Phonological / Phonemic awareness

Phonological / Phonemic awareness

1. Ensure it is an integral part of communication.

2. develop intelligibility (the degree to which the learner’s speech can be understood in different language situations) increase communication ability and develop increased self-confidence in speaking the language and listening and understanding the language

3. Plan the phonological awareness experiences.

   • The activities need to be fun.
   • Utilize all the activities they are already familiar with.
   • Think about how you can involve parents/carers in this. In some countries, students’ parents/carers may not know a single word in English. However, depending on the cost and the effort you are prepared to put into it, you could record this week’s sounds onto copies of CDs or memory sticks that the children take home with them and the parents/carers support them in the sound activity practice.

4. Phonemic Awareness: relates to the correspondences between letters or groups of letters and the sounds they represent. Learners with phonemic awareness can break up words into their different sounds. They can also join sounds together to make words.

   • Way learners show phonemic awareness
     • recognizing words, in a set of words, which start with the same sound
     • identifying and speaking the first or last sound in a word
     • linking, or blending, the separate sounds in a word to say the word
   • Key points to remember when enhancing their phonemic awareness
     • Always remember that the end goal is the understanding of meaning, not phonemic awareness.
     • In some schools, a full phonemic awareness approach early in the program may be the norm.
     • Some teachers, for various reasons, often overemphasize the role of phonemic awareness.
     • Never ask learners to decode a word where they don't know its meaning.
     • Phonemic awareness instruction should be tackled briskly and relevantly. It should always take place in activities that are relevant and have a purpose.
     • It should emphasize chunks and patterns in words that learners will recognize when reading other words with similar chunks and patterns.
   • Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Activities
     • Listen and imitate: This is a technique in which learners listen to a model (you or a recording) and repeat or imitate it,
     • Minimal pairs: Seeing if learners can distinguish between minimal pairs. A minimal pair is simply a pair of words that differ in only one phoneme (each meaningful sound in a language). Examples of common minimal pairs are: ship/sheep
     • Contextualized minimal pairs: In this technique, you establish the context/setting, such as a blacksmith shoeing a horse, and present key vocabulary. Learners are then trained to respond to a sentence stem with the appropriate, meaningful response (a or b): Sentence stem: The blacksmith (a. hits / b. heats) the horseshoe.
     • Visual aids: For sound formation, it may help to use a sketch of the mouth or a color wall chart, and to describe the pronunciation of a sound in terms of lips, tongue, teeth, etc.
     • Tongue twisters: This is a technique from speech correction strategies for native speakers. One well-known example is: She sells seashells by the seashore. You could make up your own twisters. Rhymes and jingles are also effective, as are chants
     • Drilling: These can include imitation drills, with repetition of sounds, words, and sentences and varied repetition of drills (varied speed, volume, and mood)
     • Linking: Trying to link the sound to a word that they already know. For example, they may find the sound in cheese quite easy, but then find it quite tricky when it appears in the middle of a word like purchase. Reminding them of the sound in the word cheese will help them to form it correctly in purchase.
     • Same or different: Read a short list of three words to the learners and ask them to tell you if you are reading the same word, or if there is a different word in the list. If the words are all the same, they say same, and if there is a different sound, they say different.
     • Stop me: Very similar to the example above, except that the learners stop you when you use a different sound, e.g. ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, sheep
     • Listen!: Place minimal pairs in sentences so that the learners listen carefully and decide on the word being used.
     • Pictures: Pictures can be very effective with learners of all ages. The learners can have pairs of pictures in front of them; e.g. ship and sheep.

5. Phonological awareness is the ability to focus on the sounds of a language. It’s about making your students aware that words are made up of individual and different-sized sounds.