Phonological awareness
A balanced approach to the teaching of reading
It is now widely accepted that there is no one single method of teaching reading that works for all children or for all aspects of literacy development. A literacy programme should promote the development and teaching of the following four key aspects.
- Decoding
- Reading for meaning and understanding
- Attitude and motivation
- Awareness of the author's craft
Decoding
Decoding involves the translation of written symbols into meaningful sounds and words.
The English language is renowned for the difficulties it can cause for literacy learners. There are many irregularities in letter patterns and sequences. These have to be learned to enable the successful development of proficient decoding skills for reading and encoding skills for spelling. Cueing strategies can help all readers to work out words they do not instantly know or recognise. Cueing strategies are needed for all readers until they have achieved rapid, context-free word recognition.
There are three main cueing strategies to be taught.
- Graphophonic cueing - the matching of written symbols and their sounds. This cueing strategy can only be used effectively for words that are either phonetically regular (e.g. went, ham) or where the phonemic letter patterns within the word are already recognised and known by the reader. The reader must also know how to analyse the word by either phoneme and/or syllable and/or onset and rime and/or morpheme within, for example:
Examples of Graphophonic Cueing peach p/ ea/ ch (phonemes) light l/ ight (onset and rime) antidisestablishmentarianism anti/ dis/ establish/ ment/ arian/ ism (morphemes)
Until this is achievable, the reader has to rely on using aspects of the context to help guess the unknown word. This involves semantic and syntactic cueing. - Semantic cueing - using the meaning of the context to approximate a guess about the unknown word. The written meaning, the illustrations and prior knowledge of the topic and of the genre can all help provide semantic cues for the reader. This can often be further informed or confirmed by also using some graphophonic cueing (often the initial or final phoneme or known letter strings within the word).
- Syntactic cueing I - using the grammatical significance of the word to help make a guess. The reader's implicit knowledge of spoken and written language feeds this skill. Either or both of the other cueing strategies will also be likely to be used to support the guess.
For example:
The _______ galloped away.
Using syntactic awareness, the reader would most likely to choose a noun. A verb would not be selected because it would not follow 'The' and there is already a verb in the sentence clause. An adjective would not be chosen because there is no noun for it to qualify.
Needless to say, the reader would be most unlikely to use this terminology to work it out, or even be conscious of the metacognitive process involved, since syntactic awareness often remains implicit until the reader is taught how to make it explicit. This involves knowledge about language or KAL in Language 5-14 (SOED, 1991).
Using semantic awareness, the reader will likely guess 'horse' because of the meaning in relation to the verb 'galloped'.
If the reader also used graphophonic awareness, using at least the onset of the word ('st'), to help decode alongside the other cues, then stallion would be the likely guess.
Expert readers can use all three strategies as and when appropriate and know why they are using them. Semantic and syntactic awareness are also very important to comprehension. All three strategies should then be taught, as HMI recognises:
An approach to the teaching of word recognition which focuses children's attention exclusively on only one kind of information will not encourage the development of the parallel processing of different kinds of information that characterises fluent word recognition.
The concept of 'phonological awareness' is at the heart of the process of learning to read at the first stages. Many local authorities have produced learning and teaching resources in this area and some examples are given below. Further information regarding phonics can be found in Issues.
Phonological Awareness Activities Handbook
Dundee City Council, along with Dundee Healthcare NHS Trust, has produced a large selection of activities to assist children develop their awareness of sounds. This is an extract from the READ Project, which encompasses the main early intervention activity in Dundee.
Phonological Awareness Screening Pack
Extract from Dundee City Council 'Phonological Awareness Screening' pack.
Developing Literacy in the Early Stages
Extract from Glasgow City Council's pack giving a summarised definition of phonological awareness and of phonemic awareness.
Awareness Raising
Booklet giving North Lanarkshire's view on this aspect of learning.