/ Effective Literacy Practices / Strategies, Practices and Tools (Grade K-3) (Phonological Awareness)
Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide students with explicit instruction and practice opportunities to play with word parts in spoken words.
Students must be able to recognize that spoken words can be broken down into syllables (and individual sounds = phonemic awareness). Segmenting and blending syllables in spoken words is the first in the developmental progression.
The three levels of phonological awareness development are:
- Early: segmenting and blending syllables
- Basic: segmenting and blending initial and individual sounds/phonemes (phonemic awareness)
- Advanced/Complex: manipulation tasks like adding and deleting (also phonemic awareness).
Students who struggle with phonological awareness will likely be struggling readers if the skill isn’t strengthened.
Dyslexia is also linked to weak phonological processing skills.
Effective Practices
- Teach students to segment words into syllables.
- Use concrete objects (bingo chips) to represent syllables when students are manipulating.
- Use motions or gestures when playing with syllables in words.
- Segment syllables using "chopping"—palms face together and chop each syllable in a word.
- Teach students to segment sentences into individual words.
- Teach students how to count the syllables in a word.
- Have students place their hands on their chin and pay attention to the number of times their chin moves down as they say a word slowly.
- Kindergarten
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- Support children to hear individual words in a sentence (early phonological awareness stage).
- Spend 10-15 minutes per day.
- Follow the developmental progression.
- Word awareness in sentences (less predictive of early reading success and less important to teach directly).
- Blend and segment syllables in words.
- Provide opportunities to practice segmenting and blending syllables in a word.
- Tell students what syllables are and model how to identify syllables in words.
- Use gestures or motions for segmenting and blending syllables in words.
- Support children to hear individual words in a sentence (early phonological awareness stage).
- Grade 1
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- Support students to hear parts of the word (early phonological awareness stage).
- Spend 10-15 minutes per day.
- Follow the developmental progression.
- Syllable deletion.
- Blend two or more phonemes.
- Segment phonemes in words with no blends (cap) first and then words with blends (clap).
- Phoneme substitution to build new words (change the /p/ in “peg” to /l/.
- Demonstrate how to isolate individual sounds in words and segment words into individual sounds with explicit instruction and scaffolded practice.
- Support students to hear parts of the word (early phonological awareness stage).
- Grade 2
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- Use intervention strategies for students struggling with phonological awareness.
- Grade 3
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- Use intervention strategies for students struggling with phonological awareness.
Tools and Activities
Segmenting Syllables
Instructional routines, tools, and word lists for explicit instruction in segmenting syllables.
Download from Oklahoma Phonological Awareness
Identifying and Linking Segments of Sound and Letters
Recommendations and sample activities for identifying words in sentences, assembling words, rhyming, and onset matching.
Learn More from What Works Clearinghouse
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.