What does it mean to be a fluent reader? Clearly, both decoding and comprehension play important roles in this process. In this piece, we take a brief look at the role played by phonological awareness in learning to read.

It might seem that young learners pick up spoken languages effortlessly. But they may perceive this as an uninterrupted speech stream, and may not be aware that it can be analysed into smaller units of sound. According to a vast body of research conducted on English and other alphabetic scripts, it is important that young children be made aware that oral speech can be analysed into smaller units of sound. This awareness is broadly called “phonological awareness”, and is considered to be vital to the success of every reader.

What are the units of sound that spoken language comprises? Young learners may slowly become aware (or be made aware) that language consists of words, which can be broken down into syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual phonemes. Some words may sound like other words (i.e., they may rhyme with other words), while some words may start or end the same as other words (for example, both “cat” and “kite” start with the same sound, /k/, and both “cough” and “laugh” end with the same sound /f/). They may notice that both “man” and “fan” share the ending sound –an, while “pot” and “rob” have the same middle sound.

Why is it important that young children become aware of these patterns of sounds in spoken language? This is because it is foundational to learning to read and write the script. Learning to decode the script involves understanding the relationships between sounds and symbols. It is not enough to teach the symbols without also establishing an awareness of how to become aware of, and to manipulate, the sounds.

Therefore, phonological awareness is a critical skill to teach and learn in the early years, and as mentioned earlier, it is a larger umbrella term that has many levels under it - words, syllables and phonemes (the smallest unit of sound). According to Ellery (2007), there is a developmental continuum along which phonological awareness develops in young children – from their becoming aware that spoken speech consists of words, to understanding rhyming, to becoming aware of syllables within words, of onsets and rimes, and finally, phonemic awareness. Let us understand each of the components of this developmental continuum.

Awareness of Words. Initially, young children may not be able to discern individual words in speech, because when we speak, we pause between phrases, not after every single word. For example, in the sentence, “He kept on running”, oral language is likely to sound like this to a child: “He kepton running”. The child may not initially understand that “kept” and “on” are two different words, and not a single one. The ability to segment sentences into component words is, therefore, an important skill that needs to be developed if the child is to make a successful transition from oral speaker to writer.

Awareness of Rhymes. Young children often notice that some words “sound like” others, mostly because they end with similar sounds. Nursery rhymes build upon this emerging capability of young learners. Rhymes not only provide delight and variety in the early language classroom, but give children many opportunities to notice similarities and dissimilarities in how different words sound. Learning to be attentive to these patterns would help them as they transition to the written script.

Awareness of Syllables. Slightly older preschoolers and primary grade children can be made aware of the fact that words can be further broken down into syllables. Being able to hear syllables in words will help children break long words apart and read and spell words by syllable at a later point.

Awareness of Onsets and Rimes. This slightly sophisticated phonological awareness skill is most relevant to learning the English script. In English, five vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w) end up making 17-18 different vocalic sounds. For example, the letter “a” makes very different sounds in “cat”, “cake” and “car”.  How can we teach children the sound of “a”? It seems like an impossible task! However, if we look carefully, the English script has certain regularities that we could teach. The sound of “a” it turns out, is quite stable in these words: cat, bat, mat, sat; and in these words: cake, bake, make, taken, raking; and also in these words: car, far, barred, starring. In short, the sounds of vowels stabilize to a large extent when they are part of a “rime” (not a “rhyme”!).

What is a rime? If we take individual syllables within words, then the rime is the vocalic sound and all that follows it, within that syllable. The onset is what comes at the beginning of the syllable, before the vocalic sound. That sounds complex! But, it is fairly simple. Let’s look at a few examples:

Cat: The vocalic sound /a/ and all that follows it is the rime. What follows /a/? the /t/ sound. Therefore, “at” is the rime. What comes before it is the onset. This is the sound /k/.

Can young children be taught to break up the word “cat” as /k/ - /at/? Of course!

Here are a couple of other examples:

Bake = /b/ (onset) + /ake/ (rime)

Baking = there are two syllables in this word, so first let’s break up the word into syllables = Bake + ing

• Bake = /b/ (onset) + /ake/ (rime)
• ing = (no onset – because there is no sound before the vocalic sound in this word) + /ing/ (rime)

Even before young children learn the script, they can be made aware that parts of some words sound like parts of other words. This would help develop their awareness of rimes!

Awareness of Phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that cannot be broken up any further. For example, the word “cat” has three phonemes - /k/ + /a/ + /t/. No matter how much we try, we cannot break these three sounds down any further. Awareness of phonemes within words is referred to as phonemic awareness, and is the last of the phonological skills to develop in young children. This is because it involves the smallest units of sound, while young children are better at hearing larger chunks. 

In the English script, sounds are represented at the phonemic level. For example, in the word “cat”, the letters, c, a and t, each represent an individual phoneme. In the word “chat”, the letters “ch” come together to make one phoneme /ch/, while a and t represent individual phonemes. For children learning scripts which are like the English script, it is quite critical to be aware of individual phonemes, because, if you cannot hear these sounds, you will not be able to represent them in writing. Research conducted on English shows that phonemic awareness is one of the leading school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read in kindergarten and first grade (Share et al. 1984, in Ehri and Nunes, 2002). We don’t have enough research on the importance of phonemic awareness in learning to decode in Indian scripts, which work a little differently from the English script.^[1]

Before we proceed further, it is very important to understand the difference between Phonological Awareness and Phonics! Phonological Awareness (PA) is a specific set of skill that involves hearing and manipulating sounds in speech. Even young children who have not yet learned the script can be encouraged to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. It involves an awareness of sounds only, even before symbols have been introduced. Phonics, on the other hand, is a method of teaching reading that involves developing an awareness of sound-symbol relationship. For example, while teaching phonological awareness, we could orally present preschool children with a few words and ask them to identify words that begin with the same sound, even if they cannot yet read those words! But when we teach them phonics, we would also ask them to attend to the symbols (letters/aksharas) in front of them and relate the symbols to their sounds. This is why phonological awareness (awareness of sounds) is necessary for learning phonics (sound-symbol relationship), but it is not the same as phonics. For learning phonological awareness, all you need are your ears, while to learn phonics, you need both ears and eyes.

How can we teach phonological awareness to young children?^[2] We now suggest a few tried and tested strategies that you could adopt in your classrooms^[3].

Word Awareness

This activity helps children recognise that a sentence is made up of words.

You will need paper cups with at least 10 counters (these could be candies, dry fruit and nuts or anything the children can eat after the activity).

You first start with counting a number of objects in the classroom – the number of chairs in a row, the number of windows, doors, shelves, tables etc. For each object you count, you pick one candy from the cup and place it before you. For example, if you count three chairs, you pick three candies to represent those three chairs. Then ask the children to put all the candies back into the cup. Now, tell children that they can also count words by picking out a candy from the cup and placing it before them, as you speak a sentence. Speak the sentence normally once. Then repeat it, pausing after each word. The children should pick a candy each time you say a word and pause. Ask them to count the number of candies to decide how many words you spoke. The best way to capture their attention is to use their names in the sentence – I saw Anya in the supermarket yesterday; Nikhil has a bright red cycle; Priya has two sisters.

As a follow up activity, ask children to come up with sentences of their own, and speak it normally and then word by word as their friends count. Pay attention to how the children are pointing out individual words in their sentence. This could be adopted to any Indian language.

Rhymes

These activities help develop an awareness of sounds and a sense that some words end in ways that sound similar.

Rhyming Jar: Make paper strips and write a couple of sentences which end with rhyming words on each, leave the second rhyming word blank. Read out the first sentence and highlight the word that they have to come up with a rhyming word for, by either whispering the word or saying it in an emphatic way. Then read the second sentence and give them enough time to suggest a rhyming word. Here are a couple of examples –

I have a pet cat. He is under the ___ (mat).

This is my bed. I want to paint it ___ (red).

I climbed a tree. I got stung by a ___ (bee)

You could also use nursery rhymes – Macchli Jal Ki Rani Hai (Hindi); Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (English); Thotake Hogo Thimma (Kannada).

Here is another activity. Record a rhyme. Each time, before you play it, call out a word. Ask the children to jump; touch their feet; or clap their hands when they hear a word that rhymes with the word you have called out. For example, before you play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, suggest a word that rhymes with “star”, for example, “far”. When you play it, ask the children to clap when they hear the word that rhymes with it as they listen to the rhyme.

Syllables

Once children are comfortable identifying the number of words in a sentence, and can identify rhyming words and come up with some of their own, we can move on to helping them identify syllables in a word. Cunningham (2005) suggests that the word “syllable” is a bit too much of a jargon, and children may not be able to relate to it. Instead, you could use the word “beat”.

Start with their names – How many beats does the name ANANYA have? They clap for each syllable. The answer is three – An-an-ya – and hence they clap three times. From first names, you could move on to middle and last names. You could do this with words from the stories you read or others they come across – names of animals, flowers, etc.

A follow up activity to make sure the children could get a hang of this is to use this as a fun exercise while taking the attendance. Each time you call out a name, ask them to clap the number of syllables in the name. Another way of doing this is while the students are about to leave after school, you could have them go out in batches – clap once and all the children whose names have single syllables could leave the class; clap twice, children with two syllables in their names leave.

Onsets and Rimes ^[4]

Blending and segmenting are not easy for many children. In general, it is easier for them to segment off the beginning letters – the onset – from the rest of the word – the rime – than it is to separate all the sounds (Cunningham, 2005). This activity works well when you want children to identify the onset and a rime from a word. You could ask them to put these sounds together to form a word. They will also recognise, with practice that manipulating the onset and replacing it with another sound will change the meaning of the word.

Teacher: “I know a word that ends with ‘at’, and starts with /b/ - which word do you get?”

Once the children suggest the word “bat”, replace /b/ with /k/ or /m/ and repeat.

Awareness of Phonemes 

Phonemic awareness can be supported in several ways. Children should be given ample support for isolating, identifying, blending, and segmenting individual sounds within a word. Manipulating individual phonemes – adding, deleting and substituting phonemes - is also an important skill that children need to develop. Here are some activities for isolating and identifying.

Isolating and Identifying – This activity helps children identify the first or the last sound in the words. You begin with isolating the first sound, then the last sound and finally the middle sound. Each of these have to be done as separate activities, and not all at once.

Keep a few pictures or objects ready to show for this activity. Say you have a picture of a parrot, ask, “What do you see?” – Parrot. Then ask the children, what the beginning sound of the word is – /p/. Initially, make this explicit as you help them. Ask them to look around their classroom to find other objects that start with /p/ – pencil, paper, etc., and ask them to call out the names of the objects that start with /p/.

This activity could be repeated for a number of words.

To help isolate the ending sound, sit with your children in a circle. Tell them you will play a game where they pay attention to the last sound of the word that is being spoken out loud. Say you use the word ‘Pencil’, the child to your left picks up the last sound from the word, pencil, which is /l/. Now, he has to give a word that starts with /l/. He may say ‘lollipop’, and the child to his left has to now come up with a word beginning with /p/.

In conducting these activities, it is important to remember that phonological awareness activities should not take more than 10-20 minutes a day in early-grade classrooms. There is far more to learning to read and write than developing phonological awareness, and a balanced curriculum would attend to various other processes. To be successful, phonological awareness activities should be quick, fun, engaging – and surrounded by a variety of other reading and writing activities!

References  

Ellery, V. (2014). Creating strategic readers. Shell Education.

Cunningham, P. M. (2005). Phonics they use: Words for reading and writing. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.

Kay Yopp, Hallie & Helen Yopp, Ruth. (2000). Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom. Reading Teacher - READ TEACH. 54. 130-143. 10.1598/RT.54.2.2.

Ehri, L., & Nunes, S. (2002). The role of phonemic awareness in learning to read. In A. E. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 110–140). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

^[1] The differences between scripts used by English vs. the Indian languages will be addressed in detail in a separate blog piece.

^[2] Please remember that children go through developmental phases when they learn the components of the continuum. Do ensure you select activities that suit the level that of your children.

^[3] For a more comprehensive set of strategies please refer to the ELI handout “Supporting Phonological Awareness in Pre-Primary and Primary Classrooms” under Resources – Handouts and Publications.

^[4] Applicable while teaching English only.