Phonological Awareness - What’s the Point?
Have you heard this term? Phonological Awareness? If you’re a parent, you may not have, if you’re a teacher of the middle grades and above you may have some inkling, and hopefully if you teach the primary grades, you are all in with incorporating this into your instruction.
The National Reading Panel (2000) shared in their report that Phonological Awareness was one of the 5 Pillars of Reading Instruction. Which basically means that it’s important for kids in order to learn how to read. Now PA is a BROAD encompassing of skills that deal with sounds in language, from being able to determine the grouping of sounds for individual words, or syllables, to understanding rhyming and alliteration. Within PA there’s a subset of skills, called Phonemic Awareness.
Phonemic Awareness deals with the individual sounds of speech. Think of the /b/ sound in the word “bat”. Why is this important to know as a parent or teacher? Well, this is where the magic happens with lifting text from the page. When a beginning reader is able to isolate and then blend together individual speech sounds, they will more readily be able to understand that our writing system is composed of using symbols (which we call letters and letter combinations) to represent these sounds. Beginning readers can be taught the unique code used in our language, and then use that knowledge to unlock all kinds of words.
What can you do if you have a beginning reader at home or in the classroom? Have fun with sounds! Just the other day as I was keeping a group of fourth grade students engaged as they were being gathered to go take ILEARN (Indiana’s state testing) make up assessments, I played I-Spy: Beginning Sound Version.
”I-Spy something that starts with /d/” I told the students, fully anticipating these middle elementary kids to scoff and roll their eyes at me, but instead, I was surprised! I had eager guesses from each of them!
”Dominic!” Suggested a student pointing to the person standing next to them, and I shook my head no, and allowed for more guesses. Finally they came to the right answer with “door”. We then started another round, but allowed a student to give the clue of the starting sound for us to use.
This could continue to be adapted by having students guess and identify objects by their ending sounds, or more complex, medial sounds.
My other favorite phonemic awareness activities is teaching kids Pig Latin. It takes me right back to being an elementary kid myself!
Now, hear me, don’t think that just teaching sounds and letters is enough to create a reader who understands what they’re lifting from the page, but it is a vital starting point!
As researchers have continued to look into the role Phonological and Phonemic Awareness plays, they are recognizing that too much of a good thing doesn’t actually get you what you want. I know I have a tendency to look at something that’s good, and think more should be better, right!? I’m sad to admit that I may have taken 50% of my intervention time with my small groups and spent it on phonological awareness activities. Which didn’t hurt them in the sense that PA instruction is beneficial, but what recent research is showing, is that it is only beneficial to a point.
And that’s the thing, I lost sight of the point of PA instruction. It’s not to get kids to chop up syllables or sounds and blend them together again, but it’s to build their sensitivity to the individual sounds in words, so that they can apply the letters and letter patterns that represent them in their reading and writing.
The point of PA instruction is to develop readers.
Which means that we don’t have to spend hours on PA instruction, and it doesn’t have to be taught in isolation away from the letter symbols used to represent the sounds. In fact, Erbeli et al. conducted a Meta-analysis and came to a finding that the benefits of Phonemic Awareness instruction capped out at about 10 hours of instruction per year (aka. 5-10 minutes a day) for grades PreK-1. This means that to benefit our readers, we need to recognize that we can’t sacrifice time on other components (vocabulary, knowledge building, fluency) of literacy thinking that more PA time is going to create proficient readers.
In addition to making sure we don’t spend TOO much time on PA, Stalega et al. looked at the effects of doing PA instruction in isolation from letters. Kids did do better with PA activates, but it didn’t show greater gains in their ability to read, more like “meh” results. That’s my official description of those results, “meh”.
So, does that mean PA doesn’t play a role in developing readers? Absolutely not, but what it does highlight is that we need to be judicious in our time with our students. We can’t expect magic pill results. Reading is FAR too complex a skill for that, but we can monitor how much, how often, and place our PA skills in the context of what we are teaching our students as a whole. Which that is a blog post for future Betsy to unpack for us.
Still have questions? Musings? Befuddlements? Reach out to Betsy with your thoughts at betsyalwine@luminaryliteracy.com, as I would love to help you in your literacy instruction journey.
References:
Erbeli, F., Rice, M., Xu, Y., Bishop, M. E., & Goodrich, J. M. (2024). A Meta-Analysis on the Optimal Cumulative Dosage of Early Phonemic Awareness Instruction. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2309386
National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Stalega, M. V., Kearns, D. M., Bourget, J., Bayer, N., & Hebert, M. (2024). Is Phonological-Only Instruction Helpful for Reading?: A Meta-Analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2340708
