The phonemic awareness discussion
There has been an extensive discussion of phonemic awareness instruction on the SPELLtalk list. It seems to have ended with a lot of uncertainty about the implications of my observations about PA for instruction, so let me try to boil it down. I’ll be pursuing these issues in greater detail here in the near future. I will be responding to comments that are posted here as soon as I can! Hey, maybe I should write a book!
Teaching children phonemes is the “science of reading” version of a traditional practice, teaching letter sounds. Time was, people taught children letters, letter names, and a sound associated with each letter, like T is “tə” and S is “ssss”. You can see how people do this in different languages and alphabets around the world on YouTube; it's fascinating. Teaching phonemes is meant to be an advance on this practice, because (it’s thought) the sounds are units of spoken words relevant to reading. As I’ve pointed out, this assumption is wrong because people don’t talk in phonemes. Readers need to learn to treat spoken words as if they consist of a sequence of phonemes, but that is a way of thinking about words rather than saying them, and it is the result of learning about print, not the prerequisite.
The sounds that people are teaching in PA instruction are like traditional letter sounds: both are approximations of sounds that are produced in speaking. Teaching a sound for each letter is a good thing. It introduces the child to the idea that letters and sounds are related, and to the idea of treating spoken words as if they consist of discrete sounds. These sounds are also important for getting phonics and reading aloud off the ground: the child can sound out simple words using the letter sounds as a tool. They will have to “blend” the sounds because BAT does not actually consist of the sounds “b” “a” and “t”. The use of the artificial letter sounds drops away as the child transitions to associating spelling patterns for words and parts of words with their actual pronunciations. For example, AT can be associated with the actual pronunciation of the syllable, and similarly for BAT and so on.
If the “phonemes” being taught in PA instruction are just variants of traditional letter sounds, what is the problem? The answer is:
if you (mistakenly) believe that phonemes are units of spoken words, then they can be taught that way, via oral language activities. That is what various authorities have recommended. In doing so, they discarded the crucial connection to print, which is the actual basis for phonemic awareness (treating words as if they consist of discrete sounds) and important for getting phonics off the ground.
This is a huge step backwards. PA instruction isn’t teaching children to read. It is teaching them about a supposed property of spoken words. This is a waste of valuable instruction time that could have been spent on teaching children to actually read, starting with sounding out simple words using letter sounds.
So, it looks like this:
The second alternative eliminates the block of time allocated to instruction and practice focused on phonemes and other properties of spoken words (e.g., syllables). Once the child learns letters and a simple sound associated with each one, they can learn about other properties of words via naturalistic tasks such as reading aloud and spelling words from their sounds, with sufficient feedback and practice. Of course, they need to continue learning about spoken language, but that means words (vocabulary) and how they are used, not properties of words.
Eliminating instruction about the properties of spoken words goes against standard practices in the “science of reading,” which makes it difficult to accept. Hopefully this discussion has opened the door to further critical thinking about these important issues