Description
Phonological Coding: Phonemic Awareness – Teacher’s Manual
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words and syllables are composed of a specific sequence of individual speech sounds and is a prerequisite to the development of reading and spelling skills, especially phonics. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that mastery of phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of reading and spelling success. As noted by Keith Stanovich it is the most important core and causal factor which separates fluent from disfluent readers.
Our Phonemic Awareness program uses words consisting of two to six sounds (phonemes) to develop phonemic awareness and phonological coding skills. The learning objectives for this program include segmenting and blending of simple, complex, and nonsense syllables, as well as analyzing/identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds in real and nonsense words. All objectives are practiced until the student achieves count per minute fluency with near perfect accuracy.
Students, ages five through adulthood, have used these materials with great success. One of this program’s best features is that the vocabulary is not age-biased, so older students will not feel the program is age inappropriate.
This unit has been constructed with an eye towards optimization of precious practice time, while fostering the learner’s desire for more practice. It employs achievable chunks, units of material which balance learners strengths and needs, to insure that growth is a key motivational element to practice further. If a task is too difficult the learner resists and if it is too easy disinterest ensues. The optimal balance occurs when both accuracy and frequency improve at the appropriate rate and there is continual feedback of that success to the practitioner.
Practice needs to be continually measured and monitored for purposes of motivation; the accuracy and speed of performances are recorded with the results being made immediately available to both practitioner and coach. Improvement, which is incremental, and might go unnoticed, will become apparent allowing the learner to climb a motivational ladder on the rungs of their personal bests. To facilitate this dynamic between challenge and achievability and provide immediacy of feedback that motivates further practice these units have been closely integrated with Precision Teaching.
With Precision Teaching a student is timed on specific tasks until he/she can perform a certain amount accurately within a specified amount of time. Timings are usually one minute, but frequently range from ten seconds to ten minutes. We record a student’s performance on a Standard Celeration Chart which gives a “learning picture” to the teacher and student, enabling them to make decisions about the student’s learning program.
The goal of timed practice is to build fluency which ensures a student permanently retains the skills taught (retention); can perform them for extended periods of time (endurance); and can easily apply them to new learning situations (application).
These practice materials for Phonemic Awareness have been designed and implemented successfully using Precision Teaching. When you employ Precision Teaching in practice sessions, your students and you will have fun learning, enjoy joint decision making and achieve learning success.