Literacy Trends in Phonemic Awareness, Research Paper Example

Literacy Trends In Phonemic Awareness and Reading Comprehension

Teaching phonemic awareness and reading comprehension are crucial parts of improving the overall outcomes of language and reading development in elementary schools. The U.S. Department of Education (2002) determined phonemic awareness education as one of the main components of an effective reading program. Likewise, comprehension is linked to vocabulary development, word recognition, and general reading quality development.  Several studies and research papers have been devoted to identifying the most successful approaches to this aspect of teaching reading.

Literacy Trends

According to the NEPS Guide (2012), teachers should implement a structured reading instruction approach in the classroom. Phonemic awareness and comprehension are essential elements of teaching students to read and developing their language skills. The guide also confirms that the structured reading instruction approach does not only have a positive impact on children’s ability to learn to read, but their overall learning outcomes as well. The skill of reading is used throughout K1-K3 curriculum; even higher education. Therefore, building up a structure that develops solid phonemic recognition skills, blending, vocabulary and comprehension goes a lot further than literacy skills.

The importance of phonemic awareness and reading comprehension.

Antonacci & O’Callaghan (2012) state that the role of phonemic awareness goes beyond reading. It makes teacher instruction more effective, supports comprehension and the understanding of texts, as well as spoken language. The authors implicate that “phonemic

awareness and letter knowledge are key predictors to students’ success in learning toread”. (p. 1.) The article also suggests that phonemic awareness should be treated as both a skill and an “understanding”. (p. 1.)

Pikulski & Chard (2003) states that building upon phonemic awareness, students later develop the skills that enable them to understand the meaning of the words and correctly interpret them. Young children move from fully alphabetic stages of learning to read to the skill of applying their alphabetic and phonemic knowledge for recognizing text and making sense of words, structures. Through learning spelling patterns and words, suffixes, syllables, they later form the ability to spell, resulting in a greater reading fluency, However, without learning to recognize the patterns in texts, based on the typical role of a word in a sentence or text, the purpose of suffixes, reading comprehension development will stagnate. Reading comprehension should be based on strong phonemic awareness, vocabulary and recognition skills. Therefore, the reasoning of the structural approach recommendation of the National Reading Panel (Shannan, 2006) is confirmed by Pikulski & Chard (2003, p. 6.) as follows: “students who lack the necessary foundations for developing decoding skills are in no position to read…”

National Reading Panel dimensions. The National Reading Panel (Shannan, 2006) created a panel report that is designed to guide teachers in teaching reading in elementary schools. According to the report, phonemic awareness is “the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds within words” (p. 5). This capability developed at an early age can help students read, understand and recognize the words, form the sounds correctly and spelling as well. Further, the author also confirms that learning phonics without the support of phonemic awareness is more difficult. The report (Shannan, 2006) also creates a developmental sequence for early education phonemic awareness. While only a few children develop this skill by the age of 3, most of them are fully competent at phonemic awareness by the age of 8. Further, it is proven that there is a close connection between phonemic awareness and achievements in reading.

The same study (Shannan, 2006) describes reading comprehension as “the act of understanding and interpreting the information within the text” (p. 28). According to the findings of the National Reading Panel, comprehension strategy instruction (single or comprehensive) were effective in elementary schools.

Technologies, emerging tools, assessments and instruction approaches.

The National Reading Technical Assistance Center (Butler et al., 2010) determine the essential dimensions for the assessment of fluency as measuring oral reading accuracy, reading rate, quality of oral reading and reading comprehension. In order to improve student reading outcomes Pikulski & Chard (2003) recommend the use of the following methods to develop the foundations of fluency: modeled reading, repeated reading of familiar text, wide independent reading, coached reading of appropriately selected materials, chunking of text and word reading practice.

It is also important to mention that some authors (Ryder, Tunmer & Gates, 2008) look at phonemic awareness instruction tools as a way of supporting reading materials and as a part of an intervention plan designed for struggling readers. Antonacci & O’Callaghan (2012) determine the most important tasks associated with the skill of phonemic awareness as follows: phoneme isolation, phoneme identity, phoneme categorization, phoneme blending and segmentation. Further, the authors state that young children start identifying the beginning and ending of the words much earlier, while they struggle to recognize the middle phonemes. Therefore, in line with the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (Shannan, 2006), there is a need for a systematic, integrated approach in teaching phonemic awareness. One of the most successful strategies used in classrooms to support phonemic awareness is to use chants, poems, songs, implementing metalinguistic approaches of language development strategies. (Antonacci & O’Callaghan, 2012, p. 3) The use of interactive classroom games, such as sound tiles and computer-based skill development software.

Butler et al. (2010) determines the most successful teacher approaches to teaching comprehension in elementary schools as: small-group instruction, skill instruction and comprehension, teacher modeling, and continuous teacher coaching. Reviewing the multiple strategy instruction method, including motivation support. By providing children with choices, introducing interesting texts and hands-on activities in the classroom, students’ comprehension outcomes can be improved. The higher the number of stimulating tasks is the more positive the impact on reading comprehension quality will be. Whole-class activities, same-age and cross-age peer tutoring and coaching under teacher supervision could also result in great improvement. Further, the introduction of text structure, the use of technology (including brief videos about phonics, words and their meanings), multi-sensory learning approaches can support children in developing reading comprehension skills. In relation with at-risk learners, the authors note that the creation of “reading clubs” and think-aloud procedures and reduced teacher-student ratios.

Conclusion

The above review of methods and recommendations to teach phonemic awareness and reading comprehension has revealed that it is necessary to developed a structured instruction (Shannan, 2006)  approach and build skills that enable children to move to the next stage of reading fluency (Pikulski & Chard, 2003). Teaching strategies should be based on thorough assessment of needs, intervention designed for struggling and linguistically diverse readers, as well as interactive games, the introduction of challenging, motivating texts. This way, the best reading fluency outcomes can be achieved, improving future learning achievements for all children.

References

Antonacci, P. & O’Callaghan, C. (2012) Section One. Essential Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness. In: Promoting literacy development. Antonacci & O’Callaghan. Sage Publication.

Burns, P., Roe, B. & Smith, S. (2012). Teaching reading in today’s elementary schools (11th ed.). Wadworth Cengage Learning: Belmont, CA.

Butler, S., Urrutia, K., Buenger, A. & Hunt, M. (2010) A review of the current research on comprehension instruction. National Reading Technical Assistance Center.

NEPS (2012) Effective interventions for struggling readers. A good practice guide for teachers. National Educational Psychological Service.

Pikulski, J. & Chard, D. (2003) Fluency: The bridge from decoding to Reading comprehension. Current Research in Reading/Language Arts.

Ryder, J. F., Tunner, W. E., & Greaney, K. T. (2008). Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21(4), 349-369

Shannan, T. (2006) The National Reading Panel Report. Practical advice for teachers. Learning Point Associates.