Educational Research: Phonemic Awareness Web

Educational Research: Phonemic Awareness

Web Page

According to Hoover (2002) in his web page article "The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read," phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the individual sounds within words. This linguistic skill is needed to read alphabetical languages. The abstract nature of phonemes can cause confusion for early learners. Research studies have shown that students who have strong phonemic awareness skills in first grade are strong readers; likewise, students who are weak in phonemic awareness are poor readers. Phonemic awareness can be difficult for many students because it is an abstract skill and must be taught directly. If the child has not mastered phonemic awareness by third grade, Hoover states that there is very little possibility that the child will ever read at the level of his or her peers.

Newspaper Article

Langland's December 2004 article "Working With Sounds: Educators Trying to Boost Reading Skills With Phonemic Awareness," claims that in Norristown, Pennsylvania, teachers have begun to incorporate phonemic awareness into their daily routine in the hopes of improving reading ability among early learners. According to Langland, the strategy of teaching individual sounds within words has been used by dyslexia researchers and reading specialists for many years, but has just begun to be used in the mainstream classroom. Langland indicates that approximately 20% of all children are diagnosed with a reading disability, but reading specialists believe that "teaching phonemic awareness in kindergarten could reduce reading failure in fourth grade by nearly 50%" (Langland, 2004). Phonemic awareness is one of the components of the Reading First program, a federal initiative designed to improve reading skills among early learners.

Book

In What Research Has to Say about Reading Instruction, Ehri and Nunes (2002) note that phonemic awareness, or PA, "is one of the leading school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read in kindergarten and first grade." Their article entitled "The Role of Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read" describes phonemes as the smallest units of spoken language that are used to create words. The English language has between 41 and 44 phonemes. The concept of phonemes can be confusing for children because there are not always the same numbers of phonemes as there are letters in a word. Phonemic awareness is important because the English language uses an alphabetic writing system, and all aspects of learning to read and write incorporate PA on some level.

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