Phonemic Awareness Instruction for ELL's

Why is phonemic awareness necessary instruction for ELL students? How is instruction implemented?

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds in the English language. It is one of the best predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of school instruction. http://colorincolorado.org/article/33830?theme=print

How does Phonemic Awareness relate to ELLs?

Because speech sounds differ among languages, phonemic awareness and phonics acquisition are more challenging for English-Language Learners. Ells are able to transfer phonological awareness skills from their primary language to English, and positively benefit from phonemic awareness training. http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/should-we-teach-phonemic-awareness-to-remedial-readers/

Best Practice Instruction for Phonemic Awareness

1. Teachers can teach phonemic awareness while also explicitly teaching vocabulary words, their meanings and their pronunciation to ELLs.

2. ELL students need to be given many opportunities and activities to aquire language.

3. Activities might include phoneme delation, word-to-word matching, blending, sound isolation, phoneme segmentation, phoneme counting, missing phoneme, odd word out, and sound-to-word matching to name a few. For more specific information on these activities, please see the link below. http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/esol/Eng/BestPractices/PDF/Intructional%20Considerations/8%20Phonemic%20Awareness.pdf

1. ELL students need to be familiar with the sounds of English before they can develop phonological awareness.

2. Instruction needs to be explicit, modifications made, and practice needs to be given when needed.

3. Once phonological awareness has developed in any language, then it can be transferred to other languages that are learned. http://www.readingrockets.org/article/19757?theme=print

1. Teachers should frequenly model the production of sounds.

2. Beginning readers should get help to learn to identify sounds in short words. http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/33830?theme=print

Pros and Cons

Research clearly reports that those students who cannot manipulate and hear phonemes will have a difficult time mastering the sound symbol correspondence. The process is exacerbated when the students in question are also learning a second language. The process is particularly difficult when the transfer of languages does not relate to the second. Often times the process is abandoned because of the tedious nature of phonemic awareness. Recent research has indicated that while the process is not always easy, the benefits out way by passing phonemic awareness instruction. One particular research by (Nag-Arulamni, Reddy, and Buckley (2003) found that students “who receive explicit phonological instruction showed significantly higher gains in reading than language proficiency instruction and control groups”.

http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/33830?theme=print

http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=432471

Fun Websites for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Word of the Day - www.pbskids.org/sesame

Kiz Club: Learning Resources for Kids - http://www.kizclub.com/

Mrs.Hurley's ESL-A Place for English Language Learners and Teachers - www.mrshurleysesl.com/index.html

Lanternfish - http://www.bogglesworldesl.com/

Starfall.com - http://www.starfall.com/

Interesting Things for ESL Students - http://www.manythings.org/

ESL Games World - http://www.eslgamesworld.com/

Conclusion

The importance of Phonological Awareness in developing readers is well documented in research. The discussion of this critical skill has had varied opinions when speaking of reading acquisition for second language learners over the past decade. Some teachers of second language students have chosen to bypass phonemic awareness instruction, believing that the lack of phoneme sound transferability from language to language is not interchangeable. That thought process has somewhat dissipated as educators become more knowledgeable in teaching reading to second language learners.

Scientifically based research now suggests that second language learners do respond well to meaningful, thoughtful instruction in phonemic awareness. The key is, understanding as much as possible the linguistic make up of the first language spoken. In addition to English, other languages have a component of phonemic awareness which provides for the ability to manipulate sounds. When students are able to process sounds in their first language, a correlation to the second language is transferable. When confusion results in acquiring a new sound, additional instruction is necessary to scaffold the development of the unknown sounds. Utilizing language games, culturally relevant rhymes, or word play with attention to vocabulary, can accentuate the learning of unknown phoneme sounds.

Gersten, R. (2003). Teaching Reading to Early Language Learners. Educational Leadership,7,60.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr03/vol60/num07/Teaching-Reading-to-Early-Language-Learners.aspx

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