Revue D'Orthophonie et D'Audiologie
Use of this program in kindergarten classrooms could result in the identification of children at risk...


American Educator
This curriculum is an example of what we desperately need more of: research-based theory in the classroom.


Joseph K. Torgesen, Ph.D.
This is the curriculum in phonemic awareness that many teachers have been waiting for.


Book Description
Phonemic awareness is the first step in any child's journey to literacy, and more than 25% of all children don't master it by third grade. Specifically targeting phonemic awareness, this program helps young children learn to distinguish the individual sounds that make up words and affect their meanings. With the unique screening method that accommodates up to 15 children at a time, educators can gauge the general skill level of the class and identify children who may need additional testing. And teachers can choose from a range of activities to use with the whole class-from simple listening games to more advanced sound manipulation exercises such as rhyming, alliteration, and segmentation. It has everything teachers need: teaching objectives lesson plans and sample scripts activity adaptations troubleshooting guidelines suggested kindergarten and first-grade schedules an appendix of advanced language games informal, large group screening tests guidelines for interpreting screening test results recommendations for further assessment The perfect complement to any school's language curriculum, this program takes only 15-20 minutes a day.


Card catalog description
Brimming with fun, adaptable activities and games, this supplemental language and reading curriculum complements any prereading program. Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade teachers can use these engaging activities in any classroom - general, bilingual, inclusive, or special education. All children benefit, because the curriculum accommodates individualized learning and teaching styles. The developmental sequence follows a school year calendar, building on simple listening games and gradually moving on to more advanced sound manipulation exercises like rhyming, alliteration, and segmentation. Assessment activities help educators evaluate language and listening skills, and the assessment forms can be photocopied for frequent use with large groups of children.


About the Author
Marilyn Jager Adams, Ph.D., a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, received her Ph.D. in cognitive and developmental psychology from Brown University in 1975 and has been working on issues of education and cognition ever since. In 1995, she was presented with the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Sylvia Scribner Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education through Research. In addition to a number of chapter and journal articles, Dr. Adams is the author of the landmark synthesis of research on reading and its acquisition, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (MIT Press, 1990). She is also the principal author of several classroom resources, including the kindergarten and primary levels of Collections for Young Scholars (SRA/McGraw-Hill, 1995) and Odyssey: A Curriculum for Thinking (Charlesbridge, 1986), and experimentally validated program on thinking skills that was originally developed for Venezuelan barrio students. Dr. Adams was Vice President (1995-1997) of AERA and a member of the Study Committee for the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the College Boards' Advisory Committee for Research and Development, and the planning committee for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading. She is a member of the national advisory boards for the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), the Orton/International Dyslexia Society, the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, and the Neuhaus Education Center. She is on the Literacy Advisory Board for Sesame Street and Between the Lions, a forthcoming television show on reading for 4- to 7-year-olds, and has also worked on early literacy products with a number of educational software groups including Apt Productions, Breakthrough, Cast, Disney Interactive, Microsoft, Sunburst/Software for Success, 7th Level, and The Waterford Institute. Barbara R. Foorman, Ph.D., earned her doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley. She is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School and Principal Investigator of the grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), "Early Interventions for Children with Reading Problems." In addition to many chapters and journal articles on topics related to language and reading development, she is the editor of Reading Acquisition: Cultural Constraints and Cognitive Universals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). She is on the editorial board of Journal of Learning Disabilities and has guest edited special issues of Scientific Studies of Reading, Linguistics and Education and Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr. Foorman has been actively involved in outreach to the schools and to the general public, having chaired Houston Independent School District's Committee on a Balanced Approach to Reading and having testified before the California and Texas legislatures and the Texas State Board of Education Long-Range Planning Committee. Dr. Foorman is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), and several local reading efforts. Ingvar Lundberg, Ph.D., was first trained as a school teacher and served in inner-city schools in Stockholm, Sweden. Later, he entered an academic career and became Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Ume. He has published a dozen books, primarily in Scandinavian languages and a large number of scientific articled, particularly in the field of reading and language development. He served on the steering committee of the largest survey of reading achievement in the world, including more than 30 countries. He is a fellow of several academies and learned societies and serves on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. He is currently affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Gteborg University, Gteborg, Sweden, where he directs a research program on communication disabilities. Terri Beeler, Ed.D., has more than 20 years of experience in education, in both teaching and administration. Dr. Beeler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Education at the University of Houston's downtown campus. Within the responsibilities of that position, she is one of the coordinators of a totally field-based teacher education program, which allows her to work with both preservice and in-service teachers and also continue to be in classrooms with children. In addition, she does a great deal of staff development and consultant work in the area of early literacy development, specifically phonemic awareness and guided reading. She is also a co-editor of the State of Reading, the journal of the Texas State Reading Association, and author of I Can Read, I Can Write: Creating a Print-Rich Environment (Creative Teaching Press, 1993).


Excerpted from Phonemic Awareness in Young Children : A Classroom Curriculum by Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R. Foorman, ingv Lundberg, Ingvar Lundberg, Terri Beeler. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
The Nature and Importance of Phonemic Awareness Before children can make any sense of the alphabetic principle, they must understand that those sounds that are paired with the letters are one and the same as the sounds of speech. For those of us who already know how to read and write, this realization seems very basic, almost transparent. Nevertheless, research shows that the very notion that spoken language is made up of sequences of these little sounds does not come naturally or easily to human beings. The small units of speech that correspond to letters of an alphabetic writing system are called phonemes. Thus, the awareness that language is composed of these small sounds is termed phonemic awareness. Research indicates that, without direct instructional support, phonemic awareness eludes roughly 25% of middle-class first graders and substantially more of those who come from less literacy-rich backgrounds. Furthermore, these children evidence serious difficulty in learning to read and write (see Adams, 1990, for a review). Why is awareness of phonemes so difficult? The problem, in large measure, is that people do not attend to the sounds of phonemes as they produce or listen to speech. Instead, they process the phonemes automatically, directing their active attention to the meaning and force of the utterance as a whole. The challenge, therefore, is to find ways to get children to notice the phonemes, to discover their existence and separability. Fortunately, many of the activities involving rhyme, rhytmn, listening, and sounds that have long been enjoyed with preschool-age children are ideally suited for this purpose. In fact, with this goal in mind, all such activities can be used effectively toward helping children to develop phonemic awareness. The purpose of this book is to provide concrete activities that stimulate the development of phonemic awareness in the preschool or elementary classroom. It is based on a program orginally developed and validated by Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen (1988) in Sweden and Denmark. After translating and adapting it for U.S. classrooms, we field-tested it with kindergarten students and teachers in two schools receiving Title I funds. We, too, found that kindergartners developed the ability to analyze words into sounds significantly more quickly than kindergartners who did not have this program (Foorman, Francis, Beeler, & Fletcher, 1997). This ability to analyze words into sounds is exactly the skill that promotes sucessful reading in first grade (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). About the Structure of Language In order to build phonemic awareness in all children, classroom teachers should know a little about the structure of language, especially phonology. Phonology is the study of the unconscious rules governing speech-sound production. In contrast, phonetics is the study of the way in which speech sounds are articulated, and phonics is the system by which symbols represent sounds in an alphabetic writing system. Phonological rules constrain speech-sound production for biological and environmental reasons. Biological constraints are due to the limitations of human articulatory-motor production. For example, humans are not able to produce the high-frequency vocalizations of whales. Other constraints on our ability to produce speech have to do with the way our brains classify and perceive the minimal units of sound that make a difference to meaning - the units we call phonemes. The differences between the sounds of two phonemes are often very subtle: Compare /b/ with /p/. Yet, these subtle differences in sound can signal dramatic differences in meaning: Compare bat with pat. Fortunately, because phonemes are the basic building blocks of spoken language, babies become attuned to the phonemes of their native language in the first few months of life. However, this sensitivity to the sounds of the phonemes and the differences between them is not conscious. It is deeply embedded in the subattentional machinery of the language system. Phonemes are also the units of speech that are represented by the letters of the alphabetic language. Thus, developing readers must learn to separate these sounds, one from another, and to categorize them in a way that permits understanding how words are spelled. It is this sort of explicity, reflective knowledge that falls under the rubric of phonemic awareness. Conscious awareness of phonemes is distinct from the huolt-in sensitivity that supports speech production and reception. Unfortunately, phonemic awareness is not easy to establish. Part of the difficulty in acquiring phonemic awareness is that, form word to word and speaker to speaker, the sound of any given phoneme can vary considerably. These sorts of variations in spoken form that do not indicate a difference in meaning are referred to as allophones of a phoneme. For exmaple, in the northern part of the United States, the pronunciation of grease typically rhymes with peace, whereas in parts of the South, it shymes with sneeze. Similarly, the pronunciations of the vowels vary greatly across regions, dialects, and individuals. Alternately, variations in spokn form sometimes eliminate phonetic distinctions between phonemes. Thus, for some people, the words pin and pen are pronounced differently woth distinct medial sounds corresponding to their distinct bowels. For other people, however, these words are phonetically indistinguishable, leaving context as the only clue to meaning. Indeed, because of variations in the language even linguists find it difficult to say exactly how many phonemes there are in English; answers vary from 44 to 52.

ANNOTATION

Teaching objectives, lesson plans & sample scripts, activity adaptations, troubleshooting guidelines, further assessment.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Brimming with fun, adaptable activities and games, this supplemental language and reading curriculum complements any prereading program. Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade teachers can use these engaging activities in any classroom - general, bilingual, inclusive, or special education. All children benefit, because the curriculum accommodates individualized learning and teaching styles. The developmental sequence follows a school year calendar, building on simple listening games and gradually moving on to more advanced sound manipulation exercises like rhyming, alliteration, and segmentation. Assessment activities help educators evaluate language and listening skills, and the assessment forms can be photocopied for frequent use with large groups of children.

FROM THE CRITICS

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