W., & Sulzby, E. (1986). Emergent literacy: Writing and reading. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

               Yopp, H. K., & Yopp, R. H. (2000). Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom. Reading Teacher, 54, 130 - 143.