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- Phonological awareness is predictive of reading achievement.
- Students with reading disabilities are generally deficient in phonological awareness.
- Phonological awareness can be strengthened through intensive, explicit instruction.
- Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate different sizes of sound units within words, including syllables, rhyming units, and phonemes.
- Phonemic awareness is the “explicit understanding that words are composed of segments of sound smaller than a syllable as well as the knowledge, or awareness, of the distinctive features of individual phonemes themselves” (Torgesen, 1999, p. 129).
- Phonics is the systematic way that specific letters or graphemes are used to represent the different phonemes in spoken words.
- Phonological awareness helps students understand the alphabetic principle.
- Phonological awareness enables students to notice how letters represent sounds.
- Phonological awareness gives students a way to approach sounding out words.
- Three research-based activities that help students strengthen phonological awareness are comparing sounds, synthesizing sounds, and analyzing sounds.
- Sound comparison activities include sound judgement and sound production.
- In sound synthesis, or blending activities, students take separate sound units and blend them together.
- Sound analysis skills include segmenting, sound deletion, and sound manipulation.
- Segmenting sounds involves taking apart the sounds in a word.
- Sound deletion is removing a specific sound unit.
- Sound manipulation is substituting one particular sound for another within a word or adding another sound unit to a word.
- Dimensions that contribute to phonological difficulty include size of sound unit, number of sound units, position of sound unit, and phonological properties.
- Vowel sounds are often difficult for students to identify.
- When teaching phonological awareness activities, begin with the easiest types of tasks and move to the more difficult ones.
- Key considerations for group instruction: use group responses two-thirds of the time; answers should be short and the same; instructors should practice; students should be carefully monitored.
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