Phonological Awareness In English
In our phonics class we spend time on skills such as, decoding, or sounding out, words, phonemic awareness and spelling.
Phonological awareness is a broad category that includes the ability to hear and identify sounds, including rhymes, tongue twisters, syllables in words, and hearing ambient sounds in the neighborhood.
Phonemic awareness, a sub-step of phonological awareness, is the ability to hear individual sounds, or phonemes, in words. A word such as ‘cat’ has three individual phonemes, /c/ /a/ /t/ and it has three letters. A word such as ‘cheep’ has three phonemes, /ch/ /ee/ /p/ even though it has five letters. The English language has twenty-six letters and forty-four phonemes.
We teach students to isolate phonemes by identifying
sounds at the beginning, end and then middle of a word. I call out a word such as ‘sat’ and they respond with the initial, or first, sound of /s/. They are dependent on their ears to hear those phonemes. You may see your child ‘tapping’ as a strategy to hear the individual sounds. As the year progresses, we practice the next steps of phonemic awareness including, segmenting (identifying all sounds in words), blending, and manipulating the sounds in a word to create a new words. An example of manipulation: “Say the word rail. Take off the ‘/r/ sound and add the /t/ sound to the word. What is the new word?”
Phonics is the relationship between the phonemes and letters. When the children learn that letters and sounds go together they have realized the alphabetic principle. The class will be using the letters and words to read and spell words. They will use their phonemic awareness to translate the sounds they hear to writing the words on the page. As they learn new words, we will introduce new rules to learn even more words.
Phonological awareness is a broad category that includes the ability to hear and identify sounds, including rhymes, tongue twisters, syllables in words, and hearing ambient sounds in the neighborhood.
Phonemic awareness, a sub-step of phonological awareness, is the ability to hear individual sounds, or phonemes, in words. A word such as ‘cat’ has three individual phonemes, /c/ /a/ /t/ and it has three letters. A word such as ‘cheep’ has three phonemes, /ch/ /ee/ /p/ even though it has five letters. The English language has twenty-six letters and forty-four phonemes.
We teach students to isolate phonemes by identifying
sounds at the beginning, end and then middle of a word. I call out a word such as ‘sat’ and they respond with the initial, or first, sound of /s/. They are dependent on their ears to hear those phonemes. You may see your child ‘tapping’ as a strategy to hear the individual sounds. As the year progresses, we practice the next steps of phonemic awareness including, segmenting (identifying all sounds in words), blending, and manipulating the sounds in a word to create a new words. An example of manipulation: “Say the word rail. Take off the ‘/r/ sound and add the /t/ sound to the word. What is the new word?”
Phonics is the relationship between the phonemes and letters. When the children learn that letters and sounds go together they have realized the alphabetic principle. The class will be using the letters and words to read and spell words. They will use their phonemic awareness to translate the sounds they hear to writing the words on the page. As they learn new words, we will introduce new rules to learn even more words.