Introduction
When today’s educators discuss the ingredients of effective programs to teach children to read, phonemic awareness (PA) receives much attention. However, not everyone is convinced. In education, particularly in the
teaching of reading over the years, the choice of instructional methods has been heavily influenced by many factors, not only teachers’ own frontline experiences about what works, but also politics, economics, and the popular wisdom of the day. The pendulum has swung back and forth between holistic,meaning-centered approaches and phonics approaches without much hope of resolving disagreements.
Meanwhile, substantial scientific evidence has accumulated purporting to shed light on reading acquisition processes and effective instructionalapproaches (Anderson et al., 1985; Adams, 1990; Snow, 1998). Many studies investigating the effectiveness of phonemic awareness instruction have contributed to this body of evidence. Proponents believe that this research holds promise of placing reading instruction on a more solid footing and ending the periodic upheavals and overhauls of reading instructional practices.
The purpose of this report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was to examine the scientific evidence relevant to the impact of phonemic awareness instruction on reading and spelling development. In the analyses conducted, the NRP sought answers to questions such as the following: Is phonemic awareness instruction effective in helping children learn to read?
Under what circumstances and for which children is it most effective? Were studies showing its effectiveness designed appropriately to yield scientifically valid findings? What does a careful analysis of the findings reveal? How applicable are these findings to classroom practice? To evaluate the adequacy and strength of the evidence, the NRP conducted a meta-analysis. The literature was searched to locate all experimental studies that included a PA treatment and a control group and that measured reading as an outcome of the treatment.
There were several reasons why phonemic awareness instruction was selected for review and analysis. Correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge as the two best school entry predictors of how well children will learn to read during their first 2 years in school. This evidence suggests the potential instructional importance of teaching PA to children. Many experimental studies have evaluated the effectiveness of PA instruction in facilitating reading acquisition. Results are claimed to be positive and to provide a scientific basis documenting the efficacy of PA instruction. There is currently much interest in PA programs among teachers, principals, andpublishers. State adoption committees have prescribedthe inclusion of PA training in reading instruction materials approved for use in schools. It is thus important to determine whether PA instruction lives up to these claims and, if so, to identify circumstances that govern its effectiveness.
Phonemes are the smallest units constituting spoken language. English consists of about 41 phonemes. Phonemes combine to form syllables and words. A few words have only one phoneme, such as a or oh. Most words consist of a blend of phonemes, such as go with two phonemes, or check with three phonemes, or stop with four phonemes. Phonemes are different from graphemes, which are units of written language and which represent phonemes in the spellings of words. Graphemes may consist of one letter, for example, P, T, K, A, N, or multiple letters, CH, SH, TH, -CK, EA, -IGH, each symbolizing one phoneme.
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words. The following tasks are commonly used to assess children’s PA or to improve their PA through instruction and practice:
Phonemic Awareness Instruction
1. Phoneme isolation, which requires recognizing individual sounds in words, for example, “Tell me the first sound in paste.” (/p/)
2. Phoneme identity, which requires recognizing the common sound in different words. For example, “Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy, and bell.” (/b/)
3. Phoneme categorization, which requires recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words, for example, “Which word does not belong? bus, bun, rug.” (rug)
4. Phoneme blending, which requires listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word. For
example, “What word is /s/ /k/ /u/ /1/?” (school)
5. Phoneme segmentation, which requires breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound. For example, “How many phonemes are there in ship? ” (three: /š/ /I/ /p/)
6. Phoneme deletion, which requires recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed. For example, “What is smile without the /
s/?” (mile)
In the studies reviewed by the NRP, researchers used one or several of these tasks to assess how much PA children possessed before training and how much they had learned at the end of training. Also, these tasks were the basis for activities that children practiced during training. In some of the studies, children were taught to perform these tasks with letters, for example,
segmenting words into phonemes and representing each with a grapheme. In other studies, phoneme manipulation was limited to speech.
To be clear, PA instruction is not synonymous with phonics instruction that entails teaching students how to use grapheme-phoneme correspondences to decode or spell words. PA instruction does not qualify as phonics instruction when it teaches children to manipulate phonemes in speech, but it does qualify when it teaches children to segment or blend phonemes with letters.
PA is thought to contribute to helping children learn to read because the structure of the English writing system is alphabetic. Moreover, it is not easy to figure out the system. Although most English words have prescribed spellings that consist of graphemes, symbolizing phonemes in predictable ways, being able to distinguish the separate phonemes in pronunciations of
words so that they can be matched to graphemes is difficult. This is because spoken language is seamless; that is, there are no breaks in speech signaling where one phoneme ends and the next one begins. Rather, phonemes are folded into each other and are coarticulated. Discovering phonemic units requires instruction to learn how the system works.
I was confused before. This is beyond me.