Phonological Awareness Development and Intervention

Let me introduce the subject with some definitions:

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

The ability to attend to the phonological or sound structure of language as distinct from its meaning. Types of phonological awareness include: phonemic awareness, rhyme awareness, syllable awareness, word awareness, and sentence awareness.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS

The ability to think consciously about and perform mental operations on speech-sound units such as segmenting, blending, deleting, and changing order of speech-sound sequences. The awareness that spoken words or syllables can be thought of as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemic awareness is a sub-category of phonological awareness.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS TRAINING

This type of training approaches sound-symbol association in a different way from the traditional phonics approach. Pupils have to explore speech sounds by first of all hearing, feeling and seeing the characteristics and comparing and contrasting the properties. Later the pupils can approach letters with a fuller knowledge of speech sound characteristics. They will be able to make more concrete connections between the auditory speech sound and the letter name. Activities which improve phonemic awareness are sound deletion, segmentation, manipulation and blending.

EARLY PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS INTERVENTION:

• LISTENING - the ability to attend to and distinguish both environmental and speech sounds from one another.
  

Listening skills can depend on a number of auditory processing factors. The basis for the development of oral language are auditory abilities such as determination of direction from where the sound comes, recalling or memorizing auditory information, intonation of voice and awareness of rhytmic patterns, all these are also very important in the acquisition of early literacy.

Learning to distinguish one environmental sound from another teaches the concept of "same / different", the ability to hear differences and label or identify them. Blindfold games can be used to help students develop a sense of directionality of sounds.

• RHYME - Rhyming is the ability to identify words that have identical final sound segments.

Bryan and Bradley (1985) suggest that rhyming facilitates reading and spelling:

1. Rhyming helps students develop phonemic awareness, which facilitates decoding.
2. Rhyming teaches students to group words together by sounds, thereby reducing the number of words they have to learn to read by making generalizations of larger sound units.
3. Rhyming teaches students to make connections between categories and the letter-string patterns that are used to spell words.

Rhyming activities can include activities such as reading stories that have rhymes, matching the rhyme with pictures, distinguishing rhyming words or odd one out, providing a rhyming word, rhyming memory games, and rhyming using songs.

• WORD AWARENESS - the knowledge that sentences consist of words and that these words can be manipulated

Word awareness should precede word segmentation into phonemes. The pupil needs to develop reading and therefore the first activities in word awareness should be activities which can help reading develop such as songs and identification of missing words, later comes the manipulation of words in a sentence.

• SYLLABLE AWARENESS - ability to hear parts or segments of phonemes

Usually this step is quite easy to learn, with the appropriate activities children learn to segment words into syllables. Activities can vary from compound words to syllable counting, deletion or addition. This task preceeds phonemic manipulation at a higher level.

• PHONEMIC AWARENESS - ability to attend to, identify, and manipulate the sounds that are representative of graphemes

The manipulation of sounds include segmentation, deletion, blending, substitution and addition of sounds both in nonsense and real words.

The speech therapist or teacher has to work on sound awareness. Sound awareness includes:

• phoneme identification or rather the identification of a sound which is heard in the beginning, final or middle position of a word.
• phoneme segmentation which is the seperation of a word into its phonemes. Different studies highlight the importance of phonemic segmentation as a predictor of reading and spelling skills. Activities which can be employed in this stage are phoneme segmentation, phoneme counting and word segmentation.
  
• phoneme blending is the blending of sounds to make a spoken word.
• phoneme deletion is the identification and omission of a specific sound from a string of sounds, nonsense words or real words.
• phoneme substitution or rather the identification and replacement of a sound with another sound from a string of unrelated sounds, nonsense words or real words.

Phonological Therapy

Stoel-Gammon and Dunn (1985, page 168) provided a neat summation of the principles of phonological therapy. They believed that it:

(1) is based on the systematic nature of phonology;
(2) is characterised by conceptual, rather than motoric, activities; and,
(3) has generalisation as its ultimate goal

In general agreement, Grunwell (1985) said that the aim of the therapy was: "...to facilitate cognitive reorganisation of the child’s phonological system and his phonologically-oriented processing strategies" (p. 99).

Similarly, Fey (1992) stated that: "phonological therapy approaches are designed to nurture the child’s system rather than simply to teach new sounds" (p.277).