Information Sheet 1.1-2
Information Sheet 1.1-2: Placing together the syllables listened to in order to produce words following phonemic rules
Blending to Read Words
Blending is the ability to put letter sounds together to read a word. To read a word, children must know the sounds the letters represent in the word and be able to blend those sounds to come up with the correct word. For example, after children know the letter sounds /f/ for f, /ĭ/ for i, and /sh/ for sh, they learn to blend those sounds together to read the whole word. When they see the word fish, they are able to say, “/f/ /ĭ/ /sh/, fish.” We call this, blending because you are putting sounds together to read a word.
Sound-Spelling Patterns
For the following activities, your child will blend letters, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words. Use the documents below as needed before or while engaging in the activities.
Sound-spelling patterns consist of letters that are often combined to make a specific sound. Common sound-spelling patterns can include consonant patterns, vowel patterns, and syllable patterns. See examples below (not an exhaustive list of examples).
Sound-Spelling Pattern Examples
| Pattern Type | Pattern | Examples |
| Consonant Patterns | Consonant digraphs are two or more consonants next to each other that make one sound. | th (this) sh (fish) tch (patch) |
| Consonant blends are two or more consonants next to each other that make their individual sounds. | st (stop) ft (raft) scr (script | |
| Silent-letter combinations are two consonants next to each other where one says its sound and the other is silent. | kn (know) wr (write) mb (lamb) | |
| Vowel Patterns | Vowel teams are two or more letters next to each other that say one vowel sound. | ea (weak) igh (night) oa (boat) |
| Vowel diphthongs two vowels next to each other that begin with one vowel sound and changes to another vowel sound within the same syllable. | ow (cow) oi (noise) | |
| r-controlled vowels are vowels followed by r. | ar (car) er (her) ir (sir) or (afford) us (fu) |
A syllable is a word part with a vowel in it. Usually, a word has as many syllables as it has vowels. Vowels are a, e, i, o, u. The other letters (like b, c, d, f) are consonants.
- Cat has one syllable.
- Picnic has two syllables (pic‑nic).
- Yesterday has three syllables (yes‑ter‑day).
Syllable Pattern Examples
| Syllable Pattern | Description | Examples |
| Open | A syllable ending with a vowel sound that is spelled with a single vowel letter (a, e, i, o, or u). | me pro/gram mu/sic |
| Closed | A syllable ending in one or more consonants and a short vowel sound spelled with one vowel. | hat dish bas/ket) |
| VCe | V stands for vowel. C stands for consonant. e is the silent e at the end of a syllable or word. A syllable pattern that ends in silent e, which makes the vowel before it a long sound (say its name). | stripe shine bake |
| Vowel Team | A syllable that has multiple vowels spelling the vowel. | tooth pain train/er |
| Vowel ‑ r | A syllable that has at least one vowel followed by an r. The r always comes directly after the vowel (ar, er, ir, or, ur). | car bird cor/ner |
| Consonant ‑ le | A final syllable that contains a consonant followed by le. The e is always silent in this syllable pattern. | sim-ple puz-zle a-ble |
Common Word Parts
Understanding common word parts like base words, prefixes, and suffixes will help children break words into smaller, meaningful word parts, which can help them read, write, and understand more challenging words.
The word help is called a base word because it can stand alone and has meaning. It is also called a base word because we can add to it to change the word. For example, we can add the ending ‑ful, for the word helpful. When we add a word part to the end of a word, it is called a suffix. We can also add a word part to the beginning of a base word. When we add a word part to the beginning of a base word, it is called a prefix. For example, the prefix un‑ can be added to helpful to make the word unhelpful.
| Word | = | Prefix | + | Base Word | + | Suffix |
| Unhelpful | = | un | + | help | + | ful |
Reading Words
Blending is the ability to put sounds together to read a word. For example, when children see the word soil, they are able to say, “/s/, /oi/, /l/, soil.” There are many ways to support your child in reading words. For example, provide opportunities for your child to practice reading words in a list or on flashcards. It is also important for children to practice reading words in sentences and stories.
High-Frequency Words
High-frequency words are words that appear frequently in books. Examples of high-frequency words are again, every, know, could. It is important that children learn how to read high-frequency words automatically, correctly without hesitation. The more a learner reads and writes high-frequency words, the better he or she will get at reading them automatically.
There are many activities that families can do to help their children read high-frequency automatically.
- Show your child the high-frequency word because. Have your child say the word, write the word, and then say the word again.
- Use the provided high-frequency word cards as flash cards and time your child as he or she reads a stack of them. You can place words that were challenging for your child in a separate pile, so you know which words need more practice. The goal is to read more words correctly in less time each time you engage in the activity.
Challenging and Important Words
Just because a book contains challenging words, it doesn’t mean that you can’t read it with your child. Before reading a book with your child, skim it to see if there are any challenging and important words. For example, Tyrannosaurus rex would be considered challenging to read, but are important words in a book about dinosaurs. Words also may be challenging because the child has not learned the sound-spelling pattern contained in the word or the word contains irregular sound-spelling patterns as in the words resource or necessary. Select three such words that appear most frequently in the book. Introduce the words to your child before you read the book. Point to each word in the book and tell your child how to pronounce it and what it means. Ask your child to point to the word and say it. If there are too many challenging words, you can read the book aloud to your child rather than have him or her read it to you.
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonological awareness (PA) is awareness of the sound structure of words. Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness. It is the conscious awareness of phonemes, the smallest units of sound in a spoken word. There are 44 phonemes in the English language.
Some of the phonemes of English.
Test yourself: think of a word which uses each phoneme.
Changing a phoneme in a word changes the word’s meaning. For example, changing the phoneme /o/ in the word ‘mop’ to the phoneme /a/ changes the word ‘mop’ to ‘map’. Two of the most important phonemic awareness skills for literacy development are blending (joining speech sounds together to make a word) and segmenting (breaking a word into its component speech sounds). Here is my deep dive into oral blending and segmenting.
Phonemic awareness is the foundation for reading and writing English (and other alphabetic languages) because an alphabetic orthography/spelling system maps print to speech at the level of the phoneme. Consequently, according to cognitive scientist Dr Keith Stanovich:
‘Students who cannot hear, and work with, the phonemes of spoken words will have difficulty learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words.’
From a very early age, children recognize the phonemes of the language spoken in the home (as opposed to those of other languages). However, research suggests that most children do not first enter school skilled in phonemic awareness. They are meaning-focused and do not think about spoken words as strings of phonemes. The neural pathways of the brain need to be programmed to attend to the ‘bits’ of words. Research also suggests that if there is no explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, many will fail to acquire it.
What is Phonics?
The alphabet was invented to make speech visible, to create a permanent record of the spoken word. Phonics is the mapping (or connection) of graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). The addition of the visual element is what makes phonics different to phonemic awareness. It is sometimes said that ‘Phonemic awareness can be taught in the dark – phonics cannot’.
Our little hedgehog demonstrating phonemic awareness.
In phonics instruction, children are taught grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) so that knowledge of sounds of the spoken word can be transferred to the written word in reading and writing. In some languages, learning phonics is easy because each phoneme has just one grapheme to represent it. English uses only 26 letters, and combinations of these, to represent 44 sounds.
The 44 phonemes which can be represented by 1,2 or 3 letters.
In English, there are multiple ways of representing one phoneme. One grapheme or grapheme-combination may represent a number of phonemes. For example, the long a sound /ay/ is typically represented by the letters ‘a’, the letter combinations ‘ai’ or ‘ay’, or the split digraph ‘a_e’.
However, it can also be represented by ‘ey’, ‘et’, ‘ea’ and ‘ei’.
Learning to read and spell becomes more complicated when children learn that a phoneme can be represented in several ways.
Phonics instruction, therefore, must include teaching of the rules that help the student to determine which GPC to use in encoding or decoding a specific word. English is not a ‘transparent’ language so high-quality, explicit systematic phonics instruction is vital.
What is Involved in Teaching Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness instruction should be deliberate and purposeful, not merely incidental ‘play with sounds. An effective Phonemic Awareness program explicitly teaches students to recognize, understand, and manipulate sounds in their spoken language. It addresses six phonemic awareness skills:
- Isolation: students recognize individual sounds in a word, e.g. ‘trap’ begins with /t/. It ends with /p/
- Blending: students listen to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and then combine the sounds to form a word, e.g. /t/ + /r/ +/a/ + /p/ = ‘trap’
- Segmentation: students break a word into separate sounds and count how many sounds they hear, e.g. ‘trap’ = /t/ + /r/ + /a/ + /p/ = 4 sounds
- Deletion: students remove a phoneme from a word to create a new word, e.g. trap – tap
- Addition: students make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word, e.g. trap – strap
- Substitution: students substitute one phoneme for another to make a new word, e.g. trap – trip
Systematic phonemic awareness instruction will begin with 2-phoneme words, move on to 3-phoneme words, and – when the students have mastered these – continue on to 4-phoneme words, and so on. It is hard for young children to isolate the component sounds of blends (such as ‘tr’ and ‘str’), and to segment and manipulate those components. Students should be given sufficient direction and practice to achieve automaticity.
Phonemic awareness tasks involve listening and speaking. They do not involve letters. The only visual input takes the form of pictures. Later, many students will benefit from use of counters (or sound buttons) with phoneme frames ‘grounding’ thinking about sounds (Ball & Blachman, 1991).
Reference:
https://phonicshero.com/phonemic-awareness/