Phonological Awareness Essay

Phonological Awareness Phonological awareness is an umbrella term, that includes multiple skills, one such skill is phonemic awareness. According the National Reading Panel (2010) phonemic awareness is one critical indicator of students reading abilities during their first two years of school. Phonemic awareness looks at the phonemes, or the smallest units of spoken sounds in language. Phonemes combine to create syllables and words. Most words combine one or more phonemes, for this reason is becomes important for teachers to explicitly teach children how to recognize and manipulate phonemes, using skills such as blending, rhyming, syllabification, and recognizing the onset and rime of words. According to Cassady, Smith and Putman (2008) phonological
According to Ehri (2005) this includes a knowledge of spelling patterns, alphabetic system, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme relations and phonemic awareness. Graphemes are the smallest written units in a word. Thus when readers learn a sight word they “look at the spelling, they pronounce the word, they distinguish the separate phonemes in pronunciation, and they recognize how the graphemes match up to the phonemes in that word,” (Ehri, 2005, p. 170). According to Henderson and Templeton (1986) there are three ordering principles in the English spelling system they are “alphabetic, within word pattern, and meaning.” The alphabetic stage is matching letters to their sounds. The within word principle children must decipher and recognize spelling patterns within a given word. In the last principle, meaning, children recognize that words with similar meaning tend to be spelled the same, and must develop a sensitivity for what a word means when it is spelled a certain way, these skills are required to develop an advanced vocabulary. Once a child has mastered these three stages, they will have a “near-optimal visual presentation of our complex language,” (Henderson & Templeton,