Phonemic Awareness

Yopp’s article, A test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children was written with the intention to bring awareness to a tool that can be used to determine a student’s phonemic awareness as well as a predictor of their future reading achievements.  Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize the phonemes or sounds in speech. As children begin kindergarten many lack the ability to identify and segment words into individual sounds.  Research has identified phonemic awareness as a prerequisite skill needed to become a successful reader.  By the end of first grade many, if not all, children are able to segment words into phonemes and identify the individual sounds that make up a word. Stanovich (1986 & 1994) stated that phonemic awareness is more of a predictor of reading achievement than tests of general intelligence including the IQ test. Adams (1990) indicated that children who fail to master phonemic awareness will struggle will to master print. However, the question remained how to identify and reach the children who did not master phonemic awareness. The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation is an instrument designed to assess a child’s ability to produce the sounds of a given word in order.  The 22-item assessment is given to students individually by verbally presenting the student with one word at a time, requiring the student to produce the sounds for each segment in order.  The student must provide all of the sounds and in the correct order in order to receive credit for a correct response.  Partial credit is not given for responses that include some correct sounds. During the test teachers can take notes regarding the incorrect responses or sounds the student may produce.  These notes may help the teacher better understand the student’s level of phonemic awareness.  Using this tool, teacher can quickly identify which students are phonemically aware and which students need further intervention. The article included all children need phonemic awareness instruction before formal reading instruction occurs.  Articles in The Reading Teacher suggest that using songs, stories, and games children can focus on the sounds of language.

The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation is an assessment I would recommend to be used in early elementary to identify students who have not mastered phonemic awareness. It would provide the teacher with the ability to create groups for small group instruction base on their level of phonemic awareness. Given the results of the phonemic awareness assessment instructional strategies and activities can be planned into the instructional time to increase the students’ ability to identify word parts and their sounds.