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 22, 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.

Genres in Children's Literature Based on the work of
Rebecca J. Lukens

Realism Animal Realism Historical Fiction Sports Stories
Formula Fiction - Mysteries

Fantasy Fantastic Stories High Fantasy Science Fiction

Traditional Literature Fables Folktales Myths Legends Folk
Epics     

Poetry

Classics

Realism

Realism means that a story is possible, although not
necessarily probable. Realistic stories have in common
several characteristics: they are fictional narratives
with characters who are involved in some kind of action
that holds our interest, set in some place and time.

Subgenres of Realism

Animal realism deals accurately with animals, telling the
details of their appearances, their habitats, and their
life cycles. Example: The Incredible Journey by Shiela
Burnford. The three pets that determinedly battle with
nature to return to their masters through the wilds of
Canada. Another example: Farley Mowat's Owls in the
Family. Billy, a human character, telling a story about
owls.

Historical fiction is when the protagonist has universal
human traits, but is a product of the time and place.
History presents facts. To turn facts into fiction, the
writer must combine imagination with fact, bringing about
an itegrated story with a fictional protagonist in a
suspenseful plot. Sometimes little is known of the period,
and at other times much is known; it is possible to write
historical fiction about the Vikings, like Hakon of
Rogen's Saga by Erik Haugaard as well as about the
American colonies, like The Witch of Blackbird Pond by
Elizabeth Speare.

Sports stories are with well-developed characters
struggling with personal issues and discovering the forces
and choices they must confront. Because children take gym
classes, watch televised sports, and are involved in
organized sports after school, sport is part of their
lives. A sport story of excellent quality is Bruce
Brooks's The Moves Make the Man.

Formula fiction stories follow distinct patterns. A
popular type of formula fiction are Mysteries and
Thrillers. Mystery stories are set in any time, historical
or futuristic, as well as the present. They rely for
suspense upon unexplained events and actions that are
sometimes, by story's end, resolved or explained by
reasonable and carefully detected discoveries.

Fantasy

Fantasy, in the phrase of Coleridge, requires "the willing
suspension of disbelief." The writer of fantasy creates
another world for characters and readers, asking the
readers believe this other world could and does exist
within the framework of the book. 

Subgenres of Fantasy

Fantastic stories are stories that are realistic in most
details but still requiring us to willingly suspend our
disbelief. Examples of such fantasy are Borrowers books of
Mary Norton, showing the daily lives of tiny people who
face everyday problems like our own and make discoveries
about fear of the unknown and about the disruption of
family life through greed. Another example is Virginia
Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, in which
everything seems realistic except the appearance of
ghostlike Brother Rush. Tree is convinced he is the ghost
of her uncle, and that he takes her into the past to
reveal details about her father and mother.  Other
fantastic stories are about characters that are not people
but are represented as people because they talk or live in
houses like ours, have feelings like our own, or lead
lives like those of human beings such as Hans Christian
Andersen's The Ugly Duckling and E.B. White's Charlotte's
Web, or Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Their
themes are about human life: Growing up is fraught with
trauma; no one appreciates the humble; a community
supports its members, no matter how foolish. 

High fantasy is primarily characterized by its focus on
the conflict between good and evil. If it is successful,
it captures our belief in two major ways: first, by the
internal consistency of the new world, like the categories
or classes of small, nonhuman beings in The Lord of the
Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein; and second, by the protagonist's
belief in his or her experience.

Science fiction is a type of fantasy, and it is often
difficult to decide whether a particular work is pure
fantasy or science fiction. Science fiction usually
stresses scientific laws and technological inventions-like
gravity and the speed of light and the contrivances with
which to deal with these forces and limitations. In Susan
Beth Pfeffer's Future Foward, Scott and Kelly, by
traveling back in time, save their neighbor Pop from being
injured in a robbery of his store.

Traditional Literature

The term "traditional" implies that the form comes to us
from the ordinary person, an anonymous storyteller, and
exists orally rather than in writing-at least until some
collector finds records, and publishes the stories or
rhymes, thus setting them into temporary form.

Subgenre's of Traditional Literature

The fable is a very brief story, usually with animal
characters, that points clearly to a moral or lesson. The
moral, an explicit and didactic or preachy theme, is
usually included at the end of the story and is the reason
for the existence of the fable. The fable makes visible
and objective some lesson like that we see in The Tortoise
and the Hare: slow but sure wins the race. Everything in
the fable exists to make an abstract point, to make a
lesson clear, as clear as the moral in The Milkmaid who
dreamily drops her basket of eggs on the way to the market
: don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Folktales rely on flat characters, bad ones and good ones,
easily recognized. Since folktales were heard by the
teller and then retold in the teller's own words, there
was hardly time for subtle character development. Stock
characters, like the fairy godmother and the wicked
stepmother in Cinderella frequently appear. Conflicts are
often between people or personified animals in person-
versus-person conflict, like Jack and the ogre in Jack and
the Beanstalk. In Eurpoean tales, incidents can occur
singly, in threes as they do in The Billy Goats Gruff.
Point of view is rarely first person, since the tales are
told about flat characters in fantastic situations. Tone
varies; it may be sentimental as in Beauty and the Beast,
objective as in The Little Red Hen, or humorous as in The
Squire's Bride.

Myths are stories that originate in the beliefs of nations
and races and present episodes in which supernatural
forces operate. Because they, too, are handed down by word
of mouth, they have no right or wrong form. Myths, like
that of the god Thor and his hammer of thunder, are
stories that interpret natural phenomena.

Legends are similar to myths because both are traditional
narratives of a people; sometimes the two subgenres are
interwoven. Legends, however, often have more historical
truth and less reliance upon the supernatural. Although
there was a King Arthur, most stories about him are not
historical truth but legend. The grandeur of the legend is
maintained in The Legend of King Arthur as it is retold by
Robin Lister, beginning with Arthur's pulling the sword
from the stone and setting up the Round Table, to his love
and loss of Guinevere and his final departure for the
magic isle of Avalon. 

The folk epic is a long narrative poem of unknown
authorship about an outstanding or royal character in a
series of adventures related to that heroic central
figure. This character or hero is, like Beowulf, larger
than life, grand in all proportions, and superhuman in
physical and moral qualities. Few retellers are so
masterful as Rosemary Sutcliff, who tells of Finn MacCool
and of the Hound of Ulster.

Poetry

Poetry, a kind of imaginative and artistic writing, can
also be called a genre of literature. A lyric, or
"personal poem" may have balladlike qualities-a refrain,
for example-and a narrative may have lyric or songlike
passages. Compactness is essential to poetry to make words
say much more than literal or denotative meaning. 

Classics

Classics are books that have worn well, attracting readers
from one generation to the next. They cross all genre
lines; they are historical fiction and high fantasy. The
Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnet, after a
generation of being little read have returned to become
regarded as classics. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
remains an incomparable work of nonsense; readers have
never outgrown Carroll's wit, and his playful
inventiveness remains unsurpassed. Another classic is E.B.
White's finest novel, Charlotte's Web. White's thorough
portrayal of character and his choice of life-and-death
conflict, his affectionately humorous tone, and his
universal themes about friendship, satisfaction, and death
are elements that identify classics.