2/11/2015
Opportunity for Early Reading Success: Phonological & Print Awareness Presenter: Kathleen Williams, PhD
[email protected]
Disclosure for Dr. Williams: • Financial: – Will be receiving an honorarium and reimbursement of travel expenses from CSHA – Author of a test [Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT‐2)] for Pearson Assessments – Author of two tests [OWLS‐2 Reading Comprehension Scale and Phonological and Print Awareness (PPA) Scale] for WPS Publishing – Author of a book (Building Early Literacy Skills: Phonological and Print Awareness Activities) for WPS Publishing • Receives royalties for all of the above
• Nonfinancial: – Author of five tests [Group Reading Assessment & Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE), Group Math Assessment & Diagnostic Evaluation (G•MADE), Reading Level Indicator (RLI), Math Level Indicator (MLI), and Reading Fluency Indicator (RFI)] for Pearson Assessments • Receives no royalties on these assessments
Why Some Children Struggle When Learning to Read and Write • Confusing instruction • Inadequate instruction • Limited vocabulary • Lack of conceptual knowledge commensurate with his/her same‐age peers • Only knows one meaning • Lack of “classroom” vocabulary
• Limited experience with print – – – –
Have not hear anyone read Have not seen anyone read – other than on a phone Don’t know the purpose or function of print No motivation to learn
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NELP Findings • Six variables with a medium to large predictive relationship with later measures of literacy – Alphabet knowledge – Phonological awareness – Rapid automatic naming (RAN) of letters or digits – RAN of objects or colors – Letter writing – Phonological memory
• Final report: Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, 2008
NELP Findings • Additional skills were identified as “potentially” important because they correlated with at least one measure of later literacy achievement – Knowledge of print conventions and concepts as in reading left to right – Oral language as measured by the ability to produce or comprehend spoken language – Reading readiness as measured by a combination of: • • • • •
Alphabet knowledge Concepts of print Vocabulary Memory Phonological awareness
Instructional Implications of the NELP Findings • Code‐focused interventions (those that teach skills related to understanding the alphabetic principle) consistently demonstrated positive effects – Code‐focused skills include “the ability to know and manipulate the sounds within spoken words (phonological awareness), and to know the letters of the alphabet and combine the letters with the sounds they represent (alphabet knowledge).” (p. 13, Bell & Westberg, 2009)
• Alphabetic Principle: the concept that letters represent segments of speech
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Implications for Best Practice • Although the statistical evidence indicated a moderate to strong relations between some skills and later literacy skills, there is no evidence that all of the skills should be targeted for intervention or progress monitoring – “Some of the identified skills may be indicators of underlying cognitive capacities rather than indicators of actual skills that are learned and used in acquiring conventional literacy skills” (p. 6, Bell & Westberg, 2009) • Rapid naming tasks predict later reading skills, but there is no evidence that spending valuable time to teach children to do this task faster will improve future reading skills – Success on the rapid naming tasks probably represents underlying abilities such as memory, processing speed, or articulation ability in children • Although there was a relationship between phonological short term memory and later reading and spelling skills, there is – “no evidence for instructional activities to improve memory in a way that will promote better reading and spelling as children are exposed to more formal reading and writing instruction” (p. 7, Bell & Westberg, 2009)
Implications for Best Practice • Code‐focused interventions consistently demonstrated positive effects – Longitudinal studies revealed that good readers in high school were initially taught to read by code‐focused instructional methods – Good readers learned early on how to sound out words and how to read new words on their own
• According to Bell & Westberg (2009) three areas are the key precursors to literacy skills and hold evidence for effective instructional practice: – Alphabet knowledge – Phonological awareness – Oral language
Phonological Awareness • The “appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning ” – (p. 51, Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998)
• Does not involve or rely on the use of print – Based on a child’s ability to recognize and manipulate the sound structures of language whole word to individual speech sound or phoneme
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Phonological Awareness: A Continuum of Complexity • Recognition and matching of rhyming words • Sentence segmentation – Speech can be divided into separate words
• Syllable segmentation and blending – Syllable: minimal unit of sequential speech & includes a single vowel sound or a combination of one vowel sound and one or more consonant sounds
• Blend or segment the onset from the rime in words – Example: In the rhyming pair “cat” and “bat,” the /k/ and the /b/ phonemes represent the onset and “‐at” is the rime
Phonological Awareness: A Continuum of Complexity • Recognize the separate sounds or phonemes in a word – Identify two spoken words that start with the same phoneme – Recognize when two words end with the same phoneme – Step above rhyming, because the child must isolate just one phoneme, the initial or the final single speech sound in the pair of words
Phonological Awareness: A Continuum of Complexity • Phonemic awareness – The skill that signifies the most developed level of phonological awareness because it indicates an awareness of each and every phoneme in a word (Hall and Moats, 1999) • Example: The word “ideal” includes four phonemes – Extremely abstract task for many children without some element of print present
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Difficulty of PA Activities • Relative difficulty depends on the interrelationship between the reasoning demands and the linguistic complexity – Supplying the last word of a simple, well‐known rhyme – Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow – And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to ____
• Requires retrieval and expression • Uses whole sentences and a meaningful context
– Identifying when two given words rhyme or not – bat/cat – fan/top
• Receptive, non‐verbal response • Uses words without context
Progression of PA Activities • Not necessary to wait for mastery before going on to the next level of activity – Within any group, there will be children at various skill levels along the continuum of phonological awareness, as well as differing receptive and expressive language abilities
• All activities should provide rich oral language experiences – Opportunity for all children to benefit from any given activity
Rhyming Activities • Nursery Rhyme Goof – Jack and Jill went up a tree
• Action Rhymes – I’m a Little Teapot
• Guess My Word – Use words for body parts or colors • I’m thinking a color and it rhymes with “shoe.” • I’m thinking of a word that names part of my face and it rhymes with “pie.”
• Rhyming Riddles • I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with sock and it tells time
– Use single syllable common words – Can be done in the car or around the dinner table – Let children create riddles, too
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Rhyming Activities • Rhyming Picture Cards – Index cards and “pinch” clothespins • boat, coat
– Work alone or in pairs
• Hink Pinks – What is a journey by boat? • Ship trip
– What is a library burglar? • Book crook
Sentence & Syllable Segmentation • Provide a bridge between rhyming and matching sounds in words – First, listen for words as individual units in a sentence – Next, listen for syllables as smaller parts of words
• Natural part of language development to “run words together – Need to help children hear words as separate units of speech
Sentence Segmentation Activities • Count the words incorporating a visual and movement (encoding the skill) – Holding up a finger for each word – Lining up poker chips, one chip to a word – Putting beads on a string, one bead to a word
• Start with simple sentences of 3 to 5 words – John ran fast.
• Use sentences from favorite books – I do not like green eggs and ham.
• Or, lines from a poem – The teensy, weensy spider climbed up the water spout.
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Segmenting and Blending Compound Words • Explain what a compound word is – Do you like popcorn? I do. The word popcorn is called a compound word. It is made of two words, “pop” and “corn.”
• Ask what two words are in common compound words – Cupcake, cellphone, applesauce, eyeball
• Have child blend words into a compound word – My words are “lady” and “bug.” What is the compound word?
Syllable Segmenting • When we say certain words, we say them in parts or syllables. Listen. – Say a child’s name that has two syllables, like “Mary” and clap twice as you say each syllable. – Continue demonstrating words with one, two, and three syllables using names and clapping once for each syllable (i.e. Ben, Gavin, Jennifer)
• If working in a group, have children first clap as a group, then individually demonstrate skill
Syllable Segmenting and Blending • Collect animal pictures or miniatures that include single and multiple syllable names – Bird, cat, fish – Chicken, lion, bunny – Elephant, octopus, alligator, hippopotamus
• Name all the animals with the child – Practice the names by clapping the syllables in each name
• Have the child divide into groups by number of syllable in name • Ask child to blend syllables by saying, – Where is the li ‐‐‐‐on?
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Matching Initial/Final Sounds • Start sound‐matching activities with initial sounds, easier than matching words that end with the same sound – Harder to isolate the final phoneme from the rest of the word – Harder to grasp the concept of last or final position
• Same or Different – Say two, single syllable words. – Do my words start/end the same or are they different?
• Clip It Together – Match pairs of pictures that start/end with the same phoneme (i.e. boy & ball or bird & red)
Phonemic Awareness • The recognition of every discrete phoneme in a word • Difficult skill to acquire: – The cognitive operation of analyzing and identifying the individual phonemes in a word is generally too abstract for most young children – The individual sounds in English words are co‐articulated in varying degrees with other sounds • Consider the \b\ sound in “beach” and “bake”
• Nonetheless, the skill is a very important for children ages five through eight – Being able to hear the separate sounds in a word helps a child develop the ability to sound out new words when reading and to make sound–symbol connections when learning to spell – Adams (1990) and Stanovich (1986) conclude that a child’s phonemic awareness on entering school is the skill most related to success in learning to read
Phonemic Awareness Activities • Beginning, Middle, or End – Recognize the individual phonemes in words with two or three phonemes and indicate the position of each phoneme (beginning, middle, or end). – Three pictures, each showing a different part of a train: locomotive, passenger or freight car, and caboose or, a toy train with three cars • Explain that the train represent the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in a word
– Say a word with two or three phonemes, pointing to the correct part of the train as you say each phoneme • Skip the middle car if the word has only two phonemes
– Have the child repeat a word you provide, pointing correctly to either two or three parts of the train
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“Phonemic Gymnastics” • Cognitively difficult tasks – Not helpful for teaching or testing the skill of phonemic awareness • Too many intervening variable
– May help to improve skill once child understands the task
• Requires auditory memory and auditory processing speed, as well as, phonemic awareness • Can be useful for developing vocabulary
Print Awareness • Children demonstrate early print awareness when they: – Notice the first letter of their names in print material – Can point to a favorite food by the label or logo
• Children will be eager to learn to read: – If they have an awareness of the importance and functions of print before entering school
• Print awareness can provide the motivation for literacy instruction
Need a Balanced Approach • Children are often taught print concepts like the letter names without demonstrating their connection to the speech sounds they use – “Many children who enter kindergarten know letter names but do not know that those letters are used to represent the segments of their own speech. Many first and second graders, and even some older students who are poor readers or spellers, also have not acquired this essential insight” (p. 23, Moats, 2000)
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Need a Balanced Approach • When teaching the association between speech sounds and letter symbols, already knowing the alphabet can facilitate learning – “It is much easier to associate a sound with a letter if you already know the name of the letter ‐ knowing the alphabet is almost like having an anchor for each sound” (p. 166, Hall & Moats, 1999).
Need a Balanced Approach • The relationship between phonological awareness and print awareness is not unidirectional, but reciprocal (Stanovich, 1986) – Phonological awareness helps a child understand the alphabetic principle – Alphabetic knowledge, understanding the more concrete sound‐symbol correspondence of phoneme to grapheme, can facilitate a child’s development of the more abstract tasks of phonemic segmentation and blending – Print knowledge helps a child profit from literacy instruction • Understand the words of instruction
Print Concepts • • • • • •
Text is read left to right Text is read top to bottom Words are read, not pictures There is a beginning to a book, and an end Words read sound like language heard Letters represent the sounds of words said – Speech to print; not print to speech
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Benefits of Access to Print • Meta‐analyses of research addressing the relationship between children’s access to print material and education‐related outcomes (p. 78, Lindsay, 2010) – More positive attitudes toward reading – Increases the amount of reading that children do – Increases children’s emergent literacy skills – Improves children’s reading achievement
Benefits of Reading Aloud • Six “well‐researched benefits to a child whose parents read aloud to him” (p. 53, Hall & Moats, 1999) – Develops background knowledge about a variety of topics – Builds vocabulary – Builds familiarity with rich language patterns – Develops familiarity with story structure – Acquires awareness of the reading process (print awareness) – Identifies reading as a pleasurable activity
Recognizing the Functions of Print • Fox (2008), children “need to use the three secrets [of reading] at the same time—print and language and general knowledge—in order to be able to read more easily” (p. 121) • Need to – demonstrate that print has meaning – provide children experiences with many forms of print
• According to Strickland and Schickedanz (2009), children’s “emerging awareness of how print functions is a key motivating force for learning to read” (p.17).
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Recognizing the Functions of Print • Show children that print can expand their knowledge and understanding of the world • “To become lifelong readers, children have to see books and print as interesting, important, [and] vital aspects of everyday life” (Flippo, 1999, p. 97). • To motivate children to want to read and to continue to read, they need to understand how print is used and how they may already be reading and using print each day
Activities: Functions of Print • Make connections between print & meaning – Label common objects in home or classroom • Chair, stove, table, hot/cold
– Collect objects with labels • Soap, milk, soup
– Recognize brands by logo • Cheerios®, Coke®
– Read informational signs • Stop, Ladies’/Men’s restroom
– Find repeating words
Letter Knowledge • Alphabet knowledge – Predicts both early and long‐term literacy success – Provides evidence for effective instructional practice
• “Like phonological awareness, strong letter knowledge skills facilitate the acquisition of decoding ability and can be taught effectively with preschool children” (Phillips, Clancy‐ Menchetti, & Lonigan, 2008, p. 12). • Goal is to recognize the upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet by name and shape
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Activities: Building Letter Knowledge • Find the letters in child’s name • Read alphabet books – Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
• Match alphabet pairs – Pinch clothespins and index cards
• Finger writing during bath time • Play‐Doh writing • Foam letter puzzles
Speech‐to‐Print • Uses the naturally developing skill of learning to speak in order to learn the non‐natural alphabetic code children will use to read and write – “What children bring to the printed page or the task of reading and writing, is knowledge of spoken language. What must be learned is knowledge of the written symbols that represent speech and the ability to use those productively.” (p. 2, Moats, 2000)
Sound‐to‐Symbol • Introduce as “known” speech sound to “newly labeled” letter symbol – Not print symbol name to sound
• Use child’s knowledge of speech – Connect using auditory, visual, and kinesthetic cues
• Teach the connection with labeled pictures of common objects and a mirror
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Sound to Symbol Progression • Teach the correspondence between phonemes and letters in this order – \w\, \m\, \b\, and \p\ to w, m, b, and p • Visual, early developing sounds
– \d\, \t\, and \n\ to d, t, and n • Similar articulation placement
– \f\ and \v\ to f and v • Teaching difference between voiced and voiceless provides another tactile cue to encoding the correspondence of sound to symbol
Sound to Symbol Progression • \k\, \g\, and \h\ to c/k, g, and h – All produced in the back of the mouth – Teach voiced sound of \g\ as in “goat” as the counterpart of the voiceless \k\
• \s\ and \z\ to s and z – Demonstrate the similarity of articulation and the difference of voicing
• \j\, \y\, \l\, and \r\ to j, y, l, and r – Introduce the “j” as in “jam” and the “y” as in “yet” – Do these sounds last as they are often difficult for young children to articulate correctly
Initial Sound to Symbol Activities • Introductory activities – Sound‐Letter Posters – Individual picture cards
• Review activities – Clothespin Alphabet – Shopping Game – Build a Zoo
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References & Resources • Bell, D. & Westberg, L. (2009). What works: An introductory teacher guide for early language and emergent literacy instruction. Based on the National Early Literacy Panel Report. Louisville, Kentucky: National Center for Family Literacy. • Flippo, R. F. (Ed.) (1999). What do the experts say? Helping children learn to read. Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann. • Fox, M. (2008). Reading magic: Why reading aloud to our children will change their lives forever. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. • Fry, E. B., Kress, J. E., & Fountoukidis, D. L. (2006). The reading teacher’s book of lists (5th ed.). Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall. • Hall, S.L. & Moats, L.C. (1999). Straight talk about reading: How parents can make a difference during the early years. Chicago, Ill: Contemporary Books.
References & Resources • Lindsay, J. (2010, August). Children’s access to print material and education‐related outcomes: Findings from a meta‐analytic review. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates. • Moats, L. C. (2000). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. • National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy. National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence‐based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (Reports of the Subgroups). (NIH Publication No. 00‐4754). • Phillips, B.M., Clancy‐Menchetti, J., &Lonigan, C.J. (2008). Successful phonological awareness instruction with preschool children: Lessons from the classroom. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 28(1), 3‐17.
References & Resources • Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (EDS). (1998) Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. • Stanovich, K.E. (1886). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, XXI, 360‐407. • Strickland, D.S. & Schickedanz, J.A. (2009). Learning about print in preschool: Working with letters, words, and beginning links with phonemic awareness. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. • Williams, K. T. (2014). Building early literacy skills: Phonological and print awareness activities. Torrance, CA: Western Psychological Services. • Williams, K. T. (2014). Phonological and Print Awareness Scale (PPA Scale) [Manual]. Torrance, CA: Western Psychological Services.
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