Essay On Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is defined as “the ability to manipulate sounds in a word by deleting, adding, and substituting syllables or sounds” (Rief and Stern 61). Most children develop the ability to connect verbal sounds with letters before starting school. Children must develop this skill before they learn how to read. Students with dyslexia cannot connect verbal sounds with letters, so they resort to memorization of word shapes and sounds. Teachers can reinforce and teach phonological awareness by prompting students to recognize rhymes, manipulate syllables and words, and visually model concepts with blocks or tiles. Students with dyslexia need exposure to the rhymes and rhythm of poetry. This is a form of word manipulation that causes students to look at parts of words for the rhyme scheme. When they look for the rhyme scheme, their phonological awareness is challenged to recognize the phonemes that make two words sound similar. Activities that include rhyme identification are: having students make up their own rhymes with sentence starters, playing word games, creating bingo boards or card games that make the student match rhyming words, or giving them two words and asking if
Sandra Rief said to “practice activities that involve deletion, substitution, and addition of sounds” (Rief and Stern 65). Getting students to take apart several words and notice the small sounds they miss conditions them to not just memorize the shape of the word, to but look at the actual content. A multi-sensory lesson can help with manipulating and segmenting words. Acquainting students with the content of words through visual, auditory, and other sensory experience ingrains a natural thought process for reading. Exercises such as making students line up first if they have a one-syllable name and multi-syllable names go next reinforces the students’ ability to break words