Early Reading Skills

Early Reading Skills: Teaching Phonemic Awareness Brandy Clarke CBC 2002

The Need for Early Reading Interventions
Poor reading ability correlates with long-term negative outcomes.
Reading is the cornerstone of academic success.
Students with poor reading skills in the beginning are likely to have poor skills in the future.

Learning in Steps
Research has demonstrated a need for children to learn to recognize words with speed and accuracy to read with fluency and comprehension.
Progression of learning:
Understanding the concept of words
Alphabetic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
Word Recognition
Fluency
Comprehension

What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is an understanding that speech is composed of individual sounds.
It is part of the hierarchy of reading skills developed in early reading.
It is not a unitary skill, but is comprised of various components.

Five levels of Phonemic Awareness (Adams,1990).
Appreciation of sound in spoken language (recitation of nursery rhymes).
Ability to compare and contrast sounds in words by grouping words with similar or dissimilar sounds (beginning, middle, and end of words).
Ability to blend and split syllables.
Phonemic segmentation or the ability to isolate individual sounds in syllables.
Ability to manipulate phonemes by omitting and deleting phonemes to make new words.

Why is it important?
It is necessary in learning to read and spell the English language because English is alphabetic.
Sounds correlate with letters to make words.
Research has demonstrated a strong link between phonemic awareness and beginning reading.

Why Phonemic Awareness over Whole-language?
The Whole-language approach
Focuses on teaching reading by immersing students in literature while providing minimal direct skill instruction.
Provides students with ample opportunities to read and write and provides guidance as needed.
Students learn to read through whole-word recognition which creates a guessing game when presented with new words.
Students taught with phonics instruction read 54% of new words correctly, students with whole-language read 3%.
However, balance is necessary.

What skills are taught?
Early Reading Skills (Good III, Simmons & Smith, 1998)
Area 1: Phonological Awareness
Awareness of correlation of sounds to words
Area 2: Alphabetic Understanding
Link between a letter and a sound
Area 3: Phonological Recoding
Use of relationship between phonemes and letters to recognize printed words, then read and spell them
Area 4: Accuracy and Fluency with Connected Text
Comprehending what is read

How to assess skills
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), University of Oregon
Dynamic: continuing evaluation of skills
Indicators: representative and correlated with important skill areas
Predictive: future reading performance
Functional: related to reading aquisition

DIBELS Assessments:
Target age range: Preschool – Second grade
Onset Recognition Fluency
Late preschool through winter of kindergarten
Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low phonological awareness
Letter Naming Fluency
Fall of kindergarten through fall of first grade
Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low skills in letter naming

DIBELS Assessments cont.:
Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
Winter of kindergarten through fall of first grade
Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low phonological awareness
Nonsense Word Fluency
Fall of first grade through summer of first grade
Appropriate for monitoring progress of older children with low skills in letter-sound correspondence

How to teach Phonemic Awareness
5 Features of effective interventions (Good III et.al., 1998)
Provide instruction at the phoneme level.
Scaffold tasks and examples.
Model skills prior to practice and provide opportunities for students to produce isolated sounds orally.
Provide systematic and strategic instruction for identifying sounds in words, blending and segmenting, and culminate with integration of phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondence instruction.
Use concrete materials to represent sounds .

Modeling activities
Teaching vs. practice
The importance of scope and sequence:
Larger units before smaller units (words before syllables)
Continuous before stop sounds (cont.: f, l, m, n, stop: b, c, d, g)
Fewer sounds before more sounds (VC or CV before CVC)
Auditory blending before segmenting (e.g. foooot-baaaall vs. mmm-aaaaa-t)
Blending and segmenting before manipulation (e.g. removing sounds to make new words)
Oral before written language

Phonemic Teaching Methods
Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum .(Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998)
The use of language games
Play regularly (15-20 min)
Go in order of sequence
Use both segmenting (analysis) and blending (synthesis) activities
Child should feel as though s/he is playing while learning
Consistently pronounce words slowly and clearly

The Language Games:
Listening game: Listening to Sounds
Rhyming: Poetry, Songs, and Jingles
Words and Sentences: Introducing the Idea of sentences
Awareness of Syllables: Clapping Names
Initial and Final Sounds: Guess Who
Phonemes: Two-Sound Words
Introducing Letters and Spellings: Guess Who: Introducing Sounds and Letters

Reading Intervention Program
Reading Recovery Program
Goal: Help struggling students catch up to peers
Requires a lot of teacher monitoring (1:1)
Daily sessions last 30-40 minutes per session and run 10-20 weeks

Reading Recovery Program Strategies
Reading left to right
Using a return sweep rather than a slow return
Monitoring whether story makes sense
Searching for cues from context
Rereading when unclear
Self-correction

Important Resources
http://dibels.uoregon.edu/
Provides explanation of DIBELS research and application
http://reading.uroegon.edu/
Big Ideas in Beginning Reading
http://www.nifl.gov
National Institute for Literacy
National Reading Panel Update

Application for CBC
It is important to understand what is needed to promote early reading skills so that problems can be identified and treated before negative trajectory is established.
Assessment techniques allow for problem areas to be targeted and monitored throughout interventions.
Teaching techniques can be used across settings to facilitate partnerships in learning.
Consultants can provide consultees with further resources to provide guidance throughout reading development.

References
Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adams, M.J., Foorman, B.R., Lundberg, I, & Beeler, T. (1998). Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A classroom curriculum. Baltimore, MD : Paul H. Brooks Publishing Co.
Good III, R. H. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) with CBM. Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring Growth and Development. Eugene, OR.
Good III, R. H., Simmons, D. C., & Smith, S. B. (1998). Effective academic intervention in the United States: Evaluating and enhancing the acquistion of early reading skills. School Psychology Review. Vol 27, No. 1, pp 45-56 .

References cont.
Grossen, B. & Carnine, D. (1991). Strategies for maximizing reading success in the regular classroom. In Stoner, G., Shinn, M. R., & Walker, H. M. (Eds) Interventions for achievement and behavior problems . Silver Spring, MD: NASP
Pressley, M. (1998). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Snider, V. E. (1995). A primer on phonemic awareness: What is it, why it’s important, and how to teach it. School Psychology Review , Vol. 24, No. 3, 443-455.

Early Reading Skills

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