Phonics Knowledge and Instruction
Overview
This module addresses phonics knowledge and instruction, beginning with the alphabetic principle. The module will continue to be modified to include other topics such as phoneme/grapheme mapping, syllable types, decoding/encoding, and morphemes to name a few. Check back to see what is new.
Alphabet Knowledge
Learning the alphabet letters and the associated sounds begins in preschool. According to the Texas PreKindergarten Guidelines, preschool children should be able to recognize, write, and name 20 letters and their associated sounds. This is not developmentally appropriate for children this young as they are still developing the necessary fine motor skills needed to write accurately and precisely.
When children understand that each letter (grapheme) has an associated sound (phoneme), they are building their understanding of the alphabetic principle. Watch these two videos and take notes in your notebook (journal) to help you internalize what the alphabetic principle is.
After watching these videos, write down a one-sentence definition of the Alphabetic Principle in your own words, followed by a short paragraph about why it is necessary for children to understand this concept and how it assists them in learning to read (decode) and write (encode).
Teachers do not need to wait until children know all letters and associated sounds before beginning to help them decode simple words such as cat, run, and sod. For this reason, it is counterproductive for teachers to use a letter of the week approach to teaching the alphabet to children. Look at this Reading Rockets site to discover ideas about how to teach the alphabet and corresponding sounds. Reading Rockets Website
Teaching the Alphabet
Learning the alphabet is much more than being able to sing the ABC song. It is often mentioned by parents that their child can sing the song so they know all the letters. That is not accurate, usually. When assessing the alphabet, teachers have the letters out of order to determine if children actually know the visual representation (grapheme) of the letter out of context or if they have a song memorized.
We do not teach letter of the week for this reason. It takes the letters out of context of sounds and words when teaching each letter in isolation. What help does this provide a child who already knows all their letters when they begin school? Will going over the letter L for an entire week help that child increase their knowledge and apply it to reading? Not without much more work to include higher level skills for them. A good recommendation is to teach 3-4 letters a week that do not look the same. For example, you would not teach a, c, and g together because they look too similar visually. By the same token, you would not teach e and i together.
There are wonderful activities you can see about how to teach the alphabet and I have included one sample here about how to work with letters. How long do we work with the alphabet? Do we stop once all children in the class know all the letters? The answer is no. We will continue reviewing the letters and sounds they make into 3rd grade. We can use alphabet arcs, mystery letters, games, and movement activities to continue working on the alphabet and providing the constant connection between the sounds (phonemes) and visual representation of sounds (graphemes). Now you can see how important the phonological awareness section of this course was.
Watch this video and keep in mind what your understanding was about teaching the alphabet. This particular video is the English alphabet, but spoken in a different country. The activities and directives are all still relevant and you can understand what they are doing. Keep in mind that this is a very long demonstration of how to use different activities with the alphabet arc, but we would use one of these with small groups at a time. This is a dyslexic child in an upper elementary grade.
Here is a video using a modified alphabet arc to play a game about letter recognition and where the letters are in order. This is an important skill, as alphabetization begins in kindergarten and develops into alphabetization with dictionary skills in upper elementary grade levels.
Graphemes
Graphemes are the visual representation of the sounds we hear in English. At times, this is where children get confused and may not understand that although they hear the /j/ sound in a word it is spelled dge as in edge. The reason for this is because two letters will never end a word in English. Those letters are J and V. This is the same reason that have is not considered an irregular word even though it does not follow the silent e rule and make the A say its name.
Reasons such as these is what can make spelling and reading difficult for children. We need to make sure we stop telling children that English is difficult and we just have to do the best we can. That adds in additional stress for children because they then believe it is all difficult and they just can't get it. It can also prevent children from learning the patterns in words that help them learn to read and spell accurately and fluently. Be ready to teach patterns and generalizations through multi-sensory methods to help children recognize the patterns in words.
Here is a video about graphemes and the different types there are. How does this help you realize how the English language works?
At times, knowing how to appropriately pronounce the sounds of the English language make it difficult to effectively teach phonics. This video has a child go through sounds to show how to pronounce each sound associated with the language.
As you watch this video, practice saying each sound as well. Typically, we add an /uh/ at the end of sounds. For example, instead of saying /b/ we say /buh/. This changes the sounds of the word and adds an additional sound that is not actually part of the word.
For you to be an effective reading teacher and help children develop their phonics knowledge, you must pronounce them accurately yourself. You did see a version of the video in the phonological awareness OER that focused on how the mouth is formed when making each of the sounds.
The following video goes over strategies about how to teach children the sounds of letters in combination of how our mouths are formed. This is very similar to a Dyslexia Reading Intervention program called Reading by Design. I was trained in this program last summer and it is wonderful, even to use in a general ed classroom for all students.
Watch this video and see how she uses hand gestures to help children learn how to know consonants, vowels, syllable types and more. This will help you in located appropriate activities in the next module and provide a foundation for the syllable types presented in the spelling module.
How does this all tie together? You have phoneme/grapheme mapping which allows children to learn how to use their knowledge of sounds and letters to spell words using boxes.
Phonics Instruction
Explicit and systematic instruction is a must when it comes to phonics instruction. Some children may seem like they easily learn how to read and have no problem comprehending passages. The problem is in the necessary foundation all students need in phonics skills. While a child may seemingly gain phonics knowledge quickly and not need explicit instruction in the letter sounds, they will need explicit instruction in how the sounds work together to form words in reading and writing.
Watch this vidoe to help you gain more understanding of how phonics skills should be taught.
You will hear some repeated terms such as orthographic mapping, phonological awareness, and others in this next video. This emphasis is due to the importance of these concepts. Watch this video of Eri's Word Reading Skills to see how children typically develop in reading.
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