Evaluating what research says in favor or against teaching phonemic awarenes

Phonemic Awareness : Not a Question of Efficiency but of Sufficiency

What is Phonological Awareness

There are a number of definitions that came out pertaining to phonological awareness . According to Troia (2004 , phonological awareness is sensitivity to the segmental nature of speech , an explicit understanding that spoken language comprises discrete units ranging from entire words and syllables to smaller intrasyllabic units of onsets , rimes , and phonemes

When a child enters a school , he would possess a certain level of phonemic awareness , some researchers and teachers regard this as a strong telling

factor of how fast a child would learn to read (Adams 1998 . Phonemic awareness is something that can be developed by different kinds of instruction and it is increasingly perceived to accelerate a child 's writing and reading skills (Adams 1998

Phonological awareness can also be defined as the ability to clearly hear and see as well as determine sound units by segments , up to the smallest unit , even beyond the syllable (Sensenbaugh 2000

Awareness of phonemes refers to having the ability and experience to understand phonemes in spoken words (Bus Ijzendoorn 1999 . It also involves the ability to manipulate such phonemes . Phonemes are known to be the smallest unit of the spoken language (Bus Ijzendoorn 1999 . It can be represented by single letters such as letters c ' or s . It can also be a combination of two letters such as ch ' th ' or sh

The term phonemic awareness ' has been interchangeably used with phonological awareness . It has gain popularity among scholarly in the 1990s in the attempts to evaluate early-literary development and reading disability among children (International Reading Association It is widely studied because of the insight it can give in terms of oral language development . Marks of having good phonemic awareness appear when one is able to perform sound segmentation once heard through someone 's speech . It is further characterized when the listener has the ability to manipulate and vocalize the sounds of oral speech upon hearing it (International Reading Association

According to a research by Sensenbaugh (2000 , there are five levels of phonemic awareness hearing rhymes and alliteration by their knowledge of nursery rhymes as the primary measurement comparing the sounds of the words for rhyme and alliteration blending and splitting syllables phonemic segmentation manipulating phonemes by adding or deleting parts of it

How is Phonological Awareness Developed

A number of activities have been created to develop the phonemic awareness among children . Most activities towards this make the children listen to the sameness , difference , number and of speech sounds (Sensenbaugh 2000 . As far as most research goes , phonemic awareness is something that can be taught and developed . It can happen naturally but activities can be administered to further enhance this skill . There are instructional activities that can make students become more aware of phonemes before actually receiving more formal reading instruction (Sensenbaugh 2000

Pre-school students can be engaged in activities that could attract their attention to sounds in words like nursery rhymes that would familiarize...