Phonological+Awareness+and+Sensitivity

Recommendations for Phonological Awareness:

Phonological awareness is the ability to understand the connection between written and spoken language, and the ability to reflect upon and manipulate these abilities (Andreassen & Smith, 2008). Phonological awareness does not begin at school, but in the child’s home and community. Therefore, precedence needs to be made by teachers to discover the level of literacy enrichment in the home and offer ways of increasing the enrichment. The diversity amongst our society makes meeting the needs of language difficult due to our lack of knowledge and integration of techniques in the curriculum process. Students from different cultural and demographic backgrounds do not possess the foundations in basic alphabet knowledge as other students that are exposed to alphabet letters do. The pre-acquisition of alphabet knowledge is the basic foundation for all literacy skills. "Beginning readers with an understanding of the Alphabetic principle become more successful, they will begin making greater independent use of letter–sound information (possibly supplemented by sentence context cues) to identify unfamiliar words in text" (Ryder, Tunner, & Greaney, 2007, pg. 350). Children begin to develop phonemic awareness as a result of the oral and written language they are exposed to during their early years prior to entrance to Kindergarten (Andreassen & Smith, 2008). The children that come from homes with literacy enriched environments acquire some level of phonemic awareness at an early age. A part of everyday classroom practices need to consist of teachers collecting data on student prior learning experiences.

Scenario:

Ms. Williams is kindergarten teacher, and extremely excited about the school year. She has taken a lot of time in reflecting on last year’s experience. She wanted to incorporate an interview to determine the level of literacy enrichment in the home, which would overlap into the classroom. She remembered many of her students last year entered K-5 not knowing letters upper case and lower case, print knowledge, left-to-right progression. Ms. Williams and her team used a suggestion box before leaving the prior year, and one of the suggestion incorporate parental involvement, which is one of Ms. Williams’s pet peeves. The suggestion went into great detail about parents not understanding the importance of literacy enrichment in the home and community. Ms. Williams decided to progress with the recommendation for this year. Ms. Williams collected her classroom roster a two-weeks prior to school. She made appointments to set-up meet-greet and get to know session for students and parents. Ms. Williams used face-to-face interviews and telephone conferences to ask parents and students about their everyday practices in incorporating a literacy rich environment in the home. Teachers need to implement an informal interview via phone, email, or person inquiring about the level of literacy enrichment, which can assist the teacher in understanding the student's readiness level and parents’ understanding. Ms. Williams used the data collected from the interview to begin planning and means of collecting information for parents to either begin literacy enrichment in the home or advance the literacy enrichment within the home.

References

Andreassen, M. (2008). Phonological Awareness. Retrieved from http://phonologicalawareness. org/11.html

Ryder, J.F., Tunner, W.E., & Greaney, K.T. (2007, July). Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness. Springer,, 349-369. doi:10.1007/s11145-007-9080-z