Early Instruction and Phonemic Awareness

Introduction

Phonemic awareness is the knowledge that distinct sound units called phonemes are what form words. A phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language. Phonemic awareness primarily concerns itself with word sounds, as opposed to word meanings. It is an insight on oral language with emphasis on the segmentation of sounds as they get their use in communication. Phonemic awareness is not automatically developed but is a learnt concept. It needs training as children learn to discriminate word sounds well after 5 years. A child in possession of phonemic awareness is able to segment words in pronunciation as well as form certain recognizable word forms.

Summary and Description

Phonemic awareness in children moves through a series of changes. They first know that words make up sentences and that word in turn form out of syllabic segments. These syllabic segments further subdivide into distinct sound units called phonemes. Although this knowledge develops after the beginning of schooling years, a child must reach a certain level of cognitive maturity to learn lexical and phonological patterns. Even before children start to reveal that they have knowledge of segmentation of sounds, it is evident that they attend to the sound structures of a language. Metacognition plays a great role in the acquisition of this awareness. According to Thompson (2003, p.48), children who do well in the measure of Piaget’s theory of concrete operations have an easier time to read, than their counterparts who fail. In fact, they pronounce words and represent them in writing better than their weak counterparts.

Phonological exposure at an early age affects phonemic awareness. Skills on phonemic awareness are linked to other metalinguistic tasks (Liberman, Brady, & Shankweiler 147). This includes morphological and syntactic tasks. This theory of metacognition is objectionable because it does not account for instances when individuals continue to experience problems even after meeting an age threshold, and their attention brought to the phonemic level through instruction. In addition, there is no strong link between reading and intelligence. Some individuals with good intelligence still experience reading difficulties.

The most important element in phoneme awareness and reading depends on the time in childhood when the phoneme organization was occurring. Rhyme and alliteration are the starting point of discriminating between words. Children learn to ignore the meanings of words. In addition, look at words that have similar end sounds. Bryant (1990, p.35-72) argues that rhyme affects a child’s reading ability. The child not only recognizes that words which rhyme often have similar sequence of letters, but also learn to analyze a word from large units such as rhyme to the specific sounds. Bryant showed that children who had good discriminative power on rhyme and alliteration perform better in reading and spelling. It is important to note that phonemic awareness directly links to how well children learn to spell and read words during their first years of instruction. Production, perception, and storage of phonological representations affect phonemic awareness. Segmenting a representation enables a child to encode word signals for storage and future reproduction.

The evidence relating to reading ability and naming has also been objective. The ability to relate items with phonological labels vindicates the presence of individual’s recognition vocabulary. Kindergarten children who perform poorly on a task involving rapid successive naming of common pictured objects present in an array are at risk for later reading failure (Blachman, 1984; Wolf, 1986). Studies have also shown that poor readers would on various occasions make phonologically related errors on target items than good readers. This indicates that, their stored lexical representations may be less precisely specified (Catts, 1986, Wolf & Goodglass 1986)

An area that can reveal phonological difficulty concerns speech production and perception. The difficulty will be revealed when a poor reader is asked to produce tongue twisters or to repeat phonologically complex or unfamiliar lexical items, suggesting that their production skills may also be compromised (Catts, 1986; Snowling, 1981)

It is evident that chronic reading failure is a result of inefficient phonological structures that inhibit acquisition of phonemic awareness, as well as the processing of written and spoken language. Orthographic representations are another cause of reading inability. Developmental changes during phonological representation may have a great impact on acquisition of phonemic awareness and by extension acquisition of reading abilities. In case there is a failure during phonological representation, the product may be a poor reader characterized by poor memory, poor lexical formations, and inability to create phonological structures.

Commentary and Conclusion

Phonemic awareness concerns the knowledge of the smallest sound forms. Phonological awareness deals with larger units of sounds such as syllables, rimes, and onsets. It is evident that chronic reading failure is a result of inefficient phonological structures that inhibit acquisition of phonemic awareness, as well as the processing of written and spoken language. Orthographic representations are another cause of reading inability. I believe that developmental changes during phonological representation may have a great impact on acquisition of phonemic awareness and by extension acquisition of reading abilities. In case there is a failure during phonological representation, the product may be a poor reader characterized by poor memory, poor lexical formations, and inability to create phonological structures.

References

Goswami, U., & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Liberman, I. Y., Brady, S. A., & Shankweiler, D. (1991). Phonological processes in literacy: a tribute to Isabelle Y. Liberman. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates.

Thompson, G. B. (2003). Reading acquisition processes. Clevedon u.a: Multilingual Matters. Erdam: J. Benjamins Pub…