Phonemic Awareness for Older Students
Phonemic awareness openers are key instructional components for older students in The Science of Reading Intervention Program. Of course, the trick is that in your reading intervention, ELL, ML, SPED, or adult literacy class, you (no doubt) have three types of struggling readers:
- Some struggling readers have already mastered phonemic awareness.
- Some need minimal instruction and practice to solidify the sound-speech (phoneme) connection.
- Some will need intensive work (perhaps connecting to the phonological stage) to achieve this reading requisite.
The rest of this article will briefly explain how The Science of Reading Intervention Program addresses the needs of these students. However, first we had better quickly dispel the myth that phonemic awareness is only for pre-K and kindergarten. Some older students, even adults, do need training.
“There is no age where a student is ‘too old’ for phonemic awareness training‒if the skills have not been mastered, the student should get training” (Kilpatrick, David A., 2016, Equipped for Reading Success).
Additionally, the latest research indicates that phonemic awareness is best taught and caught in the context of connections to letters (or sound-spelling graphemes to get technical) and not solely with auditory instruction. “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction ‘In the Dark’, But Should You?” (2021). Additional meta-analyses have confirmed the importance of this connection and demonstrated that the two components of phonemic awareness that best transfer to reading are blending and segmenting.
For 1. Some struggling readers have already mastered phonemic awareness:
I designed the phonemic awareness lessons as quick, one-minute openers… language play on Google slides. Simply follow the directions on the slides. Students respond to your prompts in unison. All speech sounds have letter connections.
Now, much criticism has been directed at Dr. Kilpatrick for his advocacy of advanced phonemic awareness skills i.e., phonemic isolation, deletion, manipulation. True that research does not establish a link between these advanced skills and reading acquisition. However, the good doctor’s response to critics does ring true to me that good readers do have these skills. Thus, my one-minute phonemic awareness lessons lessons feature phoneme isolation, addition, deletions, substitution, manipulation, and segmentation. Can’t hurt. And for those who have mastered the requisite reading skills of phonemic blending and segmenting, the latter three skills may be beneficial.
For 2. Some need minimal instruction and practice to solidify the sound-speech (phoneme) connection.
All too often, we teachers tend to spend too much time teaching what can be learned quickly and too little time teaching what requires more guided practice. For some (I would say many) older students, phonemic awareness can be mastered quickly. Older students have the advantage of more language than beginning readers in their oral language lexicons. The one-minute drills in my program will turn on the light bulbs in short order.
For 3. Some will need intensive work (perhaps connecting to the phonological stage) to achieve this reading requisite.
The program deals with the needs of these students in two ways. First, the explicit phonemic awareness lessons are combined with the explicit Say It! Spell It! Read It! sounds to print phonics lessons. Beginning with the sound i.e., Say It! reinforces phonemic awareness, and each of the 54 lessons provides a review of the phonemes introduced in the previous phonics lesson. Thus, the phonemic awareness drills assist phonics and spelling acquisition, and phonics and spelling practice improves phonemic awareness. Second, unlike other programs, The Science of Reading Intervention Program provides second-chance instruction. Midway through the full-year program, students take a battery of diagnostic assessments to determine mastery. For students still needing more intensive phonemic awareness practice (and for newly transferred students), 5 quick, whole-class phonemic awareness assessments with audio files determine which skills students need for group work. Corresponding activities include formative assessments.
Check out a sample phonemic awareness opener from my program for older students and see how easy it is to teach to all three types of your students!
