Teaching Kids to Read Through Phonetic Awareness (a must-read)

 Learn Reading Through Phonetic Awareness

        Everybody agrees that nothing is more important to academic achievement than being a good reader. Students with reading difficulties fall behind rapidly in nearly all school subjects. They are likely to develop negative concepts of themselves as well as lose any motivation to succeed that they may have had. A reading difficulty represents a breakdown somewhere in the process of learning to read. Many poor readers have a specific weakness in phonological (sound) processing. They are weak in the mastery of the sounds of individual letters. Some of these reading weaknesses are:

 Reversals - confusing letters like b and d, reading words like rat for tar, won for now

 Elisions    - reading cat instead of cart   

 Syllables in the wrong order - like are there for there are

 Reading very slow, reading without fluency, reading word by word; and,

 Poor comprehension - does not understand what one is reading

         One  pre-requisite for learning to read is being aware that words consists of individual sounds. Children sometimes come to school unaware that words are made up of sounds. This is where Phonetic Awareness or PA comes in.

      Phonetic Awareness helps children identify individual sounds or phonemes within words. For example, the word bag has 3 phonemes "buh" '"aah" and "ugh". Children who have mastered sounds can easily hear these three sounds, not because the ear hears that way - the ear hears one pulse of sound - but because the brain automatically separates them. At a basic level, children should recognize that letters represent the sound of spoken words (letter-sound relationship).

         The progressive steps in learning to read are: from sounds, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs. Once again, Phonetic Awareness is an understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds like CAT is composed of the sounds /k/ /a/ and /t/. Bar lines are the symbol for sound. /k/ means the sound of letter K - "kuh". Bear in mind that a word is made up of a series of letter sounds connected with each other. To read the word form, start with sounding f ➨ fo ➨ for ➨ form. It is important to overlearn lower order processes i.e. sound discrimination skills until they become automatic. For teachers, to overteach individual letter sounds for mastery. Phonetic Awareness also facilitates the reading of words with dipthongs, digraphs and consonant clusters/blends in the higher levels.

        Studies have shown that phonics is an essential way to teach reading to students. They have also shown that phonics is essential, too, in teaching reading to students with reading disabilities. PA is important in the sense that it improves children's word reading and reading comprehension. It also helps children learn to spell.

       How do we ensure a successful reading program for our learners? PA,  a daily 15-minute reading practice and a strong sight vocabulary are the answer.

                    /EAB 

                             

                     

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