A Better Start to Reading

Phonological awareness development for early readers.

(Our Phonics programme!) 

• Phoneme awareness, or the awareness of individual sounds in words, is the most important level to focus on, as this is what has the most impact on children's early reading and spelling.

‘Children who have stronger phonological awareness are much

more likely to be better readers and spellers, than children who demonstrate

weakness in this area, and in fact, it's been shown that weakness in processing

phonological information efficiently, is associated with persistent reading

problems, like dyslexia.’

 

• Phonological awareness builds on early speech perception skills. It requires children to consciously reflect on the sound structure of a word. 

Here are some examples of the three levels of sound structure in the English language:

• Syllable awareness: Recognizing the word 'daddy' can be broken into two syllables – dad-dy or 'caterpillar' can be broken into 4 syllables cat-er-pil-lar.

• Rhyme awareness: Recognizing the word 'cat' can be segmented into c-at and rhymes with words like bat, sat, mat.

• Phoneme awareness: Recognizing the word 'dog' can be segmented into 3 sounds or phonemes: d-o-g; recognizing that the first sound in the word ‘cap’ is /k/; identifying individual sounds/phonemes in words.

• Quality shared book reading experiences matter. Children who have

greater exposure to experiences that explicitly bring their attention to the relationship between letters on the page and their speech sounds, will demonstrate stronger phonological awareness skills. 

• The three main phoneme-level skills children require to read and spell are:

1. Phoneme identity   2. Phoneme segmentation and blending     3. Phoneme manipulation.  

• Phonological awareness is a focus on the sounds in words, but for successful reading and spelling attempts, children need to be able to connect the sounds they can hear (the phonemes) to the letters they are reading or want to write (the graphemes).

• Examples of parents and teachers demonstrating how to facilitate phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge in the context of shared reading:

• Making links between the letter name and the sound it makes, as well as connecting it to the print.

• Playing games that draw attention to the sounds in words, for example word generation and rhyme generation games.

• Practicing segmenting and blending words from the book they have just read.

• Helping older children to use their segmenting and blending skills to sound out words when reading.

Vocabulary development for early readers:

To be able to read for meaning children need to be able to understand what they are reading

Vocabulary knowledge plays a critical role in supporting children to understand what they are reading. Think back to Module 1, when we presented the Simple View of Reading - vocabulary knowledge sits under the linguistic comprehension part of the model, and is the other critical piece of the reading comprehension puzzle.

Vocabulary growth in the preschool years has a long standing influence on later literacy skills

The findings from the review were clear; preschool vocabulary growth is a

significant predictor of overall reading comprehension well into the late school years.

Reading comprehension is the product of both word recognition and listening comprehension.

It doesn't matter how advanced their decoding skills are if they don’t understand the meaning of the words.

By the time children are five they typically know the meaning of 2000 - 3000 words.

Children grow their vocab during the preschool years during conversations with others.

Reading styles that are more interactive significantly increase the number of new words children learn during shared reading - you can do this by:

• Providing an elaboration or defining an interesting word as you are reading.

• Comment on what is happening.

• Talk about the pictures.

• Ask children questions about what is going on in the story.

• Repetition - ensuring children hear a word multiple times, in context

• Read a book more than once to the children 

Research says that sharing books with children is the best way for them to learn new words.

Elaboration - explaining in the moment what a word means as you are reading - stop, define, elaborate and give a bit more information then keep reading.

Tier 2 words - add precision or interest e.g: perched, scatter, swiftly - these are words we want to elaborate on.

Risk factors that lead to reading problems

The first one is around a child who may be using

unusual speech error patterns, and that's those kind of patterns where children are using speech

errors that are not typical of younger children. Another important risk factor that we've spent a

bit of time in the course talking about, is of course phonological awareness. So if a child

is struggling to develop phonological awareness skills again, that's an additional risk factor.

Again, the next one is around language, if a child has a speech difficulty and they

also have difficulty with understanding language or expressing their thoughts,

then that's another risk factor for their reading development.

And the final one that plays an important role, is that genetic risk,

so if a child with a speech difficulty has a parent or a close family member who

has had reading problems, then that will also add to that risk profile.

 

A closer look at Dyslexia.

The International Association of Dyslexia, defines dyslexia as:

“...a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.”

Many years of research across languages has now led to our understanding of the relationship between dyslexia and poor phonological ability. For a detailed discussion about this relationship please refer to Professor Gillon and Professor John Everatt’s chapter: The Importance of Phonological Processing Skills in Dyslexia, in Gillon GT. (2017) Phonological Awareness: From Research to Practice. (2nd ed.). 

By focusing on strengthening young children’s letter knowledge and phoneme awareness skills and helping them to use this knowledge effectively when reading and spelling, we can better support all children to succeed in reading.

Research  shows how targeted phonological  processing teaching can lead to accelerated reading accuracy and comprehension compared to other types of language teaching.

Teaching strategies;

• Bring the attention to the print, sound out the first word and then come smaller words such as pig p -i-g. Really focus on the text. Sound out together to keep it enjoyable.

• Redirect to what are the sounds that go with each of the graphemes. Segmentation and blending. 

• Go back and re-read that sentence again with fluency once you have decoded the words.

Teaching strategy demonstration, using letter blocks. 

 

Activity - tracking sound changes in words.

• 'Iris we were reading the story about Dot and this word here says 'd-o-t' dot.

• Now if that word there says 'dot' and I want to make the word that says 'hot',

• what sound am I going to put at the beginning of that word to make 'dot' into 'hot'?

• Gail: Great you heard the first sound change and the word says?

• Brigid: Hot.

• Gail: Okay if that word says 'hot' and I want to make it say 'pot'. Let's think about which

• letter we'll use now to make 'hot' into 'pot.'

• Gail: And the word says?

• Brigid: Pot

• Gail: Great. And once they get good at changing that first sound then we could

• change the last sound in a word. So if we had a 'pot' we could then change it to 'pop.'

• Let's have a look what sound we would need to put at the end to change 'pot' to 'pop'?

The Gillon Phonological Awareness Training Programme This booklet has lots of great teaching ideas.

Supporting Struggling Readers;

• Carefully monitor early phonological awareness.

• Be explicit in your teaching - leaving nothing to chance.

• Needs to be a focussed effort

• Making the link between phonological awareness, segmenting and blending and letter sound knowledge.

• Improving fluency - re-reading, 

Reading at home;

• Praise and encouragement and not expect too much.

• Be an enjoyable experience

• Sometimes simply reading to the child and focussing on one or two words that your child could decode with help.

• Make it a positive experience

Booksharetime.com website that has great book suggestions for speech and language difficulties.

 Phonological awareness is awareness of the sound structure of language.

As we've talked about in our modules, that awareness begins to develop quite early,

from two to three years of age, at that syllable level. Phonics on the other hand, is knowing that

relationship between the letter and the groups of letters, and the sound they represent. So for

our teachers we really want to make sure that they're promoting both of those related skills.