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Effective Phonics Programs Start With Phonemic Awareness
Phonics interventions for struggling readers vary dramatically in scope and approach. Phonics programs that focus on building phonemic awareness are the most effective at kick-starting reading because, without phonemic awareness, learning phonics is, at best, challenging for a child and, at worst, humiliating.
- Phonemic Awareness is about processing sounds, picking out letter sounds inside words
- Phonics is about connecting those letter sounds to text symbols
Most reading instruction starts with phonics. But phonics mastery is frustrating if a child cannot hear the letter sounds inside words represented by text symbols.
So phonics instruction and drills at home are distressing for many children because phonemic awareness is missing.
This comes down to efficient language processing and accurate listening. Once a child processes sounds accurately and can hear the sounds inside words, connecting those sounds to letter symbols is so much easier.
What Many Parents Miss About Their Child’s Difficulty With Phonics
For adults who’ve been reading since before they can remember, it’s hard to understand how difficult it can be to learn the basics of language. The process of learning words, how they’re built out of letters, how they fit together, and what they mean is literally what sets humans apart from animals.
But even though our brains can learn these things, there is no reading region, so it requires a great leap in each child’s mental development. The intuitive process children use to bridge that gap relies on phonics and phonemic understanding.
Students must learn that words are made up of sounds before they can understand the sound-spelling relationships of written words. The two concepts are intertwined despite having different meanings. And it’s a lot more challenging for a young brain than most parents suspect.
Is Your Child Hearing Phonemes?
The language processing speed needed to pick up phonemes for phonics is a lot more demanding than understanding whole words. This is phonemic awareness, the ability to identify, manipulate, and differentiate individual phonemes (the smallest units of sound in a language) in spoken words.
It’s a matter of “pixels” of sound to pick up the / r / in /g-r/ so that / grit / is not processed as / git/. This better processing is also needed for close-sounding syllables, like hearing the difference between /moon/ and /noon/
Adding more pixels to words to make the phonemes clearer is challenging for many children.
Language processing matures for many, if not most, children around age 7, and later for many more. Phonemic awareness won’t kick in until auditory processing is fully developed. If you have concerns about your child, check out these symptoms of an auditory processing delay.
So, even if your child had no evidence of speech or language delays before elementary school, if they have any trouble at all with reading, your starting point should be language processing.
Phonics Interventions for Reading
Learning to read requires a sequence of skills, starting with language comprehension and phonics.
If children have the phonemic awareness to sound out and learn unfamiliar words, they will find phonics easier as they connect text to letter sounds.
Segmenting and blending are two of the most important phonemic awareness skills to teach children. Segmenting is breaking a word into individual sounds. Blending is pushing sounds together to make words. Decoding is recognizing these letter sounds as words.
If phonemic awareness is not there, your child will need blending help in 1st grade or earlier, stuck at the phonics teaching stage, the starting gate of learning to read.
To get out of the reading starting gates, a child needs to not only hear phonemes, but also process them effortlessly and automatically. Only then can decoding be automatic. And only then can reading comprehension and thinking while reading fully develop.
Phonemic awareness is essential for phonics, reading, and spelling as it helps children understand the sound structure of words. More on phonemic awareness here.
The key to unlocking phonemic awareness is language processing and pre-phonics training.
Teaching Phonics At Home
Phonics refers to the relationship between letters (graphemes) and the sounds (phonemes) they represent. It involves teaching children the systematic and predictable relationships between letters and sounds, enabling them to decode words.
For younger children, the best way to build phonemic awareness for phonics is to be read to and spoken to in an adult voice. The more words a child hears, the more language processing is stimulated and practiced, and that builds phonemic awareness and phonics readiness.
Some children still need a nudge, a little more direct instruction, to help them connect letters to sounds. Rhyming and phonics-based word games can help tune up their phonemic awareness. Online phonics programs for kids also teach letter-sound correspondences, blending sounds to form words, and segmenting words into individual sounds.
Phonics is important not only because it’s how we decode and read words, it also impacts how well we spell. Phonics mastery is the gateway skill to reading automaticity and comprehension.
Many online phonics programs for kids exist, such as ABC Mouse and Hooked on Phonics. These phonics programs are effective if your child’s language processing is sufficiently developed.
If you have tried these programs without much success, and given the importance of learning phonics and decoding with automaticity by 2nd or 3rd grade, the next step is a phonics intervention before reading gets too frustrating.
Phonics Interventions for Struggling Readers
If you need outside help, there are two main phonics interventions for elementary-age children: direct drill-based phonics instruction and cognitive training that works on auditory and language processing.
Phonics Instruction
There are a number of different methods. What they have in common is that they use a structured and repetitive review of each letter and its associated sound.
The Orton-Gillingham approach is the most popular of these methods. Most practitioners will quote 8-24 months to learn phonics this way, with at least 50 hours of 1-on-1 instruction. Even if you can hear phonemes in words, it can be a long, grueling process.
Several phonics programs address phonemic awareness delays with multisensory approaches, including Orton-Gillingham. For example, having children write a letter in shaving cream using their fingers while repeating its sound. This leverages movement, touch, and smell to build the connection between the symbols and their pronunciations.
Once students learn each letter and its sound, they’re ready to move on to common letter blends — the sounds produced when letters such as “ch” or “sh” are used together. Once they master that with automaticity, learning to read can truly begin.
Cognitive Training To Help Phonics Learning
Two sound-based approaches can address delays in language processing skills that can hold back reading: auditory training therapies and computer-based programs.
Auditory training programs such as the Listening Program for preschoolers and auditory training conducted mainly by audiologists can help stimulate auditory senses.
Computer-based training, including Fast ForWord software by Gemm Learning, uses intense, adaptive exercises to strengthen all aspects of auditory processing needed for reading, including sound discrimination and sound sequencing, as part of a comprehensive reading intervention for elementary-age children, 5 years of age and older.
If you are concerned about your child’s progress and are looking for an evidence-based phonics intervention program for elementary-age children you can do at home, check out our Fast ForWord reading program here or request a demo to see an overview of how it works and try the exercises.
