Phonemic Awareness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Phonemic Awareness - Essay Example d on the NRP report and also details the relationship between the various components of the balanced reading program and the above mentioned entities. A phoneme is the smallest part of a spoken language which has the ability to change the meaning of a word. Phonemic awareness (PA) is the skill to hear, recognize and control the phonemes (Armbruster, Lehr and Osborne, 2003, p.3). Studies have demonstrated that PA can be taught to the children through many methods of instruction such as phoneme isolation (recognition of individual sounds in a word), identity (recognizing same sounds in different words), categorization (recognizing an odd word from a set of three or four words), blending (combining various phonemes into a single word), segmentation (breaking a word into smaller sounds) and deletion (to recognize a word after a phoneme is deleted) (National Reading Panel, 2000, p.2-2). However, children who were taught three or more types of the above mentioned phonemic instructions did not gain much in terms of PA. Many reasons can be cited for the same. The children get confused by the multiple types of phonemic instruction and the teachers are not in a position to concentrate on a single type of instruction completely. They rush through the methods of instruction and sometimes end up teaching tougher methods before the children are aware of easier types of instructions. However, if only one or two methods of instruction were used it was found to be highly effective in gaining PA (Armbruster, Lehr and Osborne, 2003, p.7). It has also been proved that children with PA found it easier to read and spell words as PA helps children understand and pronounce the different phonemes which constitute a word. Also PA helps the children relate sounds with the alphabet (Armbruster, Lehr and Osborne, 2003, pp.6-7). This is the reason why PA is found to be very effective when alphabets are used during the process of phoneme manipulation. English language is represented as words