5.3: Teaching Phonological Awareness

Playful Teaching Promotes Playful Learning

For children to be engaged in active, playful learning, teaching needs to be active and playful. Examples of phonological awareness activities that engage children in playful learning are provided in this textbook.

When Does Phonological Awareness Develop?

Early language experiences at home and in preschool play an important role in developing children’s phonological awareness. Although speaking and listening may seem unrelated to learning to read, being aware of sounds in words is actually very important to reading. Before learning to read, children need to be aware of sounds in words without relating those sounds to print. Children demonstrate phonological awareness through their speaking and listening skills. Singing nursery rhymes, silly songs, and making up silly words or poems are ways to enhance preschool children’s awareness of sounds. These skills are fun to practice because many children love to play with sounds in words. However, for most children, engaging only in these activities is not enough to build phonological awareness.

Because phonological awareness does not come naturally to all children, it needs to be explicitly taught and practiced (Philips et al., 2008). Difficulties with phonological awareness are at the heart of most children’s reading challenges. Therefore, a key goal in preschool is to provide a strong foundation in phonological awareness so that children can benefit from reading instruction later in school (Philips et al., 2008).

Why Is Phonological Awareness Important?

Phonological Awareness Is Directly Related to Reading Ability

Phonological awareness is directly related to reading ability (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Foorman et al., 2016; Wagner et al., 1994). If phonological awareness is strong, reading ability is likely to be strong (Share & Stanovich, 1995; Wagner et al., 1997). Even though reading is not formally taught in preschool, critical foundational skills and instruction are provided that will directly support children when they are introduced to formal reading instruction. Phonological awareness is one of those skills—and teaching it in developmentally appropriate lessons is very important. It is also important for preschool teachers to know the developmental sequence of how having phonological awareness supports learning to read. This knowledge will help you fulfill your critically important role in teaching these skills to children.

Phonological Awareness Builds Children’s Capacity to Learn Phonics

The goal of phonological awareness instruction in preschool is to build children’s capacity to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken words. For example, children can learn to blend sounds together, to make words, and to delete sounds from words, leaving other words or parts of words. Children’s capacity to manipulate the sounds in spoken words, especially the smallest units of sound (phonemes), will be important in formal reading instruction later. This capacity will directly relate to their new understanding of phonics, which is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between the sounds of spoken language and the letters and spellings that represent those sounds in written language. Children who have acquired phonological awareness and print knowledge can quickly understand the connections between sounds and letters. Those children, who also more readily use those connections to identify words in print, almost invariably become better readers than children who have difficulty acquiring these skills (Share & Stanovich, 1995).

Phonological Awareness Is a Foundational Skill for Reading

Phonological awareness is one of the core foundational skills in the development of early reading abilities. Children with strong phonological awareness also benefit more from phonics instruction in kindergarten, grade 1, and beyond, so they acquire better decoding skills to sound out and read words. Think about the feedback that elementary school teachers often provide when students are trying to read or write an unfamiliar word, such as “Sound it out.” This cue makes sense only to a child who has a strong foundation in phonological awareness, letter names, letter sounds (Philips et al., 2008), and who has been taught a process to sound out, or decode, a word. Decoding skills then support the development of reading fluency, and reading fluency promotes reading comprehension. So, without a foundation of phonological awareness, a child is unlikely to develop the word-reading skills needed to understand text, which is the goal of reading (Lane & Pullen, 2004). The literacy trees represent the importance of emergent literacy skills to later reading development; see https://youtu.be/dTzdfHqKh00 for an animation elaborating on this relationship.

Levels of Phonological Awareness

When teaching phonological awareness and providing opportunities for practice, have a good supply of pictures for common words that your children know. Picture cards and puzzles are often used in phonological awareness instruction and practice. In each of the levels and tasks described below, pictures of commonly known words are used as prompts and as manipulatives. Each level in the phonological awareness continuum is described next. Even though you are selecting words the children likely know, it is always good practice to begin every activity by verbally labeling each picture.

Word Level

The simplest level of phonological awareness is the word level. This often involves manipulating individual words in compound words (by blending, segmenting, and deleting). A compound word is a word made up of two or more words such as doghouse, cupcake, and airport. The activities in Table 5.3.1 illustrate opportunities for children to demonstrate their word-level phonological awareness. In general, tasks are listed from simple to more complex—that is, most children fnd blending easier than deleting.

Table 5.3.1 Word-Level Phonological Awareness Activities

Task	Teacher Prompt	Child Response
Blending (putting together)	Show one picture puzzle piece at a time (dog and house). “I’ll say a word, one part at a time. You put the parts together to make the whole word. Dog (pause) house. What word?”	The child puts the two puzzle pieces together and says doghouse.
Segmenting (breaking apart)	Show a picture of a cupcake and be sure the child can correctly identify it. “What two words make up the word cupcake?”	Cup-cake
Deleting (removing one or two words from a compound word and determining what word remains)	“I will give you a word and ask you to remove one part of it, and you tell me what part is left. Say sidewalk.”	Sidewalk
	“Now say sidewalk without saying side.”	Walk
	Repeat by deleting the other word in the compound word. When the child grasps the idea, switch roles and the child can become the teacher!

Syllable Level

The syllable level of phonological awareness involves the ability to blend, count, delete, and segment parts of multi-syllabic words. A multi-syllabic word is a word with more than one syllable, such as tiger, hamburger, and hippopotamus.

The activities in Table 5.3.2 illustrate opportunities for children to demonstrate their syllable-level phonological awareness. When practicing phonological awareness at the syllable level, it is important to note that oral syllabication and written syllabication are not always the same. In some cases, there may be multiple, acceptable oral syllabications. So, be consistent from day to day with the same words when orally blending, segmenting, and deleting syllables. To be consistent, we used the Merriam-Webster oral syllabication rules for the syllable level tasks.

Table 5.3.2 Syllable-Level Phonological Awareness Activities

Task	Teacher Prompt	Child Response
Blending (putting together parts of a word to create a whole word)	“I’m going to break a word into parts, and you say the whole word. To–ma–to.”	Tomato
Counting (counting the syllables in a spoken word by clapping or tapping each syllable)	How many syllables in (pause) hamburger?”	(Clapping for each syllable) Ham–bur–ger, three!
Segmenting (hearing a word and breaking it into syllables)	“I’m going to say a word and you say each part you hear in the word. Paper.”	Pa–per
Deleting (saying a given word without a specific syllable)	“Say pencil.”	Pencil
	“Now say pencil without cil.”	Pen

Onset-Rime Level

The onset and rime are smaller units within a syllable. The onset is the part of the syllable that comes before the vowel, and the rime is the vowel and everything after it. For the word run, the onset is /r/, and the rime is /un/. For the word stop, the onset is /st/, and the rime is /op/. Some types of words do not lend themselves to onset-rime activities. Words that begin with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) are not used in onset-rime activities because they do not have an onset. Also, words with open syllables—that is, words with a vowel at the end of the syllable, such as be and go—are not used in onset-rime activities. The following chart shows a variety of words divided into their onsets and rimes.

Word	Onset	Rime
sit	s	it
put	p	ut
thin	th	in
spot	sp	ot
street	str	eet
spoil	sp	oil

The onset-rime level is a transitional level between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Children can demonstrate onset-rime-level phonological awareness by engaging in the activities described in Table 5.3.3.

Table 5.3.3 Onset-Rime Level Phonological Awareness Activities

Task	Teacher Prompt	Child Response
Rime matching (determining whether two words rhyme)	Show a picture of a fox and a picture of a box. “Do these words rhyme: fox, box?”	Yes
	“These words rhyme because they share the same rime: -ox.” (You can explain to children that fox and box rhyme because they sound the same in the middle and the end.)
	(You may fnd that it helps children to hear three words-- two rhymes and one word that does not rhyme.) “Which two words rhyme: cat, mop, hat?	Cat, hat.
Onset matching	“Which of these words have the same frst sound: toy, man, toad?	Toy, toad.
Onset-rime blending	“What word do these sounds make: /f/ /an/?”	Fan
Onset identity (beginning sounds) (saying the first part, or sound, of a word that is shown in a picture and heard)	Show a picture of a boat, and say the word without an article such as a or an, which can be confused with the beginning sound. “This is (pause): boat, what is the frst sound you hear in (pause) boat?”	/b/
Alliteration (saying a word that begins with the same onset as a word that is heard)	Show a picture of a dog. “Tell me another word that begins with the /d/ sound.”	If the child produces a real word like duck or a nonsense word like dak it is considered correct.
Onset-rime segmenting	“I’m going to say a word and you tell me the first sound you hear and then the rest of the word. Doll.”	/d/ /oll/
Deleting onsets and rimes (saying what is left after removing the onset or the rime)	Show a picture of a coat. “Say coat without /k/.”	Oat
	“Say coat without /oat/.”	/k/
Generating rhymes (saying a word that rhymes with a word that is heard)	Show a picture of a frog. “Tell me a word that rhymes with frog.”	If the child produces a real word like log, or a nonsense word like mog, it is considered correct.

Manipulating sounds using onset-rime can be more difficult because the sounds can become distorted, or sound wrong. For example, if you use onset-rime to blend the word pat, it is difficult to say /p/ without it being distorted or sounding like /puh/. This then makes blending the word sound like, /puh/ /at/, puhat—but there is no such word. So, when teaching these lessons, take care to pronounce the individual sounds correctly.

Now that you understand more about onsets and rimes and how to manipulate them, let’s take a moment to think about rhyming. Silly rhyming songs, books that include rhyming, and nursery rhymes may be children’s first exposure to the idea that words have characteristics other than semantic meaning. That is, children often start to mimic rhyming words such as cat and hat rather than think about what a cat is or what a hat looks like on someone’s head. So, rhymes may be the first aspect of phonological awareness that children learn to copy after they hear it in a song, or a book read to them. However, manipulating rhymes can be challenging because rhyme manipulation is actually onset-rime manipulation. Words that rhyme share the same rime, as in the words sun and run (they have the same rime, -un). Children need to be able to segment, or separate, the onset from the rime. Rhyming activities can be a playful way for children to engage in word manipulation but should not be considered a sufficient single method of phonological awareness instruction.

Phoneme Level

The phoneme level of phonological awareness is when children become able to manipulate individual phonemes, or sounds, in words. The phoneme level of phonological awareness is called phonemic awareness. Although some children will develop the capability to manipulate phonemes during the preschool period, this level generally emerges in kindergarten. As with the other levels, picture cards and other manipulatives such as small counters are often used in phonemic awareness instruction and practice. These tasks are considered part of phonological awareness and not phonics because they are completed orally, without using letters. Children can demonstrate phonemic awareness by engaging in the activities described in Table 5.3.4.

Table 5.3.4 Phoneme Level Phonological Awareness Activities

Task	Teacher Prompt	Child Response
Isolating and producing phonemes in one-syllable words at the initial, final, and medial (middle or vowel) position.	“What is the frst sound you hear in sun?”	/s/
	“What is the last sound you hear in mat?”	/t/
	“What is the middle sound you hear in sit?”	/ĭ/
Blending	“I’m going to say each sound in a word and you tell me the word. /s/ /ŭ/ /n/.”	Sun
Segmenting	“Tell me each sound you hear in the word mat.”	/m/ /ă/ /t/
Deleting	Say, “Meat.”	Meat
	“Now say meat without /m/.” (This same task is used at the onset-rime level, using coat; there can be overlap between tasks at the onset-rime level and tasks at the phoneme level.)	Eat
Substituting (making a new word by replacing one phoneme with another phoneme)	“The word is fun. Change /f/ to /r/. What’s the new word?”	Run

References

Ball, E. W., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a diference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49–66.

Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C. A., Dimino, J., ... & Keating, B. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade: Educator's Practice Guide (NCEE 2016-4008). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Science, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED566956.

Lane, H. B., & Pullen, P. C. (2004). Phonological awareness assessment and instruction: A sound beginning. Boston, MA: Pearson/A and B.

Phillips, B. M., Clancy-Menchetti, J., & Lonigan, C. J. (2008). Successful phonological awareness instruction with preschool children: Lessons from the classroom. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 28(1), 3–17. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ791353.

Share, D. L., & Stanovich, K. E. (1995). Cognitive processes in early reading development: Accommodating individual diferences into a model of acquisition. Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology, 1(1), 1–57.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., & Rashotte, C. A. (1994). Development of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New evidence of bidirectional causality from a latent variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 73–87.

Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., Rashotte, C. A., Hecht, S. A., Barker, T. A., Burgess, S. R., ... Garon, T. (1997). Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 33(3), 468–479.