Phonological awareness is the ability to command words and sounds for reading and language understanding. For effective literacy education, the teacher should have practical skills in communication, adaptation, and comprehension (Dessemontet et al., 2017). Similarly, students should acquire decoding skills, which means using the denotations of an alphabetic language for word construction (Allen & Zygouris-Coe, 2019). Teachers might help children to learn these skills if needed.
Rewiring the brain for phonemic awareness includes playing with sounds, creating rhymes, and suggesting applicable words through meaning and tune. Using the named students acquire pre-reading experience, which later contributes to breaking terms down and making up new words (Dessemontet et al., 2017). Reading Recovery is one of the programs that assist learners in building reading comprehension. Teachers work with low-achieving students in a one-on-one manner, and the program has promising results (Bates et al., 2016). Furthermore, the Success for All-Reading First plan divides children into groups by their reading abilities, thus providing a competitive atmosphere that fosters education (Korelich et al., 2016). Finally, the Read 180 curriculum is based on the learner’s answers to specific questions promoting the unique learning style (Briones, 2016). The named programs are useful tools for working with phonology problems.
Learners with intellectual disabilities often have problems with phonological skills, which, in case they are overcome, do not make a significant difference in development. To work with such unique students, teachers need to implement individual strategies (Dessemontet et al., 2017). First, they should teach them common words, so that the pupil can understand the logic of the language. This step can be time-consuming, but it results in a successful outcome (Allen & Zygouris-Coe, 2019). Next, it is helpful to learn rhymes that foster comprehension of words and analyze their phonetics. Lastly, educators should offer children a way of visualizing terms, as people with dyslexia usually have difficulties with it (Dessemontet et al., 2017). These strategies are especially helpful for teaching intellectually disabled children.
Teachers in the elementary setting dedicate their attention to presenting the learner’s familiar matters and repeating them numerous times because of their brain development characteristics (Allen & Zygouris-Coe, 2019). Alternatively, older groups require less repetition of the same material and complete more complex tasks (Dessemontet et al., 2017). Pupils should command compound phonemic awareness; in other words, memorize the word while performing the other word task (Allen & Zygouris-Coe, 2019). Teachers, in turn, should be extremely patient, communicative, and adaptive. To ensure students’ psychological well-being, they should be friendly, which is significant support for children (Dessemontet et al., 2017). They must be ready for abruptly changing the teaching style as specific methods could be useless for particular learners.
Identifying onset and rime mean the child’s ability to name the initials and string of letters to follow. The first task that can help to increase phonemic awareness is the identification of rhymes. For example, students can be asked to eliminate the redundant word in the series log, dog, frog, cat. Second, the teacher reads the rhyme and asks the students to guess the last sound in the line. This type of task significantly improves the phonological skills of children (Allen & Zygouris-Coe, 2019). The understanding of the logic of the language helps students to comprehend alphabetical laws later when they face the challenge of reading (Dessemontet et al., 2017). This ability is essential for the learner to develop literacy, especially for perceiving words as interconnected terms. Teachers can contribute to the acquiring of these skills by conducting interactive word games and assisting children in those.
Simple phonological skills are about identifying words, their sound, and rhymes. Compound ones contribute to building relationships between different concepts. For instance, understanding that cowboy consists of two individual terms attributes to the latter. After these abilities are acquired, students must learn to deliver complex ideas using their knowledge. A teacher can ask them to retell short stories to improve their fluency. The last strategy to follow is building word lists according to features such as similar pronunciation or similar writing. The named techniques can help children to foster their perception abilities.
References
Allen, J. V., & Zygouris-Coe, V. (2019). Using guided reading to teach internet inquiry skills: A case study of one elementary school teacher’s experience. Reading Psychology, 1-40. Web.
Bates, C.C., D’Agostino, J. V., Gambrell, L., & Xu, M. (2016). Reading recovery: Exploring the effects on first-graders reading motivation and achievement. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 21(1), 47-59. Web.
Briones, M. (2016). Effects of reading 180® on oral reading fluency among special education students. [Master’s thesis, California State University]. Capstone Projects and Master’s Theses.
Dessemontet, R. S., Chambrier, A., Martinet, C., Moser, U., & Bayer, N. (2017). Exploring phonological awareness skills in children with intellectual disability. American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 122(6), 476-491. Web.
Korelich, K., Jones, D., Challoo, L., Bradley, K.S., & Davis, R. (2016). The success for all reading programs and effect on student achievement in a south-central Texas major suburban school district. Journal of Education and Human Development, 5(4), 43-54. Web.