Monday 1 December 2014

Why Is Phonemic Awareness An Effective Remedial Strategy For Dyslexia?


What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to differentiate between phonemes and to manipulate them. Remedial instruction for dyslexia requires extensive training in phonemic awareness. 




The English language has 44 phonemes. Children with dyslexia essentially lack the ability to isolate, blend and use these essential language sounds while they are engaged in the task of reading. This key reading skill is not related to a child’s knowledge of spelling or his awareness about letter-sound correspondence.

The Phonological Representation Theory states that dyslexic children suffer from phonological deficits and as a result their ability to clearly represent the smallest unit of speech sounds is hindered. The smallest unit of speech sounds that carry meanings are called phonemes. Phonological representation allows us to break down a word into its constituent sound units (phonemes) and use these units to build back the word again.





Why is Phonemic Awareness important?

The English language is particularly perplexing because there is a lot of irregularity in letter- sound correspondence as a direct result of which many words have irregular spellings.

For example:
The word ‘cat’ can be broken down into three phonemes.

The word ‘read’ also has three phonemes but it is a four letter word as opposed to ‘cat’ which has three phonemes and is also a three letter word.

This creates a lot of confusion for dyslexics because their phonological representations are less precise as compared to average children. Simply put, dyslexics have problems in understanding, remembering and reproducing the smallest units of speech sounds.








 The U.S National Reading Panel found  that "teaching children to manipulate phonemes in words was highly effective under a variety of teaching conditions with a variety of learners across a range of grade and age levels and that teaching phonemic awareness (PA) to children significantly improves their reading more than instruction that lacks any attention to PA."

According to Gillon (2004), “Phoneme awareness performance is a strong predictor of long-term reading and spelling success and can predict literacy performance more accurately than variables such as intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, and socioeconomic status” 

The National Center for Learning Disabilities, NCLD  in an important article on reading states
 Great progress has been made during the past 15 years in the area of reading, and particularly, in our understanding of the underlying skills needed to be an efficient reader. Beginning readers must master a set of phonemic awareness and phonics skills that allow for new words to be "unlocked." Research has demonstrated that:


  •         children are more likely to have trouble reading in the later grades if they lack phonemic awareness (as early as in kindergarten)
  •         simple tests of children's skill at working with phonemes could predict later reading problems and failure; and
  •         children's reading can be improved using simple techniques to show them how to identify the phonemes in words.


Research has also demonstrated that phonemic awareness and phonics, while necessary to learn to read, are not sufficient, especially when we think about reading as a way to extract meaning from printed text. Good readers must also be able to apply these skills quickly, understand the words they read, and to relate what they read to their own lives and experiences.

What is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?
Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sounds of a language whereas phonics is the ability to understand the relationship between letters and sounds or letter- sound correspondence.




For example:
Answering the questions given below would be a test of the child’s phonemic awareness;
a)      Do ‘pen’ and ‘pipe’ begin with the same sound?
b)      What word do we get if we put these sounds together: ‘s’; ‘a’; ‘t’?
c)      What is the first sound in ‘rose’?

To test a child’s phonics, he or she would be asked to look at the words ‘pen’, ‘pipe’, ‘sat’ and ‘rose’ in a printed text and then sound them out  aloud.










Research has shown that there are many probable causes of dyslexia, though the picture is still not very clear, the phonological representation theory remains the most likely explanation for dyslexia. This is due to the finding that phonological deficits form the core of the problems related to dyslexia and more than 75% of children with dyslexia were found to have phonological processing problems.  

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