phonemic awareness in the Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties

This is my second post on this book. At a third of the way through, there will be more.

David Kilpatrick's Book, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, describes phonemic awareness as the most common root of reading problems. The idea that phonemic awareness has been critical to reading has been around since the 1980s, at least. Race to the Top funds required reading instruction to include this component. Many common assessment tools (ex. DIBELS and AIMSweb) include this area in assessing kindergarten and first grade students. Phonemic awareness skills, however, continue to develop in "normal" readers until the fourth grade.

What are phonemic awareness skills?

There are three main levels of these skills: early, basic and advanced.

Early- preschool to early kindergarten in typical students. Rhyming, alliteration, syllabication and identification of initial sounds. When my children were young, we read lots of Dr. Seuss and nursery rhymes and talked about words like rhyme and alliteration, and played word games with both. These activities are critical.

Basic- kindergarten and first grade. Phonemic blending and segmentation. We have kids put together /b/, /a/, /t/ to get bat, reverse the skill or ask them to sound out or stretch out words.

Advanced- end of first grade to fourth. Phonemic manipulation: delete a sound, substitute a sound or reverse sounds. My son had this young as a splinter skill. He sang "The Wheels on the Bus" with a twist. He would change the initial sound of each word to be the same letter. We had "Bo beels bon bo bus," "Mo meels mon mo mus," "Toe teels ton toe tus" and more. (Try this; it is really hard to do for the whole song.) He would sing in perfect rhythm. He could be asked to switch to another sound and off he would go.

If students fail to develop all these skills they will never become proficient readers. Advanced phonemic awareness is necessary for orthographic mapping- the mental process used to store words for efficient retrieval. Orthographic mapping allows people to have good sight word vocabularies. It can be measured by timed word identification skills. The student I briefly worked with who sounded out nearly every word could read, but it was laborious. He was not fluent and it interfered with his comprehension. If students are struggling with sight words, it may be important to go back to early or basic phonemic awareness development and press forward from there. Students need these early foundations to peg sight words with. Apparently it takes four exposures for a "typical" reader to develop a sight word if they have good phonemic awareness. As a result, reading is key to developing a robust sight word vocabulary. Older students who do not have the ability to do this indicate they may be lacking in phonemic awareness.

I look forward to continuing to read to see what suggestions are proposed for addressing this area.