EMERGENT LITERACY R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Alphabetic Principle-English is an alphabetic language based on the alphabetic principle: each speech sound of the language is represented by a graphic symbol.  Phonology is the study of speech sounds.  Phonics-is the study of the relationships between the speech sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) that they represent.  Phonemic awareness is children’s basic understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds. R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 It provides the foundation for phonics and spelling.  Phonemic awareness requires that children treat speech as an object and that they shift their attention away from the meaning of words to the linguistic features of speech.  Children develop phonemic awareness as they learn to hear and manipulate spoken language. R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Phonemes are the smallest units of speech, and they are written as graphemes, or letters of the alphabet.  Phonemes are usually represented using diagonal lines /d/  Sometimes phonemes are spelled with two graphemes duck (ck) R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Identify sounds in words  Categorize sounds in words  Substitute sounds to make new words  Blend sounds to form words  Segment a word into sounds  These 5 components are strategies that children use with phonics to decode and spell words. The two most important are blending and segmenting. R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Learning to identify a word that begins or ends with a particular sound. ◦ For example, when shown a brush, a car, and a doll, they can identify doll as the word that ends with /l/. R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Recognizing the “odd” word in a set of three words ◦ For example, when the teacher says ring, rabbit, and sun, recognizing that sun doesn’t belong. R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Learning to remove a sound from a word and substitute a different sound in the beginning, middle, or end of words. ◦ bar to car ◦ tip from top ◦ gate to game R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Learning to blend two, three, or four individual sounds to form a word ◦ For example, /b/ /i/ /g/ blending the individual sounds to form big R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Learning to break a word into its beginning, middle, and ending sounds. ◦ Feet into /f/ /e/ /t/ go into /g/ /o/ R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 English language learners: ◦ Need more opportunities to play informally with rhyme and to orally manipulate the sounds in words ◦ Need to listen to wordplay books read aloud more times ◦ Need to participate in mini-lessons on specific phonemic awareness strategies R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Teach high-utility phonics skills that are most useful for decoding and spelling unfamiliar words  Follow a developmental continuum for systematic phonics instruction, beginning w/ rhyming and ending with phonics generalizations  Provide direct instruction to teach phonics skills R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Choose words for phonics instruction from books students are reading and other high- frequency words  Provide opportunities for students to apply what they are learning about phonics through word sorts, making words, interactive writing, and other literacy activities R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Take advantage of teachable moments to clarify misunderstandings and infuse phonics instruction into literacy activities  Use oral activities to reinforce phonemic awareness skills as students blend and segment written words during phonics and spelling instruction  Review phonics skills as part of the spelling program in the upper grades (critical for ELL) R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Research indicates a clear connection between phonemic awareness and learning to reading  As children become more phonemically aware, they recognize that speech can be segmented into smaller units, this is useful in recognizing sound-symbol correspondences and spelling R. Grant Emergent Literacy

 Children can be explicitly taught to segment and blend speech  Phonemic awareness has been shown to be the most powerful predictor of later reading achievement R. Grant Emergent Literacy