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Addressing Phonemic Awareness Deficiencies

Disability Definition:

Learning disabilities as a neurological condition impedes a person’s physical or cognitive abilities to carry out everyday functions. In the United States of America, federal legislation crafted in (1990) and (2004) collectively known and refined as the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) further clarifies what a specific learning impairment may entail. IDEA defines cognitive disability as  “ a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken, or written communication, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations. ,

Phonological Awareness as a Learning Disability:

The word phonological in the realm of academia refers to a broad skill a person possesses to manipulate or identify units of oral (spoken) language. According to literacy professor Deselea Konza from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, “Phonological awareness is a broad term referring to the ability to focus on the sounds of speech as distinct from its meaning: on its intonation or rhythm; on the fact that certain words rhyme; and on the separate sounds. When children play with language by repeating syllables, they are demonstrating an awareness of the phonological element of rhyme”.

Characteristics of students who display deficiencies related to phonological awareness lack word recognition from a less complex to a more complex spectrum. Within this spectrum are word awareness, syllable awareness, onset-rime, and phonemic awareness. According to scholarship by child development speech and language specialist Gayle Gillon at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, deficiency in phonemic awareness performance in both the short and long-run can offset academic growth by impeding a child's ability to comprehend words, syllables, and extend sentence structure. (5)

Prevalence of PA as a Learning Disability: How Identified and Diagnosed

Notwithstanding an array of available phonological awareness standardized tools used to gauge reading proficiency in elementary schools, educators in America often adopt the Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), the Oral Reading Fluency assessment (ORF) and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) to identify and gauge deficiencies in PA. Descriptive statistics from the research of Elhassan, Crewther, & Bavin, (2017), reveals that learners in 4th through 6th grade have a greater propensity to become dysfluent readers when they lack blending sounds skills.

The reading mean and standards deviation graphic chart and the table below provide insight into the Elhassan, Crewther,.& Bavin, (2017) research:

Table 2

Means and standard deviations of the CTOPP Phonological Awareness Composite Score and its individual subtests, elision and sound blending by reading fluency group.

Predictor variable    Dysfluent           Moderate            Fluent                 All Readers

Mean (SD)          Mean (SD)          Mean (SD)           Mean (SD)

Elision                  14.43 (4.54)          15.84 (4.82)        17.62 (3.45)         15.86 (4.49)

Sound blending  15.57 (3.70)            16.32 (3.22)       17.90 (1.94)         16.53 (3.22)

Phonological awareness composite

29.79 (7.14)         32.18 (6.81)        34.87 (4.44)         32.12 (6.60)

N = 124. CTOPP, Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing. Untransformed data presented.

From this data, it is reasonable to conclude that students in the early grades of formative education who display weaknesses in listening comprehension, word identification, word pronunciation,  word construction, and reading abilities usually translates to a higher prevalence of comprehension deficits when compared to the aggregate student population who do not have PA deficiency in subsequent years of academic study.

General Academic Instructional Strategies & Supports to Enhance Student with PA Inadequacy:

Early intervention addressing PA deficiencies is the first strategy to help children overcome frailty in manipulating sounds of words. Improving student’s ability to listen and take control of phonemic sounds and blending multiple letters will improve word identification and co-construction of multi-syllabic words. For example, a student having PA deficiency can exponentially increase her/his vocabulary once they learn the phoneme “at” and can add the letters c-at, h-at, f-at, b-at, and r-at. Such a foundational skill will weave additional word growth into a lexicon of new written and spoken know-how, which invariably will enrich reading skills for all learners. Aside from early intervention in school, homes also play a role in refining PA skills by surround a child with print-rich materials appropriate for age levels that will continually build on the success of the school experience. A third strategy envelops word awareness development when parents read to their children at night. Listening to words and or looking at symbols/visuals, then having children repeat the same words can produce consciousness of vocabulary positioning within a sentence and or story.

The next six supporting interventions can be used to enhance student capabilities to improve PA across varied student cognitive abilities and school grade levels, according to educator and literary author Karen Tankersley.

Preschool Level:

a. Letter sounding identification: This technique will stress teaching letters to students and helping them grasp corresponding sounds. Click this link to learn more about this technique.

(Video Courtesy of McGraw Hill Educational Video Series).

b. Letter displays on boards or blocks at home: Providing letter tiles of upper case, lower case, syllables, and vowels will bolster visual, tactical, and spoken skills for vocabulary acquisition.

Elementary Level:

c. Teaching students to recognize syllables:  With the recognition of particular words, students can begin to enhance their vocabulary by learning how to rhyme specific words using syllables. When students can effectively manipulate phonemes (the smallest unit of spoken language) word growth begin to take hold.

d. Word comparisons:  Using visuals, display images of a particular word that can belong to two different spoken brackets. For example, display the word teach and teacher, work and worker, pen and pencil. Helping students pronounce each image and predict which word is associated with a particular visual will fortify “model sounding phonemes.”   This technique will begin to ripen intuition for word appreciation.

Middle School Level:

e. Create new words:  Using index cards give students-specific curriculum content words that need to be expanded using prefixes, suffixes, and the element of rhyme. For example, the word awake can be rhymed with fake, rake, bake, and take. Building morphemic awareness for the word awake can include awake or awakened or awakening.

f. Playing real or not game:  Increasing PA language skills can also occur when using common curriculum vocabulary terms, adding a new letter, and then having the student determine if the new word is a valid or false term based on what she or he hears. Consider the following illustration. Write the word conquest on the board then replace the letter (c) with a letter (s) displaying sonquest. Students will then have to determine if the new word is real or not.

High School Level:

g. Alliterative Stories:  Having fun with students can be as simple as having them try to pronounce time tested alliterations using the classic phrase; Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers. In like manner, try Kiara Kicked Kangaroos Kindly or the classic tongue-twister, A skunk sat on a stump. The stump thought the skunk stunk. The skunk thought the skunk stunk. What stunk, the skunk or the stump? This time-tested technique allows students to have fun, all the while building sentence structure, and storytelling capabilities.

h.  Building sentences:  Helping students across the curriculum enhance PA can also take place by having the teacher display novel sentences on the board at the beginning of class. The sentences can then be removed from the board after the instructor places students in small groups. The instructor then hands each group a word bag containing a set of words where the students have to reconstruct the original sentence. This activity forces students to manufacture a coherent sentence based on the recollection of sounds and proper syntax.

General Behavioral Strategies for Sensitive & Self-Conscious students with PA deficits:

All educators in and out of the classroom environment can address the needs of highly sensitive children who battle the nightmares of PA shortcomings by recognizing the underlying causes which produce over-stimulation of emotions. Scholarship offered by clinical psychologist and prominent author Dr. Elaine Aron (2002) in The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them helps her readers understand that children born with sensory processing sensitivity have a personality trait that is treatable with overwhelming success rates. Once parents, educators, and paraprofessional internalize that “(HSC) is not a special need, disorder, dysfunction, or diagnosable condition” (Hollands, 2014), crafting applied instructional systematic approaches can help students effectively manage their highly sensitive self-esteem. For example, according to contributing family counseling services Focus on the Family, author Catherine Wilson proposes educators and parents get to know children by spending quality time in a variety of academic settings. By recognizing fears, apprehensions, limitations, and anxieties and not crossing a HSC’s boundaries, such students will begin to assimilate and engage in academic learning skills such as phonological awareness .

In the same fashion, collaborating with previous and current educators assigned to children classified as highly sensitive has the effect of lessening trigger talk that will overly stimulate HSC to shut down or experience anxiety-driven behaviors that will produce deficiency in academic progress. Another equally galvanizing strategy centers on the use of melodic sounds to foster social-emotional learning in the classroom experience. Research conducted by neurological surgeon and clinical professor Dr. Michael Schneck at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois presents evidence when students listen to classical, Turkish, and or Western music cortisol levels as well as elevated blood pressure drops which relieve anxiety. Clinical trials published in Learning and Individual Differences in 2012, compare two groups of students who attended a one-hour lecture with and without classical music playing in the background. The results significantly demonstrate students who listened to classical music outperformed students who did not listen to classical music in such categories as “recalling information and being receptive to improved brain plasticity and neural-network development”.

Under these circumstances, soothing melodic sounds have proven to be an effective strategy to remember melodies, pitches, and rhymes. When educators implement these techniques in the learning environment, PA deficiencies are being strengthened to overcome the stigma of sensory processing sensitivity for children afflicted with negative self-beliefs.