How to Plan Phonemic Awareness Therapy

Introduction:

The value of phonemic awareness activities such as teaching sound identification, sound segmentation and rhyming are well accepted by speech-language pathologists and educators. We professionals and colleagues understand the critical role exposure to phonemic awareness tasks plays in the development of early reading skills. Although there is an understanding of the value of teaching phonemic awareness, there is often a mismatch between what we know, and what we are comfortable enough to actually do. The purpose of this article is to discuss how to plan phonemic awareness therapy to help clients get the most from their treatment.

When planning phonemic awareness therapy, two core factors should be considered:

• Implicit and explicit phonemic awareness.
• Phonological make-up of the targets words used.

Implicit vs. Explicit Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness can be defined as the sensitivity to or the knowledge of the sound system of a language at either an implicit or explicit level (Lance, Swanson, & Peterson, 1997). The types of tasks used to target phonemic awareness include:

1. Rhyming Rhyme identification is considered an implicit level of phonemic awareness. For this task, children identify and generate words that rhyme. As they become more skilled they generate additional words that rhyme. Generation of rhyming words effectively moves phonemic awareness from an implicit to an explicit level.
    
2. Alliteration Alliteration identification is considered an implicit level of phonemic awareness. For this task, children identify words that begin with the same sound. After this skill develops, children generate additional words beginning with the same sound. As with the generation of rhyming words, generation of words that have alliteration indicates an explicit understanding of the concept.
   
   a.CategorizationThis broader term encompasses not only the identification of beginning sounds, but also middle and ending sounds (vowel and consonants).
    
3. Blending Blending is typically considered an explicit task and is also referred to as a task of synthesis (Lance et al., 1997). For this task, children are presented with individual phonemic sound components which make up a word, and then the child combines the sounds to form the word. For example, /k/-/e/-/t/ is blended to produce "Kate."
    
4. Segmentation Segmentation is an explicit task and is also referred to as a task of analysis (Lance et al., 1997). For this task, children are presented with a word and asked to break it into its individual sounds. For example, the word "Kate" is broken down into its individual sounds /k/-/e/-/t/.
    
5. Elision This task is considered to be the most difficult of the explicit phonemic awareness tasks. For this task, children are presented with a word and asked to say the word with one of its sounds deleted. For example, "Say the word smoke without the /m/" (Rosner & Simon, 1971).