Beginning Reading

Phonemic Awareness

One of the most compelling and well-established findings in beginning reading research is the important relation between phonemic awareness and reading acquisition. Phonemic awareness refers to the conscious understanding and knowledge that words consist of separate sounds or phonemes and the subsequent ability to manipulate these individual sound units. In addition, beginning readers also must learn that individual sounds combine to make up a word. Moreover, they must recognize that the same sounds are found in many different words (e.g., the /sssss/ in sit has the same sound as the /sssss/ in miss). Those phonological awareness skills are crucial for reading acquisition and must be taught.

In early phonemic awareness instruction, students do not see written words or letters; rather, they listen and respond to what they hear. Phonemic awareness involves activities such as the following:

• 1.
  Isolating beginning, middle, and ending sounds (e.g., “What is the first sound in rose?” – /rrrrr/)
• 2.
  Orally blending sounds to make a word (e.g., “What word do you have if you put these sounds together: /c/, /aaaa/, /t/?” – cat)
• 3.
  Segmenting a word into sounds (e.g., “Say the sounds in the word sat.” – /ssss/, /aaaa/, /t/)
• 4.
  Manipulating sounds within a word (e.g., “What word do you have if you change the /ssss/ in sat to /mmmm/?” – mat)

Phonics

The second big idea in beginning reading is alphabetic understanding, often referred to as phonics. Alphabetic understanding refers to a student's understanding that words are composed of individual letters and is concerned with the mapping of print to speech, or the establishment of a clear link between a letter and a sound. A beginning reader must come to know each letter as a discrete, self-contained visual pattern that can be printed or pointed to.

The importance of developing an awareness and facility with mapping sounds to letters is underscored by the apparent limitation of whole-word identification strategies. In learning to identify printed words represented by an alphabet, facility in whole-word naming will rapidly reach its limit unless accompanied by a facility in applying the alphabetic code, or phonics skills, to “sound out” unknown words. To read words, a reader must see a word and access its meaning in memory. However, to get from the word to its meaning, beginning readers first must apply alphabetic understanding and phonics skills to decode the word. The reader

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