CSET Practice Test On Reading, Language, and Literature

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment
Guidelines David J. Chard and Shirley V. Dickson May 1999
Intervention in School and Clinic Volume 34, Number 5 pp.
261-270

No area of reading research has gained as much attention
over the past two decades as phonological awareness.
Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research
on phonological awareness is that critical levels of
phonological awareness can be developed through carefully
planned instruction, and this development has a
significant influence on children's reading and spelling
achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant,
1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor,
Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993). Despite the promising
findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and
many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist.
For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine
how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for
whom. Moreover, many people do not understand the
difference between phonological awareness, phonemic
awareness, and phonics. Still others are uncertain about
the relationship between phonological awareness and early
reading.

What Is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the understanding of different
ways that oral language can be divided into smaller
components and manipulated. Spoken language can be broken
down in many different ways, including sentences into
words and words into syllables (e. g., in the word simple,
/sim/ and /ple/), onset and rime (e. g., in the word
broom, /br/ and /oom/), and individual phonemes (e.g., in
the word hamper, /h/, /a/, /m/, /p/, /er/). Manipulating
sounds includes deleting, adding, or substituting
syllables or sounds (e.g., say can; say it without the
/k/; say can with /m/ instead of /k/). Being
phonologically aware means having a general understanding
at all of these levels.

Operationally, skills that represent children's
phonological awareness lie on a continuum of complexity.
At the less complex end of the continuum are activities
such as initial rhyming and rhyming songs as well as
sentence segmentation that demonstrates an awareness that
speech can be broken down into individual words. At the
center of the continuum are activities related to
segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables
into words. Next are activities such as segmenting words
into onsets and rimes and blending onsets and rimes into
words.

Finally, the most sophisticated level of phonological
awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the
understanding that words are made up of individual sounds
or phonemes and the ability to manipulate these phonemes
either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual
phonemes within words to create new words. The recent
National Research Council report on reading distinguishes
phonological awareness from phonemic awareness in this
way: The term phonological awareness refers to a general
appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from
their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding
that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes,
this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic
awareness. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51)

Throughout this article we will use the term phonological
awareness to mean an awareness at all levels from basic
rhyme to phonemic awareness. Only in some specific
instances will we use the term phonemic awareness.

At this point, it is important to note that phonological
awareness differs distinctly from phonics. Phonological
awareness involves the auditory and oral manipulation of
sounds. Phonics is the association of letters and sounds
to sound out written symbols (Snider, 1995); it is a
system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic
principle, a system of which a central component is the
teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of
letters and their pronunciations (Adams, 1990).
Phonological awareness and phonics are intimately
intertwined, but they are not the same. This relationship
will be further described in the following section.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological
awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme
and alliteration. For many children, this begins very
early in the course of their language development and is
likely facilitated by being read to from books that are
based on rhyme or alliteration, such as the B Book by
Stanley and Janice Berenstain, 1997, or Each Peach Pear
Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, 1979, (Bryant, MacLean,
Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). As children grow older,
however, their basic phonological awareness does not
necessarily develop into the more sophisticated phonemic
awareness. In fact, developing the more complex phonemic
awareness is difficult for most children and very
difficult for some children (Adams et al., 1996). However,
it is a child's phonemic awareness on entering school that
is most closely related to success in learning to read
(Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).

Why Is Phonological Awareness So Important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the
alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written
language. Specifically, developing readers must be
sensitive to the internal structure of words in order to
benefit from formal reading instruction (Adams, 1990;
Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). If
children understand that words can be divided into
individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into
words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read
and build words. As a consequence of this relationship,
phonological awareness in kindergarten is a strong
predictor of later reading success (Ehri & Wilce, 1980,
1985; Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, &
Hughes, 1987). Researchers have shown that this strong
relationship between phonological awareness and reading
success persists throughout school (Calfee, Lindamood, &
Lindamood, 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995).

Over the past 2 decades, researchers have focused
primarily on the contribution of phonological awareness to
reading acquisition. However, the relationship between
phonological awareness and reading is not unidirectional
but reciprocal in nature (Stanovich, 1986). Early reading
is dependent on having some understanding of the internal
structure of words, and explicit instruction in
phonological awareness skills is very effective in
promoting early reading. However, instruction in early
reading-specifically, explicit instruction in letter-sound
correspond ence-appears to strengthen phonological
awareness, and in particular the more sophisticated
phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

Many children with learning disabilities demonstrate
difficulties with phonological awareness skills (Shaywitz,
1996). However, many other children have such difficulty
without displaying other characteristics of learning
disabilities. Although a lack of phonemic awareness
correlates with difficulty in acquiring reading skills,
this lack should not necessarily be misconstrued as a
disability (Fletcher et al., 1994). More important,
children who lack phonemic awareness can be identified,
and many of them improve their phonemic awareness with
instruction. Furthermore, although explicit instruction in
phonological awareness is likely to improve early reading
for children who lack phonemic awareness, most children
with or without disabilities are likely to benefit from
such instruction (R. E. O'Connor, personal communication,
June 2 2, 1998).

In short, success in early reading depends on achieving a
certain level of phonological awareness. Moreover,
instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for
most children and seems to be critical for others, but the
degree of explicitness and the systematic nature of
instruction may need to vary according to the learner's
skills (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998), especially for
students at risk for reading difficulties. With this in
mind, we discuss documented approaches to teaching
phonological awareness.

Teaching Phonological Awareness

There is ample evidence that phonological awareness
training is beneficial for beginning readers starting as
early as age 4 (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne &
Fielding-Barnsley, 1991). In a review of phonological
research, Smith et al. (1998) concluded that phonological
awareness can be developed before reading and that it
facilitates the subsequent acquisition of reading skills.
Documented effective approaches to teaching phonological
awareness generally include activities that are age
appropriate and highly engaging. Instruction for 4-year-
olds involves rhyming activities, whereas kindergarten and
first-grade instruction includes blending and segmenting
of words into onset and rime, ultimately advancing to
blending, segmenting, and deleting phonemes. This pattern
of instruction follows the continuum of complexity
illustrated in Figure 1. Instruction frequently involves
puppets who talk slowly to model word segmenting or magic
bridges that are crossed when children say the correct
word achieved by synthesizing isolated phonemes. Props
such as colored cards or pictures can be used to make
abstract sounds more concrete. During the last few years,
publishers have produced multiple programs in phonological
awareness, some of which are based on research. Two of
these programs are Ladders to Literacy (O'Connor, Notari-
Syverson, & Vadasy, 1998) and Teaching Phonemic Awareness
(Adams et al., 1996). Below are illustrations of phonemic
awareness lessons that are based on examples from these
programs.

Instructional activity that teaches synthesis of phonemes
into words.

Guess-the-Word Game

Objective: Students will be able to blend and identify a
word that is stretched out into its component sounds.

Materials Needed: Picture cards of objects that students
are likely to recognize such as: sun, bell, fan, flag,
snake, tree, book, cup, clock, plane

Activity: Place a small number of picture cards in front
of children. Tell them you are going to say a word using
"Snail Talk" a slow way of saying words (e.g.,
/fffffllllaaaag/). They have to look at the pictures and
guess the word you are saying. It is important to have the
children guess the answer in their head so that everyone
gets an opportunity to try it. Alternate between having
one child identify the word and having all children say
the word aloud in chorus to keep children engaged.

An Instructional activity that teaches segmentation at
multiple phonological levels.

Segmentation Activities

Objectives: Students will be able to segment various parts
of oral language.

Activity: a. Early in phonological awareness instruction,
teach children to segment sentences into individual words.
Identify familiar short poems such as "I scream you scream
we all scream for ice cream!" Have children clap their
hands with each word. b. As children advance in their
ability to manipulate oral language, teach them to segment
words into syllables or onsets and rimes. For example,
have children segment their names into syllables: e.g.,
Ra-chel, Al-ex-an-der, and Rod-ney. C. When children have
learned to remove the first phoneme (sound) of a word,
teach them to segment short words into individual
phonemes: e.g., s-u-n, p-a-t, s-t-o-p. 

Figure 4. An instructional activity that teaches phoneme
deletion and substitution.

Change-A-Name Game

Objective: Students will be able to recognize words when
the teacher says the word with the first sound removed.

Activity: Have students sit in a circle on the floor.
Secretly select one child and change their name by
removing the first sound of the name. For example, change
Jennifer to Ennifer or change William to Illiam. As you
change the name, the children have to identify who you are
talking about.

Extension Ideas: As children become better at identifying
the child's name without the first sound, encourage them
to try removing the beginning sounds of words and
pronounce the words on their own.

After children learn how to remove sounds, teach them to
substitute the beginning sound in their name with a new
sound. The teacher can model this ,beginning with easier
sounds (common sounds of consonnant s, e.g., /m/, /t/,
/p/) and advancing to more complex sounds and sound blends
(e.g., /ch/, /st/). 

Most early phonological awareness activities are taught in
the absence of print, but there is increasing evidence
that early writing activities, including spelling words as
they sound (i.e., invented or temporary spelling), appear
to promote more refined phonemic awareness (Ehri, 1998;
Treiman, 1993). It may be that during spelling and writing
activities children begin to combine their phonological
sensitivity and print knowledge and apply them to building
words. Even if children are unable to hold and use a pen
or pencil, they can use letter tiles or word processing
programs to practice their spelling.

Instruction in phonological awareness can be fun,
engaging, and age appropriate, but the picture is not as
simple as it seems. First, evidence suggests that
instruction in the less complex phonological skills such
as rhyming or onset and rime may facilitate instruction in
more complex skills (Snider, 1995) without directly
benefitting reading acquisition (Gough, 1998). Rather,
integrated instruction in segmenting and blending seems to
provide the greatest benefit to reading acquisition (e.g.,
Snider, 1995). Second, although most children appear to
benefit from instruction in phonological awareness, in
some studies there are students who respond poorly to this
instruction or fail to respond at all. For example, in one
training study that provided 8 weeks of instruction in
phonemic awareness, the majority of children demonstrated
significant growth, whereas 30% of the at-risk students
demonstrated no measurable growth in phonological
awareness (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). Similarly,
in a 12-week training in blending and segmenting for small
groups (3-4 children) in 2-minute sessions four times a
week, about 30% of the children still obtained very low
scores on the segmenting posttest and 10 % showed only
small improvements on the blending measures (Torgesen et
al., 1994).

Torgesen et al. (1994) concluded that training for at-risk
children must be more explicit or more intense than what
is typically described in the research literature if it is
to have a substantial impact on the phonological awareness
of many children with severe reading disabilities.
Therefore, we recommend two tiers of instruction. The
first tier of instruction is the highly engaging, age-
appropriate instruction that we introduced earlier. The
second tier of instruction includes more intensive and
strategic instruction in segmenting and blending at the
phoneme level (e.g., Snider, 1995).

Beside content, another issue that requires attention in
phonological awareness instruction is curriculum design.
From research, we are able to deduce principles for
effectively designing phonological awareness instruction.
These design principles apply for all students but are
particularly important for students who respond poorly to
instruction. In the design of phonological awareness
instruction, the following general principles increase
students' success (Chard & Osborn, 1998):

* Start with continuous sounds such as /s/, /m/, and /f/
that are easier to pronounce than stop sounds such as /p/,
/b/, and /k/;

* Carefully model each activity as it is first introduced;

* Move from larger units (words, onset-rime) to smaller
units (individual phonemes);

* Move from easier tasks (e.g., rhyming) to more complex
tasks (e.g., blending and segmenting); and,

* Consider using additional strategies to help struggling
early readers manipulate sounds. These strategies may
include using concrete objects (e.g., blocks, bingo chips)
to represent sounds.

Research suggests that by the end of kindergarten children
should be able to demonstrate phonemic blending and
segmentation and to make progress in using sounds to spell
simple words. Achieving these goals requires that teachers
be knowledgeable about effective instructional approaches
to teaching phonological awareness and be aware of the
ongoing progress for each of their students. In the next
section, we describe effective ways to assess phonological
skills and monitor progress in phonological awareness.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David J. Chard, PhD, is an assistant professor of special
education at The University of Texas at Austin. His
current interests include research in professional
developmental in early reading and analysis of children's
discourse in mathematics classrooms. Shirley V Dickson,
PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at
Northern Illinois University. Her interests are in
research on phonological awareness and reading instruction
and collaboration models in special education. Address:
David J. Chard, University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of
Special Education, SZB 408, Austin, TX 78712.

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29.

A RUN-ON SENTENCE (sometimes called a "fused sentence")
has at least two parts, either one of which can stand by
itself (in other words, two independent clauses), but the
two parts have been put together instead of being properly
connected.

The CSET may attempt to trick you by having a run-on
sentence that is very short.

Remember, the length of a sentence has nothing to do with
whether a sentence is a run-on or not. 

Example

The sun is high, put on some sunblock.

When two independent clauses are connected by only a
comma, they constitute a run-on sentence that is called a
comma-splice. The example above is a comma-splice. When
you use a comma to connect two independent clauses, it
must be accompanied by a conjunction (and, but, for, nor,
yet, or, so). 

Example

The sun is high, so put on some sunscreen.

Run-on sentences happen typically under the following
three circumstances:

1) When an independent clause gives an order or directive
based on what was said in the prior independent clause: 

Example

This next chapter has a lot of difficult information in
it, you should start studying right away.

(We could put a period where that comma is and start a new
sentence. A semicolon might also work there.) 

2) When two independent clauses are connected by a
transitional expression (conjunctive adverb) such as
however, moreover, nevertheless. 

Example

Mr. Nguyen has sent his four children to ivy-league
colleges, however, he has sacrificed his health working
day and night in that dusty bakery.

(Again, where that first comma appears, we could have used
either a period - and started a new sentence - or a
semicolon.) 

3) When the second of two independent clauses contains a
pronoun that connects it to the first independent clause. 

Example

This computer doesn't make sense to me, it came without a
manual. 

(Although these two clauses are quite brief, and the ideas
are closely related, this is a run-on sentence. We need a
period where that comma now stands.) 

Most of those computers in the Learning Assistance Center
are broken already, this proves my point about American
computer manufacturers. 

(Again, two nicely related clauses, incorrectly connected
- a run-on. Use a period to cure this sentence.)