April 1, 2023
How Kids Learn to Read: The Role of Phonology
The process of learning to read is complex. It involves phonemic awareness, or the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds; phonics, or matching sounds to letters; and decoding, or translating written words into speech by breaking the words down into their component sounds.
Phonemes and phonemic awareness
Before a child can learn to read, they must demonstrate “phonemic awareness", which is “the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and understand that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds" (“Big Ideas in Beginning Reading”, University of Oregon). There are 44 of these individual sounds, or phonemes, in the English language, and they form the smallest units of sound in speech. Phonemic awareness is entirely oral, and the manipulation of sounds is heard and spoken, not written.
Phonics and phonological awareness
All phonemes correspond to letters in written language, and the ability to identify that relationship is known as “phonics". This includes sounds that are represented by more than one letter, such as “sh” or “cl”, which are called blends, diphthongs, or digraphs, depending on which letters are put together. Phonics involves the idea of written language, as it refers to the ability to match spoken sounds with their corresponding letters.
Decoding
When kids understand phonemic awareness and phonics, they can begin to decode. Decoding includes the use of visual, syntactic, and semantic cues to decipher the meaning of words - and ultimately, sentences. Visual cues come from the way a word looks in terms of recognizable letters, combinations, and the sounds they represent. Syntactic cues are found in the order of words and the way a sentence is structured. Semantic cues may come from an accompanying picture, or a word’s part of speech.
Many school districts across the country use curricula designed specifically to teach phonemic awareness and phonics to early stage readers. Some of the more popular curricula are Heggerty, Wilson FUNdations, or The Superkids Phonemic Awareness Curriculum. These curricula typically end in elementary school, though there is no guarantee that all students have mastered the concepts. Additionally, many states require the explicit teaching of phonology in their standards. These requirements are important, because when children are not taught these skills explicitly, they may have trouble as they continue to learn to read. For example, a lack of foundational skills in phonemic awareness and phonological awareness may lead to a reader who struggles with fluency, as they do not have automaticity in identifying letter-sound pairings. When a reader struggles with fluency, vocabulary and comprehension become difficult to build.
These building blocks of language are critical for young readers to master. Rally Reader is here to help children (and parents and teachers alike) in this endeavor. Rally supports children throughout their literacy development, correcting errors such as the mispronunciation of a word or the substitution of a word. As Rally works with readers, they gradually develop mastery over their previous mistakes. This is beneficial for all readers, but especially for those who struggle with decoding. The importance of phonemic and phonological awareness in learning to read cannot be overstated. Once readers have developed baseline fluency, Rally ensures they continue to be supported throughout their reading development.