Phonological Awareness(

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Assessment andInstruction in

1999Florida Department of EducationDivision of Public Schools and Community EducationBureau of Instructional Support and Community Services

PhonologicalAwareness

This is one of many publications available through the Bureau of Instructional Support andCommunity Services, Florida Department of Education, designed to assist school districts, stateagencies which support educational programs, and parents in the provision of special programs.For additional information on this publication, or for a list of available publications, contact theClearinghouse Information Center, Bureau of Instructional Support and Community Services,Division of Public Schools and Community Education, Florida Department of Education, Room622 Turlington Bldg., Tallahassee, Florida 32399-0400.

telephone: (850) 488-1879

FAX: (850) 487-2679

Suncom: 278-1879

e-mail: [email protected]

website: http://www.firn.edu/doe/commhome/



Reprinted 2002Florida Department of EducationDivision of Public Schools and Community EducationBureau of Instructional Support and Community Services

Florida Department of EducationBureau of Instructional Support and Community Services

Shan Goff, Chief

Debby Houston, Administrator, ESE Program Development and ServicesCarol Allman, Supervisor, ESE Program Development and ServicesPaul Gallaher, Program Specialist, ESE Program Development and Services

This document was written by Joseph K. Torgesen and Patricia G. Mathis, Florida StateUniversity.

This document was edited and designed by Carmy Greenwood, Program Specialist,Clearinghouse Information Center

CopyrightState of FloridaDepartment of State1999

Authorization for reproduction is hereby granted to the state system of public education asdefined in section 228.041(1), Florida Statutes. No authorization is granted for distribution orreproduction outside the state system of public education without prior approval in writing.



By

Joseph K. Torgesen and Patricia G. MathesFlorida State University

ContentsPreface ________________________________________________________________________________ vii

Section 1: Phonological Awareness and Its Importance in Reading _____________________1Research Evidence for the Role of Phonological Awareness in Reading Growth __________ 4

Section 2: Assessment of Phonological Awareness ______________________________________7Information about Measures of Phonological Awareness ______________________________ 10Test of Phonological Awareness _____________________________________________________ 13The Phonological Awareness Test ____________________________________________________ 15Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test _________________________________________ 19Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation _________________________________________ 21Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis ____________________________________________________ 25Test of Invented Spelling ____________________________________________________________ 29

Section 3: Instruction in Phonological Awareness ____________________________________ 33Goals of Instruction in Phonological Awareness ______________________________________ 33General Issues In Teaching Phonological Awareness _________________________________ 34Pronunciation Suggestions for Individual Phonemes _________________________________ 36

Easy to Pronounce ______________________________________________________________ 36Slightly Harder to Pronounce ____________________________________________________ 36Hardest to pronounce ___________________________________________________________ 37Short Vowels ____________________________________________________________________ 38

Materials Teachers Can Use to Help Children Acquire Phonological Awareness ________ 38Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum ___________________ 41Sound Start: Teaching Phonological Awareness in the Classroom _____________________ 43Sounds Abound ____________________________________________________________________ 45The Phonological Awareness Kit: Beginning and Intermediate ________________________ 47The Phonological Awareness Companion ____________________________________________ 49Peer Assisted Learning Strategies for Beginning Readers _____________________________ 51Daisy Quest and Daisy’s Castle _____________________________________________________ 53Waterford Early Reading Program—Level 1 __________________________________________ 55Read, Write, and Type_______________________________________________________________ 57Earobics____________________________________________________________________________ 59Launch into Reading Success through Phonological Awareness Training ______________ 61Phonological Awareness Training for Reading ________________________________________ 63The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech _____ 65

Section 4: Software to Build Pre-Reading Skills ______________________________________ 67Programs Considered in This Review ________________________________________________ 68Phonemic Awareness Activities in Software Programs ________________________________ 69Most Highly Recommended Software Programs ______________________________________ 69

References ____________________________________________________________________________ 71

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The discovery of the importance of phone-mic awareness in early reading is generallythought to be one of the most importantbreakthroughs in reading instruction inthe last 20 years. This manual is written tohelp teachers incorporate assessment andinstruction of phonological awareness intotheir pre-reading and reading curriculum.

The first question every busy teacher has aright to ask about this manual is, “Will thishelp me do my job more effectively?” Theanswer in this case is relatively straightfor-ward. If you take the time to study theconcepts and materials discussed in thismanual, you will learn how to help morechildren learn to read well.

There is now a very strong research baseindicating that at least 20 percent of schoolchildren will experience special difficultieslearning to read without explicit instruc-tion to stimulate phonological awareness.Such instruction also appears to acceleratereading development in all children. It isessential that all kindergarten, first, andsecond grade teachers, as well as all teach-ers who work with children with readingdisabilities, understand what phonologicalawareness is, how it can be quickly as-sessed, and how we can help childrenacquire it.

This manual is divided into four mainsections. The first section describes whatphonological awareness is and how it isrelated to reading instruction.

The second section presents informationabout the assessment of phonologicalawareness, and the third section describeshow instruction in phonological awarenesscan be integrated into reading instruction.These sections present detailed informa-tion on and evaluations of presently avail-able tests and curriculum materials in thisarea.

Preface

vii

—continued

viii

The fourth section presents descriptiveinformation about a range of computersoftware marketed for home and schooluse in building pre-reading skills in youngchildren.

We hope teachers will find this manualuseful in their efforts to help all childrenacquire effective literacy skills. We areconvinced that information about phono-logical awareness can make a difference ifit is understood and applied properly. Bestwishes in your work with Florida’s chil-dren.

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Some of the information in this sectionoverlaps with that found in the pamphlet“What Every Teacher Should Know aboutPhonological Awareness,” which you mayhave already read. If you have read thepamphlet, you may want to skip directly tothe part of this section dealing with addi-tional research evidence.

One other note before we begin: Whenspeech researchers write about the soundsin words, they use a phonetic alphabetthat has a unique symbol for each of the44 phonemes in our language. Since mostteachers are unfamiliar with this alphabet,we will represent the sounds in words byusing a letter enclosed by slash marks. Forexample, the sounds in the word bat willbe represented like this: /b/-/a/-/t/.Whenever you see a letter enclosed byslash marks in this manual, you shouldthink of the sound of the letter, rather thanits name.

What Is PhonologicalAwareness?

In order to understand the concept ofphonological awareness, we must firstknow what a phoneme is. A phoneme isthe smallest unit of sound in our languagethat makes a difference in a word’s mean-ing. For example, the word cat has threephonemes, /k/- /a/- /t/. By changing thefirst phoneme, we can produce the wordbat. Changing the second phoneme createsthe word cot, and we can obtain the wordcab by altering the final phoneme. Wordsin English (in fact, in all languages) arecomposed of strings of phonemes. This isfortunate, because it allows us to create allthe words we will ever need by using vari-ous combinations of just 44 differentspeech sounds!

Speech researchers have discovered thatthe human brain is specifically adapted forprocessing many different kinds of linguis-tic information, and one part of our biologi-

PhonologicalAwarenessand ItsImportancein Reading

Section 1

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cal endowment allows us to process thecomplex phonological information inspeech without actually being aware of theindividual phonemes themselves. This isone of the human abilities that makesacquiring speech a natural process, so thatalmost everyone in the world learns tospeak a language with very little directinstruction. However, because phonemesare represented by letters in print, learningto read requires that children becomeconsciously aware of phonemes as indi-vidual segments in words. In fact, phono-logical awareness is most commonlydefined as one’s sensitivity to, or ex-plicit awareness of, the phonologicalstructure of words in one’s language. Inshort, it involves the ability to notice,think about, or manipulate the indi-vidual sounds in words.

One of the early signs of emerging sensitiv-ity to the phonological structure of wordsis the ability to play rhyming games andactivities. In order to tell whether twowords rhyme, the child must attend to thesounds in words rather than their mean-ing. In addition, the child must focusattention on only one part of a word ratherthan the way it sounds as a whole. Aschildren grow in awareness of the pho-nemes in words, they become able to judgewhether words have the same first or lastsounds, and with further development,they become able to actually isolate andpronounce the first, last, or middle soundsin words. At its highest levels of develop-ment, awareness of individual phonemes inwords is shown by the ability to separatelypronounce the sounds in even multi-syllable words, or to tell exactly how twowords like task and tacks are different (theorder of the last two phonemes is re-versed).

Acquiring phonological awareness actuallyinvolves learning two kinds of things aboutlanguage. First, it involves learning thatwords can be divided into segments ofsound smaller than a syllable. Second, it

involves learning about individual pho-nemes themselves. As children acquiremore and more conscious knowledge of thedistinctive features of phonemes (how theysound when they occur in words, or howthey feel when they are pronounced) theybecome more adept at noticing their iden-tity and order when they occur in words.For example, while children in the firstsemester of first grade might be able toisolate and identify the first or last soundof a word like man, by the end of firstgrade, most children can easily, and rela-tively automatically, segment all thesounds in a more complex word like clap.Children must acquire knowledge of thedistinctive features of phonemes so theycan recognize them when they occur withslightly varied pronunciations in differentwords. For instance, the sound /l/ variesslightly in its pronunciation dependingupon whether it occurs at the beginning ofa spoken word such as last, as the secondsound in a consonant blend as in flat, inthe middle of a word, such as shelving, orin a final blend such as in fault. Childrenwill be able to understand the way theletters represent sounds in these wordsbetter if they recognize that the samephoneme, /l/, is represented by the letter lin each of these words.

Why Is PhonologicalAwareness Important inLearning to Read?

Phonological awareness is important be-cause it strongly supports learning howthe words in our language are representedin print. When children learn to read, theymust acquire two different kinds of skills.They must learn how to identify printedwords, and they must learn how to com-prehend written material. Their majorchallenge when they first enter school is tolearn to accurately identify printed words,and this brings them face to face with thealphabetic principle. English is an alpha-betic language, meaning that words are

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represented in print roughly at the level ofphonemes. For example, the word cat hasthree phonemes, and three letters are usedto represent them; the word which also hasthree phonemes, but five letters are usedto represent them.

In our language, the alphabetic principlepresents two important learning challengesto children. First, individual phonemes arenot readily apparent as individual seg-ments in normal speech. When we say theword dog, for example, the phonemesoverlap with one another (they arecoarticulated), so that we hear a singleburst of sound rather than three individualsegments. Coarticulating the phonemes inwords (e.g., starting to pronounce thesecond phoneme, /r/, in the word frostwhile we are still saying the first phoneme,/f/) makes speech fluent, but it alsomakes it hard for many children to becomeaware of phonemes as individual segmentsof sound within words.

The second challenge presented by thealphabetic principle in our language is thatthere is not always a regular one-to-onecorrespondence between letters and pho-nemes. For example, some phonemes arerepresented by more than one letter (e.g.,ch, sh, wh, ai, oi). In addition, sometimesthe phoneme represented by a letterchanges, depending on other letters in theword (not vs. note, fit vs. fight, not vs.notion), or pronunciation of parts of somewords may not follow any regular letter-phoneme correspondence patterns, suchas in yacht or choir.

If understanding and utilizing the alpha-betic principle in reading words presentssuch learning challenges for children, theobvious question, and one that has beenrepeatedly asked over the last century, iswhether it is really necessary for childrento understand the principle and master itsuse in order to become good readers. Onthe basis of research on reading, readingdevelopment, and reading instruction

conducted over the past twenty years, wenow know that the answer to this questionis very strongly in the affirmative! Childrenwho quickly come to understand the rela-tionships between letters and phonemes,and who learn to utilize this information asan aide to identifying words in print, al-most invariably become better readersthan children who have difficulty acquiringthese skills (Adams, 1990; Beck & Juel,1995).

There are at least three ways that phono-logical awareness is important in learningbeginning word reading skills.

• It helps children understand thealphabetic principle. Without at leasta beginning level of phonological aware-ness, children have no way of under-standing how the words from their orallanguage are represented in print.Unless they understand that wordshave sound segments at the level of thephoneme, they cannot take advantageof an alphabetic script. They will alsonot be able to understand the rationalefor learning individual letter sounds,and the common strategy of “soundingout” words in beginning reading will notmake sense to them.

• It helps children notice the regularways that letters represent sounds inwords. If children can notice all fourphonemes in the spoken word flat, ithelps them understand the way theletters in the written word correspondto the sounds. This ability to notice thematch between the letters and soundsin words has two potential benefits tochildren learning to read. First, itreinforces knowledge of individualletter-sound correspondences, andsecond, it helps in forming mentalrepresentations of words so they can beaccurately recognized when they areencountered in print again. Researchhas shown that the associations chil-dren form between the letters and

4

sounds in words help create the kind ofsight-word representations that are thebasis of fluent reading (Ehri, in press).

• It makes it possible to generatepossibilities for words in context thatare only partially sounded out. Forexample, consider a first-grade childwho encounters a sentence such as“John’s father put John’s bicycle in thecar,” and cannot recognize the fifthword. A relatively early level of phono-logical awareness supports the abilityto search one’s mental dictionary forwords that begin with similar sounds.Thus, if the child knows the soundrepresented by the letter b, he/she canmentally search for words that beginwith that sound and fit the context. Aschildren acquire more knowledge ofphonics and can sound out more lettersin words, their search for words withsimilar phonemes in them can proceedmuch more quickly and accurately.

As should be clear from this analysis,phonemic awareness has its primaryimpact on reading growth through its effecton children’s ability to phonetically decodewords in text. Although phonetic decodingskills should never be considered the endgoal of reading, research now shows that,for most children, acquiring these skillsduring early elementary school is a criticalstep along the way toward becoming aneffective reader.

Research Evidence for theRole of PhonologicalAwareness in ReadingGrowth

There are three major kinds of evidencethat directly demonstrate the importantrole that phonological awareness plays inhelping children during the early stages oflearning to read. One type of evidence isprovided by studies showing that the level

of phonological awareness in kindergartenis a very strong predictor of children’sprogress in learning to read. Another typeof evidence comes from studies indicatingthat deficient phonological awareness isone of the most reliable diagnostic signs ofserious reading disabilities. The final typeof evidence comes from research that hasdemonstrated the positive effects on read-ing growth of instruction designed tostimulate phonological awareness.

Differences in PhonologicalAwareness Predict SubsequentGrowth in Reading Ability

Many studies have examined the extent towhich differences in phonological aware-ness among children in kindergarten andbeginning first grade can predict who willbecome good and poor readers after read-ing instruction begins. For example, oneearly study showed that several shortphonological awareness tasks administeredduring the second semester of kindergar-ten each predicted first-grade word readingskill as well as or better than the six sub-sections of a standard readiness test or astandardized intelligence test (Stanovich,Cunningham, & Cramer, l984).

One of the most complete investigations ofthe relationship between early differencesin phonological awareness and subsequentreading growth has been conducted atFlorida State University (Torgesen, Wagner,& Rashotte, 1994; Wagner, et al., 1997). Inthis study, we followed the reading growthof approximately 200 children from kinder-garten through the end of fifth grade. Thegraph on the next page presents informa-tion on the growth of word reading abilityin two groups of children who began firstgrade with quite different levels of phono-logical awareness. The numbers at theright of the graphs represent averagegrade-level score at the end of fifth grade ofchildren who scored above and below the20th percentile on phonological awareness

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tests at the beginning of first grade. Inother words, the graphs compare the groupof children who fell in the bottom 20thpercentile on measures of phonologicalawareness with the group of children whoscored above the 20th percentile. All thechildren had general verbal ability in thenormal range.

From the left panel, we can see that chil-dren with weak phonological awarenessended up about two grade levels belowtheir peers in sight-word reading ability,and the right panel shows that their pho-netic reading skills were more than threegrade levels below their peers. On a mea-sure of reading comprehension, the chil-dren with weak phonological awarenessobtained a grade score of 3.9, which wasthree years behind the score of 6.9 ob-tained by their peers.

It is interesting to note that phonologicalawareness is a strong predictor of readinggrowth not only in English, but also inSwedish, Spanish, French, Italian, Portu-guese, and Russian.

Poor Phonological Awareness Is aReliable Diagnostic Sign of SeriousReading Disability

The second kind of evidence on the impor-tance of phonological awareness in readingdevelopment comes from research that hascarefully studied the abilities of olderchildren with reading disabilities. Whenthese children are compared to normalreaders on many different verbal and non-verbal skills, they are consistently moreimpaired in phonological awareness thanin any other single ability (Fletcher,Shaywitz, Shankweiler, Katz, Liberman,Stuebing, Francis, Fowler, & Shaywitz,1994). Even when dyslexic children arecompared to younger children who havethe same general reading ability, childrenwith reading disabilities perform morepoorly on tasks that measure phonologicalawareness (Stanovich & Siegel, 1994).

Figure 1. Growth of sight-word and phonetic decoding skill in children who begin first grade belowthe 20th percentile in phonological awareness.

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Instruction in PhonologicalAwareness Accelerates ReadingGrowth

The final type of evidence about the role ofphonological awareness in reading isprobably the most important. This evi-dence indicates that specific training inphonological awareness either beforereading instruction begins, or duringreading instruction, consistently acceler-ates reading growth for children who re-ceive it. This research has also shown thatmethods that integrate instruction inletter-sound correspondences in a waythat directly links newly acquired phone-mic awareness to reading and spellingproduce stronger effects on reading thanthose that do not. While most instructionalprograms in phonemic awareness beginwith oral language activities, most alsoconclude by leading children to apply theirnewly developed ability to think about thephonemic segments in words to simplereading and spelling activities.

When we recommend that oral instructionin phonological awareness be accompa-nied, or followed by print-based activitiesinvolving letters, this does not mean thatinstruction in phonological awareness isuseful only if it precedes a systematic andcomplete phonics curriculum. Althoughmost reading researchers now recommendthat reading curriculums should contain abalance of activities including both skills-oriented phonics instruction and meaning-ful, literature-based activities in readingand writing (Adams, 1990; Beck & Juel,1995), children in kindergarten need onlyvery simple activities to make the connec-tion between phonological awareness andreading. As will be seen when we reviewinstructional programs, the print-based

activities that accompany instruction inphonological awareness are necessarilyvery simple. For example, children whohave been taught a few letter sounds, andwho have achieved a beginning level ofphonemic awareness, should be able toidentify the first letter of a word when theyhear it pronounced. They might also be ledto substitute different letters at the begin-ning or end of a word like cat to makedifferent words. They could also be askedto pronounce the sounds of the lettersc, a, t, and then blend them together toform a word.

The importance of this progression fromoral to written language activities wasillustrated in the first major demonstrationof the effectiveness of training in phonemicawareness reported by Bradley and Bryant(1985). In this study, phonemic awarenesswas stimulated by using activities thatrequired children to categorize words onthe basis of similarities in their beginning,middle, and ending sounds (sound com-parison tasks). However, in one of theconditions, this training was supplementedby work with individual plastic letters toillustrate the way new words could bemade by changing only one letter (orsound) in a word. It was children in thislatter condition who showed the largestbenefit from the phonemic awarenesstraining program. While training in phone-mic awareness, by itself, can producesignificant improvement in subsequentreading growth (Lundberg, Frost, &Peterson, 1988), programs that directlyillustrate the relevance of the training tosimple reading and spelling activitiesconsistently produce the largest gains inreading (Blachman, Ball, Black, & Tangel,1994; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1993;Cunningham, 1990).

7

The primary purpose for the assessment ofphonological awareness is to identify chil-dren who may require extra instructionalhelp. Although phonological awareness canbe effectively stimulated by group activitiesat the classroom level, there will always bea proportion of children who need moreintensive, or more explicit, instruction inorder to make adequate growth in thisarea. In the first part of this section, wewill present some general issues involvedin selecting and using measures of phono-logical awareness, and in the second halfwe present detailed descriptions and infor-mation about several measures that arecurrently available.

When Should Assessment ofPhonological Awareness BeConducted?

In most school programs, teachers shouldprobably wait until the second semester ofkindergarten to identify children who mayrequire extra help in this area. Whenchildren enter school, their differences inphonological awareness are heavily influ-enced by their home language environ-ment. Thus, some children may score lowon tests of phonological awareness early inthe year, but may respond very well tosystematic instruction in this area. Par-ticularly when kindergarten children areexposed from the beginning of the year toactivities designed to stimulate phonologi-cal awareness, by the beginning of thesecond semester, teachers will have a verygood idea of which children are progressingslowly. The measures we will discuss inthis section can be used to support teacherjudgments about the need for extra in-struction.

When used in this way, the assessment ofphonological awareness in kindergartencan be seen as part of an overall assess-ment effort to support the prevention ofreading problems in young children. As-

AssessmentofPhonologicalAwareness

Section 2

8

sessment of phonological awareness in firstand second grade children may also bewarranted as a means to monitor thedevelopment of those who continue toexperience difficulties in this area.

How Is PhonologicalAwareness Assessed?

Since researchers first began to studyphonological awareness in the early 1970s,more than 20 different tasks have beenused to measure awareness of phonemesin words. These measures can be groupedinto three broad categories: sound com-parison, phoneme segmentation, andphoneme blending.

Sound Comparison

Sound comparison tasks use a number ofdifferent formats that all require childrento make comparisons between the soundsin different words. For example, a childmight be asked to indicate which word (ofseveral) begins or ends with the samesound as a target word (e.g., “Which wordbegins with the same first sound as cat—boy, cake, or fan?”). Additionally, tasksthat require children to generate wordsthat have the same first or last sound as atarget word would fall in this category.Sound comparison tasks are particularlyappropriate for kindergarten-age children,as they do not require as fully explicit aknowledge of phonemes as tasks thatrequire children to pronounce or manipu-late individual phonemes.

Phoneme Segmentation

Phoneme segmentation tasks require arelatively explicit level of awareness ofphonemes because they involve counting,pronouncing, deleting, adding, or reversingthe individual phonemes in words. Com-mon examples of this type of task requirepronouncing the individual phonemes in

words (“Say the sounds in cat one at atime.”), deleting sounds from words (“Saycard without saying the /d/ sound.”), orcounting sounds (“Put one marker on theline for each sound you hear in the wordfast.”).

Phoneme Blending

Phoneme blending skill has only beenmeasured by one kind of task. This is thesound blending task in which the testerpronounces a series of phonemes in isola-tion and asks the child to blend themtogether to form a word (e.g., “What worddo these sounds make, /f/ - /a/ - /t/?”).Easier variants of the sound-blending taskcan be produced by allowing the child tochoose from two or three pictures the wordthat is represented by a series of pho-nemes.

An important point about these differentkinds of tasks is that they all appear to bemeasuring essentially the same construct,or ability. Although some research (Yopp,1988) has indicated that the tasks mayvary in the complexity of their overallintellectual requirements, and there maybe some differences between segmentationand blending tasks at certain ages(Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994), forthe most part, they all seem to be measur-ing different levels of growth in the samegeneral ability (Hoien, et al., 1995;Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984).Sound comparison measures are easierand are sensitive to emergent levels ofphonological awareness, while segmenta-tion and blending measures are sensitiveto differences among children during laterstages of development involving refine-ments in explicit levels of awareness.Measures of sensitivity to rhyme (whichword rhymes with cat—leg or mat?) are notincluded among measures of phonemicawareness because they appear to bemeasuring something a little different, andless predictive of reading disabilities, than

9

those measures that ask children to attendto individual phonemes. For the samereason, measures of syllable awareness arenot included in this group.

How Should You Select aMeasure to Use in YourAssessment Program?

Although the most commonly used mea-sures of phonological awareness appear tobe measuring roughly the same construct,there are usually small differences in theirpredictive relationships with readinggrowth. In selecting the best measure touse in your classroom, at least three fac-tors are important in addition to cost.

• Is its degree of difficulty suitable for thechildren you will assess?

• Does it have adequate measurementreliability?

• What is the evidence for its ability topredict reading growth?

Degree of Difficulty

A given test may be a good indicator ofrelative strengths and weaknesses inphonological awareness among the chil-dren in your classroom and still not be anappropriate measure for your purposes.For example, if you are able to provideextra instruction only to the children whofall in the bottom 20 percent of your class,then you should use a test that is particu-larly sensitive to differences among chil-dren in the lower half of the class. Thiswould probably be a relatively easy mea-sure that does not discriminate well amongthe strongest children in your class, butwhich is very sensitive to differencesamong your weakest students. In contrast,if you used a more difficult measure, itmight tell you who had the very strongestphonological skills in your class, but mostof the children in the lower half of the class

would obtain very low scores so that youcould not differentiate among them easily.

If the children in your classroom generallycome from backgrounds in which theyhave had rich pre-school experiences withlanguage and pre-reading activities, then ameasure that has a slightly greater degreeof difficulty may be most appropriate. Inaddition if you are likely to be assessingchildren beyond kindergarten age, thenyou should select a measure that containsa sufficient number of more difficult itemsin order to provide sensitive measurementof individual differences beyond beginninglevels of phonological awareness.

Measurement Reliability

Measurement reliability is simply thedegree to which a test provides consistentassessment of a given construct. If a testdoes not have sufficient reliability, it can-not be counted on to serve as a usefulsupplement to teacher judgment by provid-ing objective identification of children withdifferent levels of phonological awareness.Test developers calculate reliability in anumber of different ways, but it is alwaysexpressed as a number between 0 and 1.Generally, tests with reliabilities above .85will be suitable for assessments to trackthe development of phonological awarenessin individual children, and all of the mea-sures to be discussed in this manual meetthis criterion. A test’s reliability shouldalways be reported somewhere in the testmanual.

Predictive Validity

Since the ultimate purpose for assessmentof phonological awareness is to identifychildren who are likely to experience read-ing difficulties, it is important that themeasure you select present evidence that itis strongly related to reading growth. Pre-dictive relationships between measures ofphonological awareness and reading are

10

usually expressed as correlation coeffi-cients.

A correlation coefficient is simply a num-ber, derived from statistical calculations,that expresses the extent to which twovariables are related to one another. Forvariables that are positively related to oneanother (when one is higher, the other alsotends to be higher), such as phonologicalawareness and reading, correlation coeffi-cients can range between 0 and 1, withpredictive correlations for most measuresof phonological awareness ranging between.6 and .8.

For practical purposes of identifying chil-dren who may be in need of extra supportin the development of phonological aware-ness, small differences in the predictivestrength of various measures are of littleimportance. However, other things beingequal (such as cost, time and ease ofadministration), relative differences inpredictive strength should be considered inselecting a measure of phonological aware-ness to use in the classroom or clinic.

Teachers and psychologists should also bealert to the fact that correlations betweentests given concurrently are usually higherthan correlations between tests givenpredictively. Thus, when manuals reportthe relationship between a given measureof phonological awareness and readingability, it is important to determine thelength of time that elapsed between theadministration of the measure of phono-logical awareness and the administrationof the measure of reading skill. Ideally,manuals should report the strength ofrelationship between measures of phono-logical awareness administered in kinder-garten and measures of reading adminis-tered in first or second grade.

Information aboutMeasures of PhonologicalAwareness

In order to make it easier for you to com-pare measures of phonological awareness,all the descriptions in this section will bepresented in a similar format. The formatwill include the following information:

• A description of the test includingsample items

• Ages for which the test is applicableand issues in administration such asthe training required, whether it can beadministered in groups, etc.

• Sample items• Information on test reliability and

validity• Types of scores that are available• Cost and ordering information (costs

are approximate and subject to change)• General comments about appropriate-

ness for various purposes

To our knowledge, six different instru-ments are presently available for teachersand other professionals to use in assessingphonological awareness. Some of theseinstruments have been subject to formalstandardization procedures so that a givenchild can be compared to a random sampleof other children of the same age or grade.These instruments, for example, can indi-cate what percentage of all children in thestandardization sample (usually 100 to200 children of the same age) obtainedscores lower than the child who is beingassessed. This kind of information is use-ful in order to estimate how extreme agiven child’s performance is compared to alarge group of other children.

11

Being able to compare children’s perfor-mance against that of a broadly basednormative sample can also help to indicatewhat proportion of children in a class orschool may be in need of special help tosupport their growth in phonologicalawareness. The proportion of children whocome to school delayed in the developmentof phonological awareness will dependsomewhat on specific aspects of their pre-school language and literacy environment.Tests with national norms can help topinpoint classes or schools in which aspecial effort must be made to enhancephonological awareness in children priorto, or during, reading instruction. Forexample, a classroom in which 75 percentof the children performed below the 20thpercentile (in the bottom 20 percent of allchildren), will require more instructionalresources to prepare children for learningto read than a classroom in which only 10percent of the children scored that low.

A number of tests described in this sectiondo not have normative information toaccompany them. Nevertheless, these testscan be useful as informal assessmentinstruments for teachers to use in moni-toring the progress of children in theirclassrooms. If these instruments are usedregularly, teachers will quickly becomeacquainted with their value in selecting thechildren who are most at-risk for readingdifficulties in their classroom. If classroomresources allow extra help for a fixed num-ber of children (say, 20 to 30 percent), thenthese measures can be used immediatelyto identify the group of children within aclassroom whose awareness of the phono-logical structure of words is least devel-oped. Finally, these measures can be veryuseful in understanding which children areresponding well to a given level or methodof intervention, and which are not.

13

Appropriate Ages and Issues inAdministration

The TOPA is appropriate for administrationto children in kindergarten through secondgrade. It is designed to be administered byteachers or paraprofessionals, but thoseadministering the test must be able tospeak clearly and pronounce individualphonemes correctly.

There are two versions of the test, one forchildren in kindergarten (KindergartenVersion), and one for children in first andsecond grade (Early Elementary Version).Both versions come in the same test kit.The TOPA can be given either in groups orindividually and takes from 15 to 20 min-utes to administer. The entire testing canbe done in one session or spread acrosstwo sessions, depending upon the timeavailable for testing and children’sattentional capacities.

Sample Items

The Kindergarten Version consists of 20items that involve comparison of the firstsounds in words. The first set of 10 itemsrequires children to indicate which of threepictures begins with the same first soundas a target word, and the second set of 10items asks them to indicate which of fourpictures begins with a different first soundthan the others.

After going through some brief exercises toensure the children understand the mean-ing of same and different, as well as how tomark the items, they are shown threeexample items such as the one below.Directions that go with this type of item,referred to as Initial Sound—Same, are:“Look at the first picture. The first pictureis a bat. Now look at the other three pic-tures: horn, bed, cup. Mark the one picturethat begins with the same sound as BAT(pause). You should have marked BEDbecause BAT and BED begin with the samesound, /b/.”

Test ofPhonologicalAwareness(Torgesen & Bryant, 1994)

Grades K–2

The Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA)contains two subtests that both involvesound comparison activities. It was de-signed to provide a simple and efficient wayto identify young children who were laggingbehind in their development of phonologicalawareness. It was developed with supportof a grant from the National Institute ofChild Health and Human Development andis nationally normed. Items were developedto be most sensitive to individual differencesin phonogical awareness at lower levels ofability.

CostCostCostCostCost

$124 for a test manual and 50 test forms(25 Kindergarten Version, 25 ElementarySchool Version)

Ordering

PRO-ED Publishing8700 Shoal Creek Blvd.Austin, TX 78757-6897512-451-3246

14

The other type of item on the KindergartenVersion of the TOPA is called InitialSound—Different. An example of this typeof item and the directions that go with itare: “Look at the pictures, knife, fork, neck,nest. Mark the one picture that has adifferent first sound than the other three.(pause). You should have marked FORK,because KNIFE, NECK, and NEST startwith the same sound, /n/. FORK beginswith a different sound, /f/.”

The only difference between the Kindergar-ten and Early Elementary Versions of theTOPA is that in the Early ElementaryVersion comparisons are made between thelast sounds in words rather than in thefirst sounds. Attending to last sounds inwords is more difficult than first sounds,thus the items on the Early ElementaryVersion are more difficult.

Reliability

The test manual provides two types of testreliability information for the TOPA. Inter-nal consistency reliabilities average .90between kindergarten and second grade(ages 5 through 7). The test-retest reliabil-ity, with six weeks between testings, for theKindergarten Version was .94, while forchildren in the beginning of first grade, itwas .77 over eight weeks. The lower test-retest reliability of the Early ElementaryVersion may reflect the impact of readinginstruction from which some childrenprofit more than others.

Validity

The manual gives values for both concur-rent validity and predictive validity. Thereported correlation between the EarlyElementary Version of the TOPA and ameasure of phonemic reading ability (TheWord Attack Subtest from the WoodcockReading Mastery Test-Revised) in Novem-ber of first grade was .66. When the Kin-dergarten Version of the TOPA was given inApril to a sample of children from an el-ementary school serving an area withrelatively low socioeconomic status andheavy minority population, the correlationwith phonemic reading ability a year laterwas .62. Both of these values indicate thatthe TOPA is sufficiently predictive of earlyreading difficulties to warrant use as ameans to identify children in need of spe-cial intervention to help prevent laterreading problems.

Scores

Because the TOPA was normed on a na-tional sample of children, a variety ofscores can be derived to show how anindividual child compares to other childrenthe same age. These scores include bothpercentile and several types of standardscores.

General

The TOPA is an excellent test for use inidentifying kindergarten children who arelagging behind their peers in the develop-ment of phonological awareness. It isparticularly useful for classroom teachersbecause it can be administered to groupsof children. It may also be used to identifychildren who are struggling with phono-logical awareness in first and second gradebut will not be sensitive to differencesamong children in the upper half of thedistribution because even in the EarlyElementary Version, the items are too easy.

Test of Phonological Awareness

15


The PAT can be given to children five yearsof age and older. Although norms extendonly through age nine, the authors believeinformation useful for planning instructionmay be obtained for children older thanten. The test should be given by someonewho is professionally trained in analyzingthe phonological structure of speech, suchas a language pathologist, learning disabil-ity teacher, reading specialist, or specialeducation consultant. The test must begiven individually, and it takes about 40minutes to administer when all subtestsare given. Administration time can be cutsubstantially by administering only a fewof the subtests, although this will reducesomewhat the reliability of the testing.

Sample Items

Although the PAT contains measures ofsensitivity to rhyme, as well as ability tosegment words and syllables, thesesubtests will not be discussed here be-cause, as was discussed in an earlierportion of this manual, they appear toprovide measures of slightly differentconstructs than measures that assessawareness at the level of phonemes. Thefive measures of phonemic awareness onthe PAT include the following:

Segmentation of Phonemes

Sample item: “I’m going to say a word, andthen I’ll say each sound in the word. Listencarefully. Cat. (Say the individual sounds,pausing slightly between each one./c - a - t/.)

“Tell me each sound in off.”

The child receives credit if all sounds aregiven in the proper order. There are tenitems.

The PhonologicalAwareness Test(Robertson & Salter, 1995)

Ages 5 years +

The Phonological Awareness Test (PAT)contains five measures of phonologicalawareness, plus measures of word andsyllable segmentation and a measure ofsensitivity to rhyme. It also contains threeadditional subtests that measure knowl-edge of letter-sound correspondences,phonemic decoding (ability to read phoneti-cally regular nonwords), and inventedspelling. It is really a comprehensive test ofphonological sensitivity and phonemicreading ability. All tests were normed on anational sample of children ranging fromfive to ten years of age.

Cost

$69 for a test manual, test supplies, and15 test booklets

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LinguiSystems3100 4th AvenueEast Moline, IL 61244-0747800-776-4332

16

Isolation

Sample item: “I’m going to say a word, andI want you to tell me the beginning or firstsound in the word. What’s the beginningsound in the word cat?” /k/

There are 10 items each that ask the childto pronounce either the first, last, ormiddle sound of short words.

Deletion

Sample item: “I’m going to ask you to say aword and then to say it again without oneof its sounds. Say cat.” (Student says cat.)“Now say it again, but don’t say /k/.” (at)

There are 10 items.

Substitution

Sample item: The first part of this subtestrequires the use of colored blocks to showthe different sounds in words. The exam-iner says, “I’m going to show you how tomake the word fun with these blocks. Eachblock is one sound of the word.” The exam-iner illustrates the relationship betweenblocks and sounds by teaching each blockwhile saying /f/ - /u/ - /n/. The examinerthen says, “Now, watch how I change funto run.” This change is illustrated by re-placing the first block with a differentcolored block. “Now it says run.” There areten test items that require children to showwhich sounds have changed on exampleslike map to mop, or tip to tick.

There are also 10 test items that do notinvolve blocks. On this type of item, theexaminer asks the child to change a givensound, /p/, in a word like paint, to anothersound, /f/, to produce another word(faint). Another example would be, “Saycow, now change /k/ to /h/.” (how).

Blending

Sample item: “I’ll say the sounds of a word.You guess what the word is. What word isthis?” Then the phonemes /p/ - /o/ - /p/are pronounced at one per second. Thechild must pronounce the word correctly inorder to receive credit.

There are ten items.

Reliability

Estimates of both test-retest and internalconsistency reliability are provided in themanual. The values reported here arethose that apply to the section of eachsubtest that measures awareness at thephonemic level. In the manual, reliabilitiesare reported at half-year age intervalsbetween 5 and 10 years of age. Here, wereport the average values across all ages.

Subtest Test/Retest InternalConsistency

Segmentation .71 .81Isolation .72 .89Deletion .71 .73Substitution .77 .82Blending .76 .74

Measurement reliability would undoubt-edly be improved if more than a singlesubtest were used to estimate the level ofphonological awareness at any given age.However, because of the way the reliabili-ties are reported in the manual, it is notpossible to estimate the overall measure-ment reliability of combinations of subtestsassessing phonemic awareness.

The Phonological Awareness Test

17

Validity

Values for the predictive validity of the PATare not reported in the manual. Concur-rent validity was established by contrastingthe performance of groups of randomlyselected children from the normativesample with samples of children who wereidentified as at-risk for reading problemsor as having reading problems. The totalscore on the PAT successfully discrimi-nated between these two groups at five agelevels between five and ten. The five indi-vidual measures of phonemic awarenessalso successfully discriminated betweenthese groups in 23 of 25 comparisons. Theonly nonsignificant differences were for thesegmentation and isolation subtests at theoldest age levels.

Scores

Since the PAT has been normed on a largesample of children, both percentile andstandard scores can be derived at all agesbetween five and ten. One potentiallyuseful feature is that these types of scorescan be derived for each subtest as well asfor performance on the total test.

General

The PAT is a well-constructed, comprehen-sive measure of phonological awarenessand phonemic reading skills. Although theletter knowledge and reading tests werenot discussed in this manual, they mayprovide a very useful addition for profes-sionals who wish to assess both phonemicawareness and print knowledge at thesame time. Both the predictive validity ofthe overall test and the specific utility ofthe word, syllable, and rhyme level testswill need to be demonstrated in furtherresearch with the instrument. However,there can be little doubt that a combina-tion of measures at the phonemic levelfrom this instrument will provide a veryuseful assessment of individual differencesin children’s level of phonemic awareness.

19


The LAC can be given to children as youngas kindergarten age and can also be ad-ministered to adults. A more difficultversion of the LAC is currently being devel-oped which will provide finer discrimina-tions of individual differences in phonologi-cal awareness in older children and adults.The test can be given by anyone who hasbeen trained in its use. However, someparts of its administration are complex andrequire careful feedback to the personbeing tested, so sufficient time must bebudgeted to learn proper administrationprocedures. The test must be given indi-vidually and, depending on the age of thechild, takes between 15 and 25 minutes toadminister.

Sample Items

The LAC has two levels, Category I andCategory II. Category I items are includedprimarily to determine whether the childcan understand how to represent thenumber, order, and identity of sounds withcolored blocks, and Category II actuallyassesses phonemic awareness.

The child begins with some preparatoryitems designed to help him or her under-stand the directions for the test. The childis requested to do such things as, “Showme three blocks that are the same color,”or “Show me three blocks, and make onlythe first and the last one the same.” Onthese items, the examiner is supposed toprovide various types of instructive feed-back.

Category I items begin with the instruction,“I want you to use these blocks to show mehow many sounds I make, and whetherthey are the same or different.” The exam-iner then says /z/ -/z/, and demonstratesthat the child should place two blocks ofthe same color. After several instructive

LindamoodAuditoryConceptualizationTest(Lindamood & Lindamood, 1979)

Kindergarten–Adult

The Lindamood Auditory ConceptualizationTest (LAC) has been used widely in clinicalwork with children with reading disabilitiesfor many years. The test provides “recom-mended minimum scores” for grades kinder-garten through sixth grade, with a separateestimate for the range of seventh grade toadult. These estimates are based on theauthor’s extensive clinical experience withthe test, and they suggest that children whoscore below these levels will likely havedifficulties acquiring phonetic decodingskills. The test requires children to indicatethe number, identity, and order of phonemesin words using colored blocks.

Cost

$89 for a manual, test supplies, and 100test sheets

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items of this type, the child performs itemsvarying in difficulty from “Show me /p/-/p/-/p/”, to “Show me /t/-/t/-/ch/.”

Category II items require the child to repre-sent the order, number, and identity ofsounds in syllables with colored blocks.After thoroughly demonstrating what isrequired, the child starts with an item like,“show me /i/.” If the child correctly placesone block, the next item is, “If that says/i/, show me /ip/.” A series of 12 increas-ingly difficult items is chained together inthis manner, until the final two items,which are “If that says /aps/, show me /asp/.” And then, “if that says /asp/, showme /sasp/.”

Reliability

The manual for the LAC presents strongevidence for its concurrent and predictivevalidity, but the information on test reli-ability is weakened by the use of inappro-priate statistical analyses. The only reli-ability value reported is a test-retest corre-lation (.96), and this number is spuriouslyinflated because it was derived from testingfour children at each age level from kinder-garten to 12th grade on alternate forms ofthe test. Including children with such awide age span in the reliability sampleartificially inflates the reliability estimatebecause there is such a large age-relateddifference in performance among thechildren.

Validity

The manual provides extensive informationon concurrent validity of the LAC as well asan estimate of predictive validity. The LACand the reading portion of the Wide RangeAchievement Test, which is a measure ofword-reading ability, were given to groupsof children from kindergarten to 12thgrade. The average correlation between theLAC and the reading test was .73, withvalues for each age ranging from .66 to.81. In terms of predictive validity, themanual reports values ranging from .88 to.98 for relationships between the LAC testadministered in September of first gradeand reading at the end of first grade asmeasured by several different tests.

Scores

Since the LAC test has not undergoneformal norming procedures, percentile andstandard scores are not available. However,the authors do provide values for “recom-mended minimum scores” at each age levelfrom kindergarten through sixth grade,with a separate estimate for adults. Thesescores are provided to “encourage educa-tional follow-up that is preventative as wellas remedial in nature.” The authorssupplement these recommended minimumscores with extensive case discussions toillustrate the meaning of scores in variousranges on the LAC.

General

The LAC provides an excellent assessmentof phonemic awareness in older childrenand adults. Its use as a screening instru-ment in kindergarten is limited by both thecomplexity of the test itself, and the timeand training required to administer it. It isrecommended for use as part of a diagnos-tic battery to examine the reasons forreading failure in children second gradeand older.

Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test

21


This test was designed for kindergartenchildren, but should also be appropriatefor identifying children who are weak inphonological awareness during first grade.It can be administered by teachers orparaprofessionals, and must be givenindividually. It takes 5 to 10 minutes perchild. It does not have norms.

Sample Items

The test consists of 22 items that are all ofthe same type. Beginning the test, thechild receives the following instructions:Today we’re going to play a word game. I’mgoing to say a word, and I want you tobreak the word apart. You are going to tellme each sound in the word in order. Forexample, if I say old, you should say “/o/-/l/-/d/.” (The administrator says thesounds, not the letters.) Let’s try a fewwords together.”

The practice items are ride, go, and man.All the items involve familiar words of justtwo or three phonemes.

Reliability

The article in which the test is describedreports an internal consistency reliabilityof .95

Validity

The Yopp-Singer test has impressive valid-ity data derived from a seven-year longitu-dinal study in which the same childrenthat were administered the phoneme seg-mentation test in kindergarten were fol-lowed through sixth grade. (See Table 1 onthe following page.) The segmentation testwas administered in the second semesterof kindergarten, and the table below givesthe correlations between the test andvarious reading measures. All of the read-

Yopp-Singer Testof PhonemeSegmentation(Yopp, 1995)

Kindergarten–Grade 1

The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmenta-tion is a brief test of children’s ability toisolate and pronounce the individual pho-nemes in words. Phoneme segmentation isa task that has been widely used in re-search on phoneme awareness over the last20 years, and it is highly correlated withother measures of phoneme awareness(Yopp, 1988). The test is very easy to give,score, and interpret.

Cost

Free by copying from the journal articlelisted below or from page 23 of this manual

Ordering

Copy from:

Yopp, H. K. (1995). A test for assessingphonemic awareness in young children,The Reading Teacher, 49, 20-29.

22

ing measures came from the Comprehen-sive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS, 1973). TheWord Attack subtest measures phoneticreading skills and recognition of sightwords. The Vocabulary subtest measureschildren’s ability to identify a word associ-ated with an orally presented category ordefinition, and the Reading Comprehen-sion test measures children’s readingcomprehension for both sentences andstories. The Total Score is the combinedscore on all the measures. The thing thatis most impressive about these results isthe continuing strong predictive relation-ship with reading growth through the endof sixth grade. A correlation of .74 withtotal reading score means that perfor-mance on the Yopp-Singer test in thesecond semester of kindergarten is highlycorrelated with overall reading ability sixyears later.

Scores

This test has not been normed; only rawscores can be obtained.

General

The major difficulty with the Yopp-Singertest is that it may be too difficult to makefine discriminations among children in thelower ranges of phonemic awareness. Therequirement to completely segment theword dog (first item on the test) may simplybe too difficult for many populations ofchildren. Although Yopp reports meanperformance on the test of about 11 itemscorrect in the second semester of kinder-garten (children with average age of 70months), her sample, as a whole, may havebeen stronger in phonemic awareness thanmany groups around the United States.For teachers who work with groups ofchildren who have traditionally had highrates of reading problems, this test may betoo difficult in kindergarten to discriminateamong children in the lower ranges ofability.

Other than the issue of difficulty level forsome groups of kindergarten children, thisis a fine, reliable test of phonemic aware-ness. It could serve very usefully, for ex-ample, to monitor the growth of phonemicawareness in first-grade children as theylearn to read.

Grade Level Word Attack Vocabulary Comprehension Total

1 .46 .66 .38 .622 .62 .72 .55 .673 .56 .66 .62 .674 .51 .62 .585 .56 .57 .596 .78 .66 .74

Table 1: Relationship of Yopp-Singer Test to Later Reading Scores

Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation

23

Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation

Student’s name __________________________________________ Date _________________________

Score (number correct) ___________________________________

Directions: Today we’re going to play a word game. I’m going to say a word, and I want you tobreak the word apart. You are going to tell me each sound in the word in order. For example,if I say old, you should say /o/-/l/-/d/.” (Administrator: Be sure to say the sounds, not theletters, in the word.) “Let’s try a few words together.”

Practice items: (Assist the child in segmenting these items as necessary.)

ride, go, man

Test items: (Circle those items that the student correctly segments; incorrect responses maybe recorded on the blank line following the item.)

1. dog ___________________________________

2. keep __________________________________

3. fine ___________________________________

4. no ____________________________________

5. she ___________________________________

6. wave __________________________________

7. grew __________________________________

8. that ___________________________________

9. red ____________________________________

10. me ___________________________________

11. sat ___________________________________

12. lay ___________________________________

13. race _________________________________

14. zoo __________________________________

15. three_________________________________

16. job___________________________________

17. in ____________________________________

18. ice ___________________________________

19. at ____________________________________

20. top __________________________________

21. by ___________________________________

22. do ___________________________________

Note. From “A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children,” by H. K. Yopp,1995, The Reading Teacher, 49, 20-29. Reprinted with permission.

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The test can be given to children fromkindergarten through late elementaryschool but will be most sensitive to indi-vidual differences in phonemic awarenessamong children in kindergarten, first, andsecond grades. It can be administered byteachers or paraprofessionals and takesabout 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Theonly difficult part in administration islearning to pronounce individual pho-nemes properly.

Sample Items

The test begins with items involving seg-mentation of compound words and syl-lables, but rapidly shifts to items involvingdeletion of phonemes. Directions for thefirst practice item are: “Let’s play a wordgame. Say cowboy. (Allow child to re-spond.) Now say it again, but don’t sayboy.” The child should respond with theword cow.

Sample items involving phoneme deletionare: “Say coat. Now say it again, but don’tsay /k/,” and, “Say stale. Now say it again,but don’t say /t/.” The correct answers forthese two items, respectively, would be oatand sale.

Reliability

Rosner does not present information onreliability in his description of the test.However, tests used in research that in-clude items very similar to those on theRosner test report acceptable levels ofreliability (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte,1994).

Validity

Again, Rosner does not present formalinformation about the predictive validity ofthis test, but numerous studies have found

Rosner Test ofAuditory Analysis(Rosner, 1975)

Kindergarten–Elementary

The Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis is theoldest published test of phonemic aware-ness, and it has been widely used in re-search. It is a relatively brief test (13 items)involving the deletion of phonemes fromwords, and it is very easy to give, score,and interpret.

Cost

Free by copying from the book referencedbelow or from pages 27 and 28 of thismanual.

Ordering

Copy from:

Rosner, J. (1975). Helping children over-come learning disabilities. New York:Walker & Company.

26

that these types of items not only arestrongly predictive of reading failure inyoung children (Wagner, Torgesen, &Rashotte, 1994), but also are very sensitivein differentiating older children who havereading disabilities from children who readnormally (Fletcher, et al., 1994).

Scores

Since this test is not normed, only rawscores are available. The author doesprovide values for “expected” performanceat various age levels, based on his experi-ence giving the test to many children. Forexample, scores from 1-3 would be ex-pected in kindergarten, 4 to 9 in firstgrade, and 10 to 13 in second grade.

General

This test is an excellent one to use for aquick assessment of relative levels of pho-nological awareness within kindergarten,first, and second grade classrooms. Theonly drawback in its use is the absence ofnorms, but that should not prevent teach-ers from finding it useful in identifyingchildren within their classrooms whosephonemic awareness is least well-devel-oped.

Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis

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Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis(Rosner, 1975)

Materials Needed

List of items to be administered to the child

Directions

Practice: “ Lets play a word game. Say cowboy. (Allow child to respond.) Now say itagain, but don’t say boy.”

If correct: That’s right, Let’s try the next one.

If incorrect: “That’s not quite right. Cowboy without saying boy is cow.” (Then see ifyou can explain it to the child. If the child requires more than a simple explanation, stoptesting.)

Second Practice Item: “Say steamboat. (Wait for response.) Now say it again, but don’t saysteam.”

If the child answers both demonstration items correctly, start the test with item 1. If he/shedoes not answer both demonstration items correctly, do not administer any more items.

Administration Notes

1. Do not give hints with your lips. Speak distinctly, but do not stress any particularsounds. In other words, do not give any additional information that might make the taskeasier. You want the child to do well but not at the expense of looking better on the testthan is really the case.

2. Remember, when you get to the items that ask the child to “Say the word, but don’t say/…./ (a single sound)” you are to say the sound of the letter, not the letter name.

3. Stop testing after two successive errors—two incorrect responses in a row—and recordthe number of the last correct item before those two errors. This is the score. For ex-ample, if the child is correct on items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and incorrect on items 6 and 7,his/her score would be 5. If he/she was correct on 1, 2, 3, incorrect on 4, correct on 5and 6, then incorrect on 7 and 8, his/her score would be 6.

Interpreting the Results

The following expected scores were not based on a formal norming procedure, but rather onthe author’s experience in administering the task to children of various ages. Although theycan be used as an initial guide to expected performance at various age levels, the test will bemost accurately used to identify children with delays in phonological awareness if this infor-mation is supplemented with local norms.

Expected scores: Kindergarten 1-31st Grade 4-92nd Grade 10-13

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Test Items

Answer Corr/incorr

1. Say SUNSHINE. Now say it again, but don’t say SHINE. SUN __________

2 Say PICNIC. Now say it again, but don’t say PIC. NIC __________

3. Say CUCUMBER. Now say it again, but don’t say CU (q) CUMBER __________

4. Say COAT. Now say it again, but don’t say /k/. OAT __________

5. Say MEAT. Now say it again, but don’t say /m/. EAT __________

6. Say TAKE. Now say it again, but don’t say /t/ ACHE __________

7. Say GAME. Now say it again, but don’t say /m/. GAY __________

8. Say WROTE. Now say it again, but don’t say /t/. ROW __________

9. Say PLEASE. Now say it again, but don’t say /z/ PLEA __________

10. Say CLAP. Now say it again, but don’t say /k/ LAP __________

11. Say PLAY. Now say it again, but don’t say /p/ LAY __________

12. Say STALE. Now say it again, but don’t say /t/ SALE __________

13. Say SMACK. Now say it again, but don’t say /m/ SACK __________

Last item before two errors in a row ________

Note. From Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties (p. 47), by J. Rosner, l975, NewYork: Walker and Company. Reprinted with permission.

Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis

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The test is designed for children during thesecond semester of kindergarten or as soonas they have acquired some rudimentaryknowledge of letter-sound correspon-dences. This kind of test may not be appro-priate once children begin formal instruc-tion in spelling, as many of the wordswould simply be spelled correctly becausethey had been memorized. The test can beadministered by teachers or paraprofes-sionals to groups of children in less than10 minutes. The scoring of the test isrelatively complicated and requires a goodunderstanding of phonetic relationships inspelling.

Sample Items

Directions can be adapted to the circum-stances of test administration, but wouldgo something like this: “I want you to try towrite some words for me. I will say a word,and you should write it as best you can. Ifyou cannot write the whole word, write anyof the sounds that you hear, and any of theletters that you think might belong in thatword.” The first word on the test is red,followed by name, bed, and lady. There are14 words on the test.

Reliability

Mann does not report reliability figures forthis test, but the strength of its relation-ships to later reading development suggestthat is probably at least as reliable as mostof the phonological awareness measuresused with kindergarten children.

Validity

The predictive validity of the Test of In-vented Spelling was assessed in a study inwhich the spelling test was given in thesecond semester of kindergarten, andreading was assessed one year later. The

Test of InventedSpelling(Mann, Tobin, & Wilson, 1987)

Kindergarten

The Test of Invented Spelling actually mea-sures more than simple phonemic aware-ness. Since it requires children to “representas many of the sounds in words as theycan” by spelling them, it also assessesknowledge of sound-letter correspondences.It is included here because it is very sensi-tive to individual differences in phonemicawareness and may actually be morepredictive of later reading growth thanmany purely oral measures of phonemicawareness (Mann, 1993).

Cost

Free by copying from the article listedbelow and on page 31 of this manual. (Toobtain a complete understanding of thetest and its appropriate uses, we recom-mend reading the original article thatreports its development.)

Ordering

Copy from:

Mann, V.A., Tobin, P., & Wilson, R. (1987).Measuring phonological awarenessthrough the invented spellings of kinder-garten children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly,33, 365-89.

30

correlation between the measure of in-vented spelling and phonetic readingability was .61, while the correlation withgeneral word-reading ability was .68. Bothof these relationships are sufficientlystrong to warrant the use of this measureto identify children at-risk for readingdifficulties.

Scores

Since the test is not normed, only rawscores are available. Based on her experi-ence with the measure, Mann (1993) sug-gests that scores below five at the end ofkindergarten indicate a pronounced riskfor reading problems in first grade.

General

One very desirable feature of this test isthat it can be given quickly to groups ofchildren. In kindergarten classes, wherechildren are expected to know some oftheir letter sounds, it provides a very goodway to assess both phonological awarenessand beginning knowledge about print. Atthe beginning of first grade, for example,this might be a very good way to identifychildren most at risk for reading difficul-ties during the year. The test will not besensitive to individual differences in pho-nological awareness in groups of childrenthat have very limited knowledge of lettersand their sounds.

Test of Invented Spelling

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Test of Invented Spelling(Mann, Tobin, & Wilson, 1987)

Materials Needed

List of words to be spelled and a numbered response form containing 14 triple spaced lines

Directions

This test can be administered to small groups of students. The teacher could introduce thetest by saying, “I want you to try to write some words for me. I will say a word and youshould write it as best you can. If you cannot write the whole word, write any of the soundsthat you hear, and any of the letters that you think might belong in that word.”

“Ready? OK, here is the first word.” (Read each word aloud twice and wait as the childrenrespond.)

Word List

1. red 2. name 3. bed 4. lady 5. fish 6. men 7. boat 8. girl 9. color

10. angry 11. thank you 12. people 13. dog 14. boy

Phonological Scoring System

Each response is assigned a score between 0 and 4. No points are awarded if no letters aregiven or if the letters fail to capture any phonological element of the target word. One point isgiven for a response in which the first letter (or only letter) represents the first phoneme inthe word. One half point is given for a single letter corresponding to any phoneme except thefirst. Two points are given if the response represents at least two phonemes. Three points aregiven if all phonemes are represented, but the word is not spelled correctly. Some leniency isallowed in using the correct letters for specific sounds, since the goal is to evaluate thechild’s awareness of the sounds in the word. Four points are awarded when the response iscorrect by conventional spelling standards. The maximum possible score is 56.

Scoring examples: red: r (1), rd (2), d (1/2); name: nam (3); fish: fis (3); angry: agre (2), angre(3); people: ppl (2), peepl (3); thank you: thak u (2), tank u (3)

Expected Scores

The test was given to a group of predominantly white, middle class children in May of thekindergarten year, and the average phonological score was 21. About 68 percent of the chil-dren obtained scores between 9 and 33. Mann suggests that scores below five at the end ofkindergarten indicate a pronounced risk for reading problems in first grade. However, thismust be verified with a larger, more diverse sample.

Note. Reprinted from “Measuring Phonological Awareness through the Invented Spellings ofKindergarten Children,” by V. A. Mann, P. Tobin, & R. Wilson, 1987, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly,33, 365-89. Reprinted with permission.

33

Instruction inPhonologicalAwareness

Section 3

In this section, we will describe 13 instruc-tional programs that focus on buildingphonological awareness in young children.Some of these programs are intended foruse in the regular classroom setting, whileothers were designed for small group orindividual instruction with children whorequire more intensive or explicit instruc-tion in phonological awareness. In addi-tion, we will also evaluate 34 different “pre-reading” computer software programscurrently being marketed for home andschool use for their potential to stimulatephonological awareness. Before we presentinformation about specific programs,however, we want to review both the goalsof instruction in phonological awarenessand some general teaching issues in thisarea.

Goals ofInstruction inPhonologicalAwarenessInstruction in phonological awareness hastwo primary goals. The first objective is tohelp children notice the phonemes inwords, to discover their existence anddistinctness. The second goal is to helpchildren make the “connection” betweenthe phonemes in words and the letters ofthe alphabet. Good instruction in phono-logical awareness should help children allthe way to the discovery of the alphabeticprinciple. Thus, although all phonologicalawareness training programs begin withoral language activities designed to helpchildren attend to the individual sounds inwords, they all should end, or overlap, withvery simple “phonics” activities designed toshow children how the sounds in wordsare represented by letters.

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When children learn to speak their nativelanguage, most of their focus is on acquir-ing the meaning of words. They are occa-sionally corrected in their pronunciations,but the primary object of language learningis to understand the meaning of words inconversation. Because of the human ca-pacity for language, the brain processesthe phonemes in spoken words automati-cally, and the child does not have to beconsciously aware of them as individualsounds in order to understand speech.However, if a child is to understand theway words are represented by print, he/she must become aware that words aremade up of the individual sounds calledphonemes. Thus, the first goal of instruc-tion in phonological awareness is to pro-vide activities that help to focus children’sattention on the individual sounds inwords. Good instruction in phonologicalawareness will help children learn to noticethe identity, number, and order of soundsin words.

Although many children will automaticallymake the connection between the pho-nemes in oral language and the letters inprint, many others will be helped signifi-cantly if this connection is made explicitlyfor them through direct instruction. Thus,after children have acquired the ability toidentify and segment individual sounds inwords, they should be explicitly taught theconnection between these sounds andletters. In addition, they should be pro-vided beginning practice activities on verysimple reading and spelling tasks. Forexample, towards the end of one excellentinstructional program, children are taughta set of consonants and vowels that can beused to create a large number of three-letter words. The children then engage in avariety of discovery and practice activitiesthat allow them to acquire beginning skillsin sounding out simple printed words andin spelling similar words by first segment-ing the sounds and then using letters torepresent the sounds. The important thing

to remember is that the effectiveness of allinstruction in phonological awareness willbe improved if the connection between thephonemes in oral language and the lettersin print is made very explicitly and directly.

General Issues InTeachingPhonologicalAwarenessIn this section, we are simply going to listsome of the most important general pointsabout instruction in phonological aware-ness. Many of the instructional programswe will describe later contain similar dis-cussions, but we thought it would beuseful to extract the most general issuesthat apply to all programs and presentthem here.

Instruction in phonological awarenessshould begin with easier tasks and movetoward more difficult tasks.

This is so obvious, it almost goes withoutsaying. However, it is important to notethat explicit instruction in phonologicalawareness is developmentally appropriatefor children as young as five years old onlyif the concept is taught in a carefully struc-tured way. While we do not yet know pre-cisely all of the potentially important stepsin this instruction, we do have a broadoutline of the most important steps. Forexample, many programs begin with gen-eral listening activities designed to helpchildren attend to sequences of individualsounds, and then move to activities thathelp children become aware of words insentences and then syllables in words.Other programs begin with activities in-volving rhyme in order to help childrenbegin to focus on the sounds in words inaddition to their meaning.

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Instructional programs can follow a varietyof paths after these initial, introductoryactivities, but it may be easiest for childrento move next to activities that involvecomparing words on the basis of first, last,and middle sounds. These sound compari-son kinds of tasks do not require as fullyexplicit an awareness of sounds as isrequired by tasks that involve segmentingand pronouncing individual phonemes.Once children have some beginning profi-ciency with sound comparison tasks, theycan be moved to training activities thatinvolve segmenting beginning sounds andblending of onset-rhyme patterns (e.g.,c-at, d-og). The final series of tasks shouldbe those that involve completely segment-ing the sounds in simple words, or blend-ing all the sounds, or manipulating thesounds in words (e.g., “what word do wehave if we say cat, but don’t say the /k/sound?”).

Instruction in phonological awarenessshould be a regular part of the curricu-lum.

In the case of whole class instruction,activities to build phonological awarenessshould take place for 15-20 minutes everyday throughout the entire kindergartenyear. The daily focus on these activities willproduce much more consistent growththan sporadic involvement or casual in-struction that occurs at irregular intervals.For children who require more intensiveinstruction, small group or individualtutoring should be provided on a dailybasis. One intensive program, for example,involves small group instruction deliveredevery day in half-hour sessions for about12 weeks.

Teachers should expect that childrenwill respond at widely varying rates toinstruction in phonological awareness.

Depending upon their talent for processingphonological information or previous

experience with rhyming and letter activi-ties, children will show very different ratesof progress in the growth of their phono-logical awareness. Not only should class-room instructional activities be planned toaccommodate wide differences in phono-logical ability among children, but provi-sion should be made to identify childrenwho will require more intense or moreexplicit instruction. By the beginning of thesecond semester of kindergarten, it shouldbe very clear to teachers which childrenwill require more intensive instruction, andthese children should be taught in smallgroups or individually.

Instruction in phonological awarenessshould involve both analytic and syn-thetic activities.

Analytic activities are those that requirechildren to identify individual soundswithin whole words (e.g., “Tell me somewords that begin with the same sound asdog.” “What is the first sound in man?” Or,“If you say man without saying the /m/sound, what word do you get?”). In con-trast, synthetic activities involve blendingtogether separately presented phonemes(“What word do these sounds make, /f/-/a/-/t/?”). Both of these kinds of skills withphonemes are important in learning toread and spell.

Since the first goal of instruction inphonological awareness is to help chil-dren notice the individual sounds inwords, teachers should speak slowly andcarefully and pronounce individualsounds correctly.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Often, theability of teachers who have become goodreaders and spellers to “hear” individualsounds in words is distorted by theirknowledge of a word’s spelling. For ex-ample, they may feel that they hear foursounds in the word church because of theextra consonant after the vowel, but in

36

fact, the letters u and r are blended into asingle sound in this word. It would be amistake to expect children to blend to-gether the sounds /ch/-/u/-/r/-/ch toobtain the word church. Similarly, teachersmay think there are four sounds in theword pitch because of the presence of theletter t, while, in fact, the word pitchrhymes with rich.

It is not easy to pronounce individualphonemes correctly without some care-ful practice.

Even then, it is impossible to pronouncephonemes individually without some dis-tortion because in speech they are alwaysco-articulated with other phonemes. Inorder to help children learn about theidentity of individual phonemes, our goalin instruction should be to keep this dis-tortion to a minimum. Some phonemes areharder to pronounce in isolation thanothers. In the chart at the end of thissection, we have listed the consonantphonemes together in three groups accord-ing to the difficulty they present in indi-vidual pronunciation. We have also given afew simple suggestions that may helpteachers pronounce them properly duringinstruction.

Instruction in phonological awarenessshould be fun for teachers and students.

When children learn about the sounds inwords, they are making discoveries abouttheir language. One has only to observe thedelight that children take in rhymingstories and rhyming games to know thatplaying with the sounds in words can befun. Most of the training programs dis-cussed in this manual embed activities toenhance phonological awareness in game-like contexts. If kindergarten phonologicalawareness instruction is not fun, it is notbeing done properly.

PronunciationSuggestions forIndividualPhonemes

Easy to Pronounce

/m/ (man)/n/ (nose)/f/ (face)/v/ (vase)/sh/ (shop)/sh/ (division)/s/ (safe)/z/ (zebra)/th/ (think)/th/ (the)

Pronunciation Notes

These phonemes can all be “stretched out”without distorting them very much. Themain thing to remember for phonemessuch as /f/, /sh/, /s/, and /th/ is thatthe vocal cords are not used when makingthe sounds, so you need to put enough“air” into the pronunciation to be easilyheard.

Slightly Harder toPronounce

/t/ (talk)/p/ (pink)/k/ (kite)/ng/ (ring)/l/ (lap)/ch/ (cheek)/w/ (water)/wh/ (what)/h/ (help)

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Pronunciation Notes

• Some of these phonemes, such as /t/,/p/, /k/, /ch/ are hard because weneed to learn to pronounce themstrongly as “whispers.” The vocal cordsare not vibrating while we pronouncethese sounds, so we should not say, forexample, tuh, or puh, or kuh with avowel sound following the phoneme.

• Teachers also have a tendency to pro-nounce /l/ as luh, but this will make ithard for children to blend the soundwith other phonemes during sound-blending activities. You do not need tofollow the /l/ sound with a vowel—justbring your tongue to the top of yourmouth (behind the front teeth) andleave it there as you say the sound).

• The /ng/ sound is just hard to get usedto saying by itself. The best way topractice saying it is to say a word likering, and then notice what your mouthis doing at the end of the word. Whenyou say the sound /ng/, put yourmouth in the same position, and useyour vocal chords.

• The sound /h/ is difficult just becauseyou need to get enough energy in your“whisper” (do not follow it with a vowelby saying huh) in order to be heard.You should be blowing a lot of air outwhen you say /h/, but should not beusing your vocal chords.

• Finally, the sounds /w/ and /wh/ areoften confused with one another, par-ticularly in Southern dialects. Thus weoften pronounce words like what andwin as though they begin with the samefirst sound. In reality, the sound /wh/should be pronounced with no vocaliza-tion (with just air coming out), while the/w/ sound is vocalized from the begin-ning. In reality, this distinction is im-portant primarily for spelling (if thewords where and were are pronounced

properly, it is obvious from listening tothem that one begins with wh and theother a w.) However, in order to avoidconfusion when letter sounds andspelling are introduced, it may be bestto avoid words with the /wh/ phonemeduring instruction in phonologicalawareness.

Hardest to Pronounce

/d/ (dog)/b/ (big)/g/ (gone)/r/ (run)/j/ (jump)

Pronunciation Notes

• The primary difficulty with the pho-nemes /d/, /b/, /g/, and /j/ is that weneed to vocalize (make our vocal chordsvibrate) while we say them, and weoften have a tendency to lengthen outthe resulting vowel sound too much.Thus, we say duuuh for /d/, and buuhfor /b/. The art of good pronunciationwith these phonemes is to make thatvowel sound as short as possible.

• The phoneme /r/ is probably the hard-est one to pronounce in isolation.Typically, teachers pronounce it in oneof two ways. It can be pronounced witha vowel sound at the beginning, as inerrrr, or the vowel sound can follow, asin ruh. The pronunciation that is usu-ally most helpful is similar to ruh, aslong as the vowel part is very short. Forexample, if you are asking a child toblend the sounds in run, it would be amistake to say /err/-/u/-/n/, becausethen the child would be led to sayerrun. Words in which the vowel soundcome before the /r/ are most usuallywords like hurt, dart, her, or corn, thatcontain what is called an r-controlledvowel. When blending these words, theteacher would say, for example,/k/- /or/- /n/ for corn.

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Short Vowels

/a/ apple/e/ eskimo/i/ indian/o/ octopus/u/ umbrella

Pronunciation Notes

• The major difficulty presented by vowelsounds is that their pronunciationvaries a lot with dialect. They are pro-nounced somewhat differently in vari-ous regions of the country, and theremay be a mismatch between the waythe teacher pronounces them and theway children in the class pronouncethem. As long as the teacher allowsreasonable latitude, this does notpresent as much of a problem in pho-nological awareness training as it doeswhen children begin to learn thesounds associated with various letters.

• At some point, it may be helpful toteach children that pronunciation forwords “in books” may be different fromthe way they hear them pronounced intheir home and neighborhood. It isimportant to learn about “book” soundsbecause this will be very helpful inspelling. Children who come to schoolspeaking a very different dialect thanthe one in which instruction is offeredfrequently experience difficulties learn-ing to read. One of the reasons for thisis that they have difficulty relating thesounds in their oral language to theway words are represented in print.Since it is critical for all children toacquire phonemic reading skills early indevelopment, teachers must workespecially hard with these children inorder to insure that they make theconnection between the sounds inwords and spellings in print.

Materials TeachersCan Use to HelpChildren AcquirePhonologicalAwareness In the remainder of this manual, we willdescribe several different kinds of curricu-lum materials that teachers can use tostimulate phonological awareness in indi-viduals ranging in age from kindergarten toadulthood. Most of the materials are de-signed for very young children, since this isthe most appropriate time to offer this typeof instruction. However, for individualswho continue to struggle in this area,perhaps because of a severe deficiency of“phonological talent,” there are intensiveprograms designed to help them acquirephonological awareness. The programs wewill discuss fall roughly into two catego-ries: those designed for regular classroominstruction in either whole class or smallgroup settings, and those designed formore intensive and explicit instruction forchildren who do not learn enough fromprograms offered in the regular classroom.At the conclusion of this section, we willbriefly review 53 different pieces of com-puter software offered for pre-readinginstruction in the home and school. Ourgoal here is to assess the value of thissoftware in stimulating phonologicalawareness and increasing children’s readi-ness to learn to read.

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Phonological awareness materials designedfor regular classroom instruction includethe following:

• Phonemic Awareness in Young Children:A Classroom Curriculum

• Sound Start: Teaching PhonologicalAwareness in the Classroom

• Sounds Abound Instructional Materialsand Game

• The Phonological Awareness Kit• The Phonological Awareness Companion• Peer Assisted Learning Strategies for

Beginning Readers• Daisy Quest and Daisy’s Castle (com-

puter program)• Waterford Early Reading Program (com-

puter program)• Read, Write, and Type (computer pro-

gram)• Earobics (computer program)

Programs designed for small group orindividualized phonological awarenesstraining for children who have difficultylearning with regular classroom programsinclude the following:

• Launch into Reading Success throughPhonological Awareness Training

• Phonological Awareness Training forReading

• Auditory Discrimination in Depth

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Phonemic Awarenessin Young Children:A ClassroomCurriculum(Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R.Foorman, Ingvar Lundberg, Terry Beeler,1997)


This is a complete, organized curriculum inphonological awareness that is appropriatefor kindergarten classrooms as well as firstgraders who are lagging behind their peersin the development of phonological aware-ness. It was translated from a programdeveloped by Ingvar Lundberg and used inone of the early and most successful stud-ies of phonological awareness training inthe research literature. It is essentially acarefully sequenced series of game-likeactivities that can be used with large orsmall groups to build phonological aware-ness in young children. In a typical kinder-garten classroom, the program containsenough activities to occupy 15-20 minutes aday for eight months of the school year. Itcontains an excellent discussion of theconcept of phonological awareness and itsrelation to reading growth and offers manyhelpful suggestions for teaching techniquesin this area.

Materials Included with Purchase

This program is contained in a singleteacher’s manual. The manual describesall 51 activities and how to sequence themin instruction. It also contains many listsof words that can be used in the activities.Some of the activities require that theteacher supply materials such as pictures,a ball of yarn, or colored paper. None of thematerials would be difficult for a typicalkindergarten teacher to develop. Themanual also includes a number of group-administered phonological awareness teststhat can be used to monitor children’sprogress. Finally, an extensive selection ofsupport materials is also listed that in-cludes a list of rhyming and alliterationbooks that can be used by parents andteachers to get children thinking about thesounds in words.

Range of Instructional Activities

This program contains a series of activitiesthat are graded in difficulty, along with arecommended sequence for introducing theactivities. The goal of all the activities is forthe children to have fun while learning tolisten for the sounds in words. Following isthe recommended sequence of activities inthe program.

Listening games—These introductoryactivities are designed to sharpenchildren’s ability to listen selectively tosounds in their environment.

Rhyming activities—These activitiesinvolving listening to rhyming sentencesand stories, generating rhymes, and mak-ing judgments about rhyming words tointroduce the idea of listening for thesounds in words.

Sentences and words—These activitiesare included to help children begin to learnabout listening for the parts within wholes.They help children acquire an awarenessthat sentences are made of words.

Cost

Approximately $22.95

Ordering

Brooks PublishingP.O. Box 10624Baltimore, MD 21285-0624800-638-3775

42

Syllables—Children learn more aboutlistening for the parts within wholes andalso about putting parts together to makewholes while they become aware of syl-lables in words. These activities teachchildren to count syllables in words andblend syllables together to make words.

Initial and final sounds—These are thefirst activities that introduce children tothe individual sounds in words. Dependingupon the pace of the class, this stage ofinstruction might be reached by late Octo-ber or November. The children first engagea series of activities with first sounds, likecomparing first sounds in words, pro-nouncing the first sounds, or changing thefirst sounds to make other words, and thendo similar activities with last sounds.

Phonemes—These activities will typicallytake place during the second semester ofkindergarten, and involve full analysis andpronunciation of individual sounds inwords as well as activities to teach childrento blend sounds together to make words. Avariety of concrete materials such asblocks, chips, or pieces of paper are usedto represent individual sounds in words.

Letters—These activities come toward theend of the year. Children are taught theletters used to represent a small number ofconsonant and vowel sounds, and thenpractice using these letters to representthe sounds in words in both reading andspelling activities.

Research Base

This program was first evaluated in astudy reported by Lundberg, Frost, andPeterson (1988) that was conducted inDenmark. They showed not only that thechildren improved significantly in phono-logical awareness, but also that the chil-dren who received the program later be-came better readers and spellers thanthose who did not. The English translationof the program was evaluated in a studyreported by Barbara Foorman and herassociates in Houston, Texas (Forman,Francis, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, & Fletcher,1996). Using the program with inner-citychildren in the Houston Public Schoolsproduced significant enhancement of theirgrowth in phonological awareness by theend of the kindergarten year.

General

This is an excellent program and isstrongly recommended for use in kinder-garten classrooms. It is also recommendedfor use with weaker students during firstgrade. It is teacher-friendly in design andwell-organized. The activities should be funfor both teachers and children, and thereare clear directions on how to deliver theinstruction. The only obvious limitation ofthe program at present is that it does notsupply all the materials required to deliverthe instruction. However, the extra materi-als required should be readily available inany kindergarten or first grade classroom.

Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum

43


Sound Start includes a spiral-boundteacher’s manual that provides a goodoverview of the concept of phonologicalawareness and directions for 21 differentinstructional activities. In addition, itcontains a selection of pictures and gameboards printed on 8 1/2 by 11 inch cardstock. The kit also comes with an excellentvideotape that demonstrates many of theactivities in the program.


The curriculum of Sound Start providesinstructional practice in developing rhyme,syllable, and phonemic awareness. Follow-ing most of the activities, the authors offerspecial instructional tips, as well as activi-ties to provide extra instruction and prac-tice for children who are having difficultymastering the skill being taught. Themajority of activities in this program in-volve singing or other musical activity.Following is a list of the specific skillstaught in the program.

Rhyme

• Recognition (“Does log rhyme withdog?”)

• Completion (Child completes a rhymewithin a sentence, like “Jack and Jillwent up the _____?”)

• Production—children make up rhymesfor individual words (“What wordsrhyme with blue?”)

Syllable Awareness

• Segmentation—These activities teachchildren to count the syllables in wordsand pronounce the syllables separately.

• Deletion—This uses compound wordsto give children practice in making newwords by dropping one of the parts ofthe compound word (e.g., starfish: star,fish).

Cost

$95 for the manual, instructional materi-als, and video

Ordering

Stern Center for Language20 Allen Brook LaneWilliston, VT 05495800-544-4863

Sound Start:TeachingPhonologicalAwareness in theClassroom(Orna Lenchner & Blanche Podhajski, 1997)

Preschool–Grade 1

Sound Start contains activities to stimulatephonological awareness that are appropri-ate for pre-school through first grade chil-dren. It was developed out of experience atthe Stern Center for Language and Learningin Williston, Vermont, and grew out of theefforts of Dr. Orna Lenchner and others tohelp classroom teachers build phonologicalawareness in their students. It is designedto serve as a regular class curriculum inphonological awareness primarily for thekindergarten year, and contains activities toteach rhyme, syllable, and phoneme aware-ness. There are two activities at the end ofthe program that help children practiceusing letters to represent the first sound inwords.

44

Phonemic Awareness

• Initial sound recognition—These activi-ties require childen to select a picturebeginning with a given sound or topronounce the beginning sound of aword.

• Phoneme segmentation—Childrenpronounce all the sounds in words—they are supported with pictures thathave dots at the bottom showing thenumber of sounds in the words.

.• Phoneme deletion—Children recognizethe sound left out when the teachersays their name after deleting the firstsound (e.g., Mark: ark, the /m/ soundwas left out).

• Phoneme substitution—Children prac-tice making funny words by puttingdifferent sounds at the beginning ofwords.

• Phoneme blending—Children practicerecognizing pictures or body parts whentheir names are pronounced one pho-neme at a time (e.g., /n/-/o/-/z/,/f/-/oo/-/t/).

Activities with Letters

Matching letters to first sounds in words—Two activities are included that providepractice in identifying the letter thatstands for the first sound in a word. Thechildren are either given the word andmust identify its first letter or are given theletter and must identify a picture that goeswith it.

Research Base

This program has not been evaluated inresearch. However, almost all of the activi-ties are very similar to those of other pro-grams that have been evaluated and haveproduced significant growth in phonologi-cal awareness. The primary question aboutthe effectiveness of this program iswhether it contains enough different activi-ties to support instruction across an entireclassroom year and, thus, whether it willbe as effective as those programs thatinclude a greater variety of content andactivities.

General

One strength of this program is the demon-stration video that is included with thematerials. It provides delightful examplesof many of the activities being performedby the author with a small group of chil-dren. This video should be very useful forinservice training of teachers and for show-ing to parents as part of parent programs.One possible limitation of the program isthe relatively limited number (21) of differ-ent activities it contains. However, themanual does provide suggestions for addi-tional activities so teachers should be ableto generate more practice if the children intheir classes seem to require it. Finally, theprogram contains only two very simpleactivities designed to help children see theconnections between sounds and letters.The program will need to be supplementedwith other activities at the end to ensurethat children learn to apply their newlyacquired phonemic awareness to spellingand reading print.

Sound Start: Teaching Phonological Awareness in the Classroom

45


The Sounds Abound program is containedin a spiral-bound notebook. The notebookcontains both directions for the activitiesand many pictures used with the activities.In addition, it contains a list of picturebooks that emphasize rhyme, song books,and fingerplay and rhyme books that canbe used to build sound awareness inyoung children. The manual also containssome simple tests of phonemic awarenessthat can be used to assess growth of theseskills before and after the program isimplemented.


The activities in Sounds Abound focus onfour broad areas.

Rhyme

• Activities to teach children how to judgewhether words rhyme or not

• Activities that help children learn togenerate rhyming words

Beginning and Ending Sounds

• Activities that teach children to makejudgments about whether words beginor end with the same sound

• Activities that teach children to producewords beginning with the same soundas another word

Segmenting and Blending

• Activities that teach children to seg-ment words into syllables

• Activities involving blending of syllablesinto words

• Activities that lead children to segmentand pronounce the phonemes in words

• Activities that involve blending indi-vidual phonemes into words

Sounds Abound(Hugh Catts and Tina Vartiainen, 1993)

Kindergarten—Grade 1

This popular program has been in use inkindergarten and first grade classrooms fora number of years. The spiral-bound bookcontains both activities and materials tolead children from beginning rhyming activi-ties through activities involving letters andsounds. It is written in a very simple format,and the activities are easy to implementand described concisely in the manual. It isnot presented as an organized curriculum,but the order of activities presented in themanual does move gradually from easier tomore difficult.

Cost

$34.95 for the manual

A game to support many of the skillstaught in the Sounds Abound program canalso be ordered from LinguiSystems. Itprovides an interesting game board anddirections and materials to reinforce skillsin rhyming, sound comparison, soundblending, and phoneme segmentation. Wewould recommend that the game be pur-chased along with the manual for maxi-mum effectiveness and ability to provideextra practice for those children who needit. The game could also be purchasedseparately for use in support of any of thephonological awareness programs dis-cussed in this manual.

Ordering

LinguiSystems3100 4th AvenueEast Moline, IL 61244800-776-4332

46

Putting Sounds Together with Letters

These activities teach children the soundsassociated with seven consonants and fivevowels and then provide structured activi-ties in which children learn to make differ-ent words by changing the first letter (e.g.,with __a t already given, the children canmake sat, fat, mat, pat, and rat by choos-ing different letters)

Research Base

As with most of the programs describedhere, there is no specific research supportfor the Sounds Abound program as aunique instructional sequence. However,all of the activities were taken directly fromresearch projects that did show a signifi-cant impact on the growth of phonologicalawareness in young children.

General

This is an excellent set of materials forguiding phonemic awareness instruction inkindergarten or first grade. Its primarystrengths are the simplicity of layout andthe ease with which the activities can beexecuted in the classroom. It may require abit more creativity on the part of theteacher to maintain interest than a pro-gram like Sound Start, since there is not anelaborate game or activity structure devel-oped for each of the instructional activities.Sounds Abound would be a useful additionto any kindergarten program in phonologi-cal awareness and could be used by para-professionals or parent volunteers tostrengthen phonological awareness insmall groups of children.

Sounds Abound

47


Both kits include a spiral-bound teacher’smanual and supporting materials such ascolored plastic blocks, picture cards, to-kens, and letter tiles. The manual for thebeginning program contains instructionsfor 31 activities, while the intermediatemanual includes 25. Many of the activitiesin the intermediate program are morecomplex than those in the beginningmanual because they are designed to beused with older children. Both manualscontain many excellent word lists that canbe used in support of the activities.


Both the beginning and intermediate kitscontain a range of instructional activitiesappropriate to their intended age groups.The activities in this program are notembedded in as game-like a format as isthe case with some of the other programs,but they are intended to be fun and couldeasily be adapted for use within games.The activities in each kit are describedbelow:

Beginning Level Kit

• Activities involving rhyme recognitionand production

• Segmenting sentences into words andcompound words into root words

• Counting the syllables in words• Many different activities involving

isolation, segmentation, blending,deletion, and substitution of phonemesin words

• Activities involving letter sounds andbeginning reading and spelling

Intermediate Level Kit

• Many activities involving isolating,counting, and deletion of syllables inwords

The PhonologicalAwareness Kit,Beginning andIntermediate(Carolyn Robertson & Wanda Salter, 1995,1997)

Kindergarten–Grade 2;Grades 3–8

The Phonological Awareness Kit is a pro-gram of instruction in phonological aware-ness that comes in two versions. The begin-ning kit is designed for small group or wholeclassroom instruction with children in kin-dergarten through 2nd grade, while theintermediate kit is appropriate for individualor small group instruction with 3rd through8th grade children who are having difficul-ties acquiring phonemic awareness andphonetic reading skills. Both programscontain instructional activities and support-ing materials that can be used to provide acomprehensive program of instruction inphonemic awareness that begins with orallanguage activities and ends with letter-sound and phonetic reading and spellingactivities.

Cost

$69.95 for each kit, which includes amanual and all supportive material

Ordering


48

• Activities involving the isolation, blend-ing, segmenting, deletion, and substitu-tion of phonemes in words

• Activities with letters that involve learn-ing all the letter sounds, initial andfinal blends, consonant digraphs, voweldipthongs, and some simple phonicsrules (silent e, r-controlled vowels).These activities involve children exten-sively in reading and writing simplewords and sentences.

Research Base

As with most of the programs describedhere, there is no published research sup-port for the Phonological Awareness Kits asa set of specific activities with a uniqueinstructional sequence. However, all of theactivities follow principles and containcontent that have been demonstrated inresearch to produce a significant impact onthe growth of phonological awareness inyoung children.

General

Both the beginning and intermediate kitsare well-designed, with high quality materi-als that can be used to support excellentinstruction in this area. The beginning kitcan be adapted for whole classroom in-struction, although many of the picturesmay not be large enough to use with wholeclassrooms. A strength of both kits is theextent to which they continue phonemicawareness activities into exercises involv-ing print. The intermediate kit, in particu-lar, is strong in this area and actuallyprovides for a range of activities that wouldbe similar to many beginning phonicsprograms. Both kits contain excellent wordlists that can be used to provide in-depthpractice on the skills taught in the pro-grams.

The Phonological Awareness Kit

49


The Phonological Awareness Companioncomes in a spiral-bound notebook. Inaddition to suggested teaching activities, itcontains an extensive list of suggestedbooks for the classroom that can be usedto help draw children’s attention to thesounds in words. It also contains wordlists that can be used in a variety of pho-nological awareness activities. A uniquefeature of this notebook is that it alsocontains materials for parents: both ageneral guide to activities that can be doneto foster literacy development in the homeand pre-drafted letters that can be senthome to parents with suggestions forspecific activities to stimulate phonologicalawareness.


This curriculum guide is organized aroundsix learning outcomes. Each learningoutcome is broken down into several es-sential skills. Suggestions for instructionare focused on these essential skills. Thesix learning outcomes in the programinclude the following:

• The student demonstrates knowledgethat print is meaningful and has con-ventions.

• The student demonstrates awareness ofwords in spoken and printed sentences.

• The student demonstrates awareness ofsyllables in spoken words.

• The student demonstrates awareness ofrhyme.

• The student demonstrates awareness ofsounds in spoken words.

• The student uses sound awareness andletter knowledge in reading and writing.

Research Base

The specific program outlined in the Phono-logical Awareness Companion has not been

The PhonologicalAwarenessCompanion(The Wellington County Board of Education,1995)


This is really a compilation of teachingsuggestions for teachers in kindergartenthrough second grade rather than a fullydeveloped set of curriculum materials. Itwas developed to provide teaching sugges-tions and lists of resource materials insupport of six learning objectives to preparechildren for instruction in reading. It isdesigned for teachers who enjoy developingtheir own specific activities but who wouldlike an overall guide to the essential ele-ments of a curriculum in phonologicalawareness.

Cost

$31.95

Ordering


50

evaluated in research. However, the overallpattern of activities and many of the spe-cific instructional suggestions have beenpositively evaluated in previous research.

General

This is an excellent general guide for acurriculum in phonological awareness inkindergarten or first grade. It seems par-ticularly appropriate for more experiencedteachers who already have a rich repertoireof instructional activities and materialsthat can be adapted to meet the specificgoals outlined in the manual. Many teach-ers will find the materials for parents thatare included in the manual of particularvalue.

The Phonological Awareness Companion

51


All the materials necessary for implement-ing this program are included in a loose-leaf binder. These materials include highlyscripted lessons that teachers can use toteach children the tutoring procedures,instructions on details of program manage-ment (e.g., scheduling students, how tohandle absenteeism), materials like scoreboards that are helpful in program man-agement, and 57 student lesson sheets.The manual is very readable and is laid outin a logical and easy to understand man-ner.


The lesson manual provides procedures fortwo kinds of activities: Sounds and Wordsand Story Sharing. The latter type of activ-ity is designed to support reading compre-hension and will not be discussed herebecause that is not the focus of thismanual. The Sounds and Words activityfocuses on five essential phonologicalskills:

• Identify letter-sound correspondencesautomatically

• Understand that words are constructedof individual sounds

• Blend sounds together to sound outwords

• Recognize sight words• Integrate phonological knowledge into

the act of reading

In the current version for first- and sec-ond-grade students, this program allowschildren to practice oral language phone-mic awareness activities at the same timethey are learning about print. The majorphonemic awareness activity in the pro-gram asks children to “say words slowly”while they show the number of soundswith their fingers. During the preparationlessons which are led by the teacher anddone with the whole class, children alsoplay the “first sound” game in which they

Peer AssistedLearning Strategiesfor BeginningReaders(Patricia Mathes, Jill Howard, JosephTorgesen, & Barbara Edwards, 1997)

Grades 1 and 2

Peer Assisted Learning Strategies for Be-ginning Readers (PALS) is a program tostimulate phonological awareness and buildbeginning reading skills in first and secondgrade children. Its development has been,and continues to be, supported by grantsfrom the U.S. Office of Education. It is basedon extensive research using older childrenas peer tutors, and it has adapted many ofthe principles learned in that work for usewith younger children. While the programsfor first and second grade children areessentially complete, they are currentlyundergoing refinement in a series of re-search studies, and a program for kinder-garten children is under development.Computer-based methods for assessment ofthe skills taught in the program are alsoundergoing development. The current pro-grams can be completed in about 16 weeksif peer tutoring sessions are scheduled threetimes a week for about 30 minutes.

Cost

$30 for the manual, which includes alllesson materials to operate the program;$12 for a videotape demonstrating use ofthe lessons

Ordering

Patricia MathesDepartment of Special EducationFlorida State UniversityTallahassee, FL 32306-3024850-644-4880

52

are asked to say the first sound of a word.Once the peer tutoring sessions begin, thechildren only do the “say it slowly” activity.The other activity that directly buildsphonemic awareness while involving printis the “sound it out” activity. Here, stu-dents first slowly identify the sounds in aprinted word, and then “say it fast” toblend the sounds together. Over the 57lessons students are given experience withalmost all of the consonant phonemes, allthe short and long vowels, and severalvowel digraphs.

Research Base

The PALS activities have been evaluatedpositively in several research studies. Inthe first study, conducted in Nashville,Tennessee, both children who were at themiddle and bottom range of reading skillsat the beginning of the year showed sub-stantially greater gains in phonemic aware-ness and reading skills than children whodid not receive the program (Mathes,Howard, Allen, & Fuchs, in press). Essen-tially the same results have been achievedin two other studies conducted in Florida(Mathes & Osterloh, 1997; Mathes,Howard, Torgesen, and Edwards, 1997).Thus, the same results about the effective-ness of the PALS program have been ob-tained in three separate studies usingdifferent samples of children.

General

PALS is an excellent program to use in firstand second grade to increase the amountof practice children receive in buildingphonological awareness and phoneticreading skills. It is relatively easy for teach-ers to learn to implement, and it providesproductive activities for both low- andhigh-ability children to do together. High-ability children are paired with lower-ability children, and both children receiveopportunities to serve as the “coach” as theskills are being learned. Effective use ofPALS requires good classroom control. If aclassroom contains a relatively high pro-portion of children who experience difficul-ties following classroom rules or interact-ing successfully with their peers, the pro-gram will be difficult to implement effec-tively. The basic format of the lessons, aswell as the order in which new knowledgeis introduced, follow well-establishedprinciples from Direct Instruction(Carnine, Silbert, & Kameenui, 1997). Easeof monitoring growth in the program willbe facilitated as soon as the computerbased assessment procedures are devel-oped.

Peer Assisted Learning Strategies for Beginning Readers

53


The programs come on several 3.5-inchdisks, and they include a teacher’s manualthat provides complete instructions on howto use them. The programs come withmanagement software that allows theteacher to specify the activities that will beavailable for any given child and also willprovide a report of the level of performancefor each child. The program keeps track ofthe activities that have been successfullyaccomplished and encourages children totry new activities so that they can keepmoving forward.


Daisy Quest provides instruction andpractice in four phonological awarenessactivities; Daisy’s Castle provides threeadditional activities. Each activity containsan instructional/practice module in whichchildren are taught how to perform theactivity and allowed to practice as much asthey want, and it also contains two differ-ent testing modules that allow children toshow what they have learned. The simplesttesting module simply asks whether twowords rhyme (or begin with the same first,middle, or last sound), and the secondtesting module requires the child to indi-cate which of three words rhymes (or hasthe same first, last, or middle sound) as atarget word. As children complete differentactivities at a preset criterion of perfor-mance, they are rewarded with clues aboutthe location where Daisy the Dragon ishiding in the world they move through inthe program.

The activities included in Daisy Quest areas follows:

• Rhyming—Children are taught to indi-cate whether or not two words rhyme.

• First sound comparison—Childrenlearn to compare words on the basis oftheir first sound.

Daisy Quest andDaisy’s Castle(Erickson, Foster, Foster, & Torgesen, 1992,1993)

Kindergarten–Grade 1;Special Education

Daisy Quest and Daisy’s Castle are twocomputer programs designed to stimulatephonemic awareness in young children.They were developed with support of agrant from the National Institute of ChildHealth and Human Development. Althoughtheir primary use will be with kindergartenand first grade children, many teachershave reported using them successfully witholder children receiving special education.The programs will run on almost anyMacintosh computer, but they will not run inWindows or DOS. The programs use veryhigh-quality graphics, digitized speech, aninteresting story line, and animation to holdchildren’s interest.

Cost

$49 each or $89 for both

Ordering

PRO-ED8700 Shoal Creek Blvd.Austin, TX 78757-6897512-451-3246

54

• Last sound comparison—Childrencompare words on the basis of lastsounds.

• Middle sound comparisons—Childrenlearn to compare words on the basis oftheir middle sounds.

Daisy’s Castle contains three instructionalactivities.

• Onset-rime blending—Children learntwo-part blending involving onsets andrhymes (c-at, d-og).

• Full blending—Children blend all thesounds in two-, three-, and four-pho-neme words to identify a specific word.

• Counting sounds—Children indicatehow many different sounds they hear intwo-, three-, and four-phoneme words.

Research Base

These computer programs have beenevaluated in two studies. In the first study(Foster, Erickson, Foster, Brinkman, &Torgesen, 1994), a total of 46 childrenranging in age from 57 to 93 months weregiven approximately five hours of experi-ence with Daisy Quest. The childrenshowed approximately as much improve-ment in phonological awareness as manyteacher-led programs produce in an aver-age of about nine hours of instruction(Torgesen & Barker, 1995). Another studyevaluated the use of both programs with agroup of children who were experiencing

reading problems after four months ofinstruction in first grade (Barker &Torgesen, 1995). The children receivedapproximately eight hours of instructionwith both programs, and gained substan-tially more in phonological awareness andword-reading ability than similar childrenwho had been given experience with soft-ware to increase early reading skills orbuild mathematics skills.

General

These programs, when used together, canbe very helpful in providing instructionaland practice activities that will stimulatephonemic awareness in young children.They can be used either as stand-aloneactivities or, preferably, as a way of provid-ing additional experience in the context ofa classroom-wide curriculum in phonologi-cal awareness. By themselves, they willprobably not be sufficient to help childrenwith severe phonological disabilities ac-quire useful levels of phonemic awareness.Young children with extremely low abilitymay require the assistance of either anolder child or an instructional aide as theyare introduced to different activities in theprograms, since the instructional routinesof these programs are not robust enoughto deal with all of the learning difficultiesthat are present in children with phono-logical disabilities. (This is less true forolder children with reading disabilities.)

Daisy Quest and Daisy’s Castle

55


The Waterford Early Reading Program is byfar the most expensive instructional pack-age described in this manual. It is sold in“units” that support instruction for anentire classroom, and each unit typicallyincludes three very high-end multimediacomputers, teacher manuals that describesupportive classroom activities, and mate-rials, including 40 individual readers, andfour videotapes, for each child to takehome.


The instructional objectives of the Level 1curriculum fall into six categories. Thesecategories are listed and described below:

• Print awareness—Activities within thisobjective include such things as learn-ing letter names and sounds, under-standing direction of print, and writingand forming letters and words.

• Phonological skills—This is the compo-nent directly focused on phonologicalawareness. Children receive extensiveexperience with rhyme; matching wordson first, middle, and last sounds; pho-neme blending; and counting thesounds in words.

• Visual perception—This segmentteaches children to recognize shapes,patterns, and details in visual material.

• Listening skills—These activities helpchildren to hone their listening skillswith music and aurally presentedstories.

• Concept development—This componentfocuses on such things as learningabout numbers, opposites, and storysequence; making predictions in sto-ries; and distinguishing between realand make-believe.

• Computer skills—Children learn to usea mouse and practice beginning key-board skills.

Waterford EarlyReading Program–Level 1(Waterford Institute, 1993)

Kindergarten(Grade 1 and Grade 2 indevelopment)

The Waterford Early Reading Program—Level 1 provides a rich set of instructionaland practice experiences focused on pre-reading knowledge and skills. It took fiveyears and $7 million to develop, and itsdevelopment has been supported throughgrants from a variety of foundations. Itrepresents an attempt to use computers toteach all the major skills and knowledgeinvolved in learning to read. The instructiontakes advantage of the full multimediacapabilities of our most advanced personalcomputers and includes original songs, artwork, full motion video, and animation. Theactivities have been designed to captureand hold the attention of young children.Level 1 will be followed by Levels 2 and 3for first and second grades respectively. TheLevel 1 curriculum for kindergarten childrenprovides approximately 15-20 minutes ofdaily instruction to extend over the entireschool year.

Cost

Cost varies with the components ordered.A full classroom installation including thenecessary computers, all software, andsupportive teacher and child materialscosts more than $20,000 at present.

Ordering

Addison Wesley’s Florida sales representa-tive: (352) 242-4823.

56

The activities in each component are variedfrom day to day and build in a sequencefrom simpler to more difficult activities.The program keeps track of children’sprogress and automatically provides theinstruction their development warrants.

Research Base

The Level 1 curriculum has been evaluatedat numerous sites around the country,ranging from large urban schools to subur-ban schools to rural schools. The additionof the computer experiences to the stan-dard kindergarten curriculum has consis-tently produced large gains in pre-readingskills at the end of the year. Measures haveincluded tests of phonological awareness,letter knowledge, and concepts aboutprint. The major unknown at presentabout this curriculum is whether it willprove to be more effective than less costlyteacher-led interventions. No studies arecurrently available to indicate that it willproduce larger gains in pre-reading skillsthan might be obtained through teachertraining in a kindergarten curriculumfocusing on the same skills. However, thismay not be the crucial question. The

Waterford Early Reading Program is astandard curriculum that will remain inplace even if trained teachers move awayfrom a school or if district policies aboutteacher training and support change. Themost important question is really whethera high-quality, computer-based curriculumwill provide more long-term stability forappropriate and effective instruction thanwill the less costly materials that dependon teacher training and support to imple-ment effectively.

General

The Waterford Early Reading Program isalmost certainly the most comprehensive,highest quality computer-based curricu-lum in essential pre-reading skills cur-rently available. Evidence suggests that itis effective in teaching phonological aware-ness and other important skills necessaryto early reading growth. It does not requireextensive teacher training to implement,although its overall effectiveness might besignificantly enhanced if teachers weremore carefully trained to use the supple-mental materials provided within theprogram.

Waterford Early Reading Program

57


The Read, Write, and Type program can beordered in at least two versions. The ver-sion for teachers includes the program ona CD-ROM plus a teacher’s manual thatdescribes a variety of learning activities tobe used prior to introduction to the samecontent on the computer. These teacher-led activities are designed to help make thecomputer-based learning/practice experi-ence more successful for young children.The manual also contains many picturesand word lists that can be copied and usedin teacher-led instructional activities. Thehome version of the program does notinclude the instructional manual.


Read, Write and Type contains 40 lessons,each of which is designed to introduce anew phoneme and provide practice hearingit in words, as well as typing it by itself,and in words and stories. One of the majorinstructional goals of this program is toprovide children with the skills necessaryto type any regularly spelled word theyhear. It brings meaning to this task byengaging children in writing and readingtasks at the sentence and story level.Within the context of this program, chil-dren primarily read material they them-selves have typed. Thus, it is not a stand-alone reading program but rather is de-signed to provide a meaningful context forteaching phonemic awareness and pho-netic writing and reading skills. A fewsimple phonics rules, such as the signal e(makes the middle vowel say its name) aretaught in the teacher-led lessons accompa-nying the program.

Each lesson provides the following experi-ences with each of the 40 phonemes andletter-sound correspondences taught bythe program:

Read, Write, andType(Jeannine Herron, 1995)

Grade 1

Read, Write, and Type is a computer pro-gram designed to teach children to readthrough writing. It is included in thismanual because it contains many activitiesthat are explicitly designed to build phone-mic awareness, and initial research sug-gests that it can be used effectively to helpchildren with phonological weaknessesacquire beginning reading skills. It uses thefull multimedia capabilities of moderncomputers to provide very engaging instruc-tional and practice activities for youngchildren. It can be used with whole class-room groups to teach typing and writingskills, or it can be used more intensivelywith at-risk children to teach these sameskills plus reading.

Cost

$29.95 for the program by itself

$69.95 for teacher version with manual(highly recommended)

$157.95 for five-station lab pack

$426.95 for 15-station lab pack

$629.95 for 25-CD school-site license

Ordering

Learning Company6160 Summit Drive NorthMinneapolis, MN 55430800-152-2255

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Initial instruction in how to type thesound—This includes direct instructionand modeling by animated “hands” as wellas practice typing the phoneme in wordsand short phrases.

Phonemic awareness—This activity pro-vides practice in “listening” for the soundwithin words. The child is shown a pictureand must indicate whether the given pho-neme occurs at the beginning, middle, orend of the word.

Practicing the phoneme in the context of astory—This activity requires the child totype a simple story dictated by the com-puter and made up of words and pho-nemes the child should know. There issubstantial visual support and promptingto help children with this task.

In addition to these standard activities foreach phoneme, there are areas in theprogram that encourage the improvementof fluency in typing and creative writing inthe form of e-mail messages. The programmonitors child progress and providescertificates for the completion of each levelof instruction.

Research Base

The Read, Write, and Type program hasbeen evaluated in both whole classroomand small-group instructional applications.With whole classroom groups, it is typicallyused for 45 minutes a day, with part ofthat time being teacher-led instruction.Initial reports (Herron, 1997) of this use ofthe program are encouraging, with most

children in first and second grades beingable to acquire useful typing skills andimprove their ability to spell and applyphonetic reading skills during reading. Inan ongoing study in Tallahassee (Torgesen,Rashotte, & Wagner, 1997), the programhas been used with small groups (threechildren) of at-risk children in four 50-minute sessions a week for eight months ofthe school year. Although these childrenbegan the year with reading skills substan-tially below their peers, their scores onphonetic reading ability, sight-word read-ing, and passage comprehension were allaverage to slightly above average at the endof the year. We also found that almost allthe children could learn useful typingskills from the program. The first year’sinstruction is now being replicated withanother group of children.

General

This is a very well-designed and executedprogram. The graphics and sound are veryengaging for young children. They enjoyworking on the program for extendedperiods of time. The instructions andactivities in the teacher’s manual are alsoinstructionally sound and fun for bothteachers and children. The program is notrecommended as a stand-alone experiencefor at-risk children, but with teacher sup-port, it appears to be a very effective way toprevent reading problems in at-risk chil-dren in first grade. For children with morenormal learning abilities in reading, itwould provide a very helpful additionalexperience to stimulate writing skills andhelp them learn to type.

Read, Write, and Type

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Earobics can be purchased in two versions.The home and professional versions arethe same except that the latter makesprovision for as many as 25 children toregister, while the home version allows onlytwo children to register at a time. In addi-tion, the professional version containsmore extensive data collection and reportwriting features than the home version.Both versions come on a CD-Rom that canbe played in either MacIntosh or Windowsenvironments. A small instruction bookletaccompanies the CD, and there is also awebsite available to answer questions andobtain more product information(HYPERLINK http://www.cogcon.com)www.cogcon.com).


All the activities in this program employ anadaptive practice format in which the levelof difficulty of the items is adjusted accord-ing to the performance of the child. Thelevel of difficulty of the games is increasedif the child meets a given performancecriterion, and it is lowered if the items aretoo difficult. The goal is to allow the childto progress through items that graduallyincrease in difficulty until high levels ofperformance are obtained. Both versions ofthe program keep records that allow thechild to resume play at the level of diffi-culty that was achieved in the previoussession. There are six activities, eachembedded in a different game-like format.The activities can be played in any orderselected by the child, or the child can focuson only a few of the activities at a time. Theactivities are described below:

Karloon’s Balloons—This activity strength-ens listening skills by requiring the child toremember sequences of sound effects,words, numbers, or speech sounds. Thecomputer provides an auditory sequence,and the child must then click on pictures

Earobics(Jan Wasowicz, 1997)


Earobics is a computer program designedspecifically to build listening skills andphonemic awareness in young childrenages four to seven. It has a comprehensiverange of activities to stimulate phonologicalawareness, and these activities can beengaged at many different difficulty levels(as many as 114) ranging from simplelistening skills to work with letters andsounds. The quality of the graphics andprogram structure are very high and shouldbe consistently engaging for young children.The program should also be suitable forstimulating phonological awareness in olderchildren who are experiencing delays inphonological development.

Cost

$59 for the home version

$149 for the professional version

Ordering

Cognitive Concepts207 Hamilton StreetEvanston, IL 60202847-328-8199

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associated with the sounds in the rightorder. There are 38 levels of play for thisactivity.

C.C. Coal Car—This activity teaches letter-sound correspondence and phonemicawareness. Across 74 levels of play, thechild begins by simply indicating whether agiven phoneme matches a letter, and endswith levels that require the child to indi-cate where a given sound occurs within athree phoneme word.

Rap-A-Tap-Tap—This activity teachesphonemic segmentation across 16 levels ofplay. The child begins by simply countingthe number of separate drum beats thereare in a given sequence, and it ends withitems that involve counting the number ofsyllables or phonemes in words.

Caterpillar Connection—This is a pho-neme-blending activity that begins withblending compound words and ends withblending phonemes. There are 56 levels ofplay.

Rhyme Time—This activity, which contains11 levels of play, teaches children to iden-tify words that rhyme.

Basket Full of Eggs—This activity beginsby helping children learn to hear the differ-ences between vowels and between conso-nant-vowel combinations. The computerpronounces two vowels or combinations,and the child simply indicates if they arethe same or different. When the child isworking with consonant-vowel combina-tions, the early levels of difficulty acousti-cally enhance the distinctiveness of thecombinations; this distinctiveness isgradually reduced as the child movesthrough the program. There are 114 levelsof play in this activity.

Research Base

We are not aware of any published re-search that documents the effectiveness ofthis program. However, the activities them-selves, and the levels of difficulty for eachactivity, are consistent with principles ofeffective instruction in phonemic aware-ness. If this program is used consistentlywith young children, it should have verysimilar effects as other instructional pro-grams that follow the same principles.Given the large range of difficulty of theitems in Earobics, the program appears tohave special potential to enhance phone-mic awareness in children with phonologi-cal processing difficulties.

General

Earobics has a number of importantstrengths which recommend its use bothat home and in the schools. The activitiesin the program follow principles of goodinstruction in phonemic awareness, andthey are provided at many levels of diffi-culty to support gradual growth and extrapractice for children who have difficulty inthis area. The most obvious limitation ofthe program is that the format of feedback,and of the games themselves, may becomerepetitious for children who spend a lot oftime with the program. For children whohave difficulty learning in this area, teach-ers and parents may have to structureadditional rewards for progress throughincreasingly challenging levels of the pro-gram. The program would provide excellentsupplemental instruction to kindergartenand first-grade children who are receivingclassroom instruction in phonemic aware-ness but are having difficulty keeping upwith their peers.

Earobics

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This program is packaged in a three-ringbinder that contains the manual as well asall of the word lists and pictures to be usedin the activities. Also included are twolaminated game boards used in several ofthe activities. Some additional materialsare required for some of the activities, butthese should be readily available in anykindergarten or first-grade classroom.


The instructional activities for Launch intoReading Success are grouped within eightbroad objectives. Each objective containsseveral instructional activities that buildupon one another to achieve the desiredlearning outcome. The eight objectives ofthe program are as follows:

• Awareness of whole words as sounds—These activities focus on helping thechild identify words as individual soundsegments within sentences.

• Tapping—The objective here is to leadchildren to be able to tap out the num-ber of syllables in words containingfrom one to four syllables.

• Rhyme—This objective contains 8activities designed to lead from beingable to recognize if two words rhyme tobeing able to generate rhyming words.

• Onset and rime—These 5 activities aredesigned to show how words can bebroken into onset and rime segments(c-at, b-ig) and how these segments canbe blended together to form words.

• Segmentation—This section begins withactivities to teach children how tosegment words into syllables by pro-nouncing each syllable separately. Theythen learn to segment two- and three-phoneme words and pronounce theindividual phonemes separately.

• Discrimination—This extensive section(11 activities) develops the skill ofidentifying words that begin and endwith the same sounds.

Launch into ReadingSuccess throughPhonologicalAwareness Training(Lorna Bennett & Pamela Ottley, 1996)


This program was designed to providespecial support in the development of pho-nological awareness to kindergarten chil-dren who are at risk for reading failure.Most of the activities are designed for small-group, rather than whole-classroom, instruc-tion. The program contains 66 activitylessons that should take anywhere from 10to 30 minutes each to complete. Because itis highly scripted, Launch into ReadingSuccess can be led by paraprofessionals orparent volunteers, as long as it is doneunder supervision of the classroom teacher.

Cost

$90 for the manual, pictures, and gameboards

Ordering

Creative Curriculum456 Moberly RoadVancouver, BC V5Z 4L7604-876-6682

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• Pronunciation lessons for consonantpairs—This unique section (it is moredeveloped here than in most trainingprograms) provides instruction de-signed to show children the essentialdifferences between voiced and un-voiced consonants (e.g., p – b, d – t,ch – j), and also to point out the wayeach of the consonant sounds areformed in the mouth.

• Blending phonemes—These five activi-ties build skill in blending separatelypresented phonemes together to formwords.

• Linkage—These 14 activities begin byteaching children to recognize theletters a, p, t, m, and i, and to associatethe appropriate phonemes with them.Subsequent activities show childrenhow these letters represent sounds inwords. Most of these activities involvechanging the first sounds in words bychanging the letters.

Research Base

This program has not been directly evalu-ated in research. However, the activities ituses are very similar to those contained inprograms that have been shown to beeffective in increasing phonological aware-ness. Given our experience with similarprograms, we would expect the kinds ofactivities used in this program to effectivelyteach phonemic awareness to children withthe most severe phonological weaknesses.

General

This program has a number of strengthsthat recommend it for use with at-riskchildren. First, it begins at a very basiclevel and moves through the steps of ac-quiring phonemic awareness in relativelysmall steps. Second, it places a strongemphasis on showing children how thesounds in words are represented in print.This may be particularly important forchildren who have lower ability in thephonological area. Finally, the programprovides extensive practice in learning thedistinct articulatory and acoustic featuresof individual consonant phonemes, whichshould help children to recognize pho-nemes when they occur at different posi-tions within words. The major limitation ofthe program arises from the fact that itmay not be sufficiently powerful to helpthe 3 to 5 percent of children with the mostsevere phonological disabilities acquiresufficient phonological awareness to learnbeginning phonetic reading skills. It also isnot clear why children are taught to seg-ment and pronounce the individual pho-nemes in words before they are taught howto compare words on the basis of their firstand last phonemes. This latter skill iseasier than full segmentation and is taughtprior to segmentation in most programs.

Launch into Reading Success through Phonological Awareness Training

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Materials in the program kit include aninstructors manual, two game boards, alarge picture of Rocky the Robot that isused during sound-blending activities, sixsets of laminated picture cards, a set ofletter cards, several solid color cards foruse in phoneme-counting activities, col-ored game tokens, and an audiotape thatillustrates how to pronounce phonemes inisolation. All materials necessary for in-struction are included in the kit.


The phonological awareness skills in thisprogram are taught and practiced using asequence of wordsets. This structure wasused so that children could become veryfamiliar with a small set of sounds byworking within wordsets that contained arestricted number of phonemes. Each newwordset introduces three new consonantphonemes, for which mouth and tonguepositions are explicitly taught. This wasdesigned to make the awareness taskseasier. As the same activities are practicedacross different wordsets, children’sawareness skills should become moregeneralized.

After several sessions of “warm-up” activi-ties involving rhyme, the following skillsare taught with each wordset:

Set 1 Onset/rime blendingPhoneme blendingSegmentation of initial pho-

neme

Sets 2-5 Phoneme blendingMatching words on basis of

first, last, and middlesounds

Identifying the position ofphonemes within words

Pronouncing the first, last,and middle sounds in words

PhonologicalAwareness Trainingfor Reading(Joseph Torgesen & Bryan Bryant, 1994)


The Phonological Awareness Training forReading program was developed with thesupport of a grant from the National Insti-tute for Child Health and Human Develop-ment. It was designed to provide small-group instruction for children with weak-nesses in the area of phonological aware-ness. It is highly scripted so that it can befollowed by teachers without special train-ing. If it is used in 30-minute sessions threetimes a week, it can be completed in slightlyless than one semester of instruction.

Cost

$129 for the kit

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Sets 6-8 Instruction in letter/soundcorrespondences

Making new words by chang-ing the first, last, or middleletter

Blending words when lettersstand for the phonemes

Research Base

Two studies have been reported that vali-date the effectiveness of the PhonologicalAwareness Training for Reading program.In a study reported by Torgesen, Morgan,& Davis (1992) it was shown that both thesegmenting and blending activities in-cluded in the program were necessary inorder to support growth in the ability toread new words. The second study(Torgesen & Davis, 1997) showed that theprogram produced a very sizeable averageeffect on the phonological awareness of alarge group of highly at-risk children.Overall, the skills of this group of childrenwho began below the 10th percentilemoved up very close to average for bothsegmenting and blending after about 16hours of training with the program. Eventhough the overall training effect from thisprogram was very strong, about 15-20percent of the at-risk children showed verylittle growth in phonological skills fromtheir experience with the program. Thesechildren may have required either morehighly trained teachers or more intensiveinstruction than was provided in thisstudy.

General

This program is well-suited for childrenwith mild to moderate phonological aware-ness difficulties. It provides in-depth prac-tice on critical phonological awarenessskills, and it is paced for children withlearning difficulties in this area. It is rela-tively easy to use and requires no specialtraining, although teachers with specialtraining in reading or language will find itinitially easier to use than those who donot have such training. Although theprogram was designed to help children inthe second semester of kindergarten pre-pare for reading instruction in first grade,it can appropriately be used with childrenwho are experiencing difficulty in readingas late as the second grade.

Phonological Awareness Training fPor Reading

65


The LiPS complete classroom versionincludes the trainer’s manual; researchbooklet; audiocassette; videotape; and avariety of instructional support materials,including letter tiles, mouth-form picturesand cards, colored blocks, and colored feltsquares. The manual contains extensivedescriptions of instructional procedures, aswell as a complete discussion of the in-structional philosophy and goals of theprogram.


The LiPS program contains instructionalactivities extending all the way into fullydeveloped phonics instruction and strate-gies for reading and spelling multisyllablewords. Since the focus of this manual is onphonological awareness, our descriptionwill focus primarily on that aspect of theprogram.

The initial instructional activities of theprogram are designed to help childrenbecome aware of the specific mouth move-ments associated with each phoneme inthe English language. The emphasis in theLiPS program is on the discovery method oflearning. That is, the mouth movementsassociated with each phoneme are notdirectly taught by the teacher. Rather, thechild is helped to discover this informationby the teacher, whose role is to ask care-fully focused questions that guide thediscovery process. Once children becomeaware of the mouth movements required tomake a given phoneme, they learn labelsfor each phoneme that are descriptive ofplace and manner of articulation (e.g., “lippopper” or “tip tapper”), and they learn toassociate each sound with a picture show-ing a mouth making the sound (mouth-form pictures). Children work initially witha small group of consonant and vowelsounds, and once they have learned thelabels and mouth/form pictures associated

The LindamoodPhonemeSequencing Programfor Reading,Spelling, and Speech(Patricia and Phyllis Lindamood, 1998)

LiPS replaces Auditory Discrimination in Depth(1984) by Patricia and Charles Lindamood.This multisensory program is designed tostimulate phonemic awareness and to teachphonemic reading skills to children withmoderate to severe phonological disabilities.Its unique feature is that it helps childrendiscover the articulatory and motor features ofphonemes and track sounds within speech. Ithas been used for many years in clinicalsettings with people with severe readingdisabilities but may also be appropriate forpreventive instruction with children at-risk forreading disabilities. LiPS is more complex thanthe other programs described in this manual;extensive teacher training is required to imple-ment it successfully.

Cost

$449 for the classroom kit

There is now available through Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes (LBLP) a CD-ROMthat contains an extensive set of practiceactivities in support of this program. It isdesigned as practice for students currentlyreceiving instruction in the LiPS program.We do not recommend that teachers simplybuy the kit and begin to use it without thespecial training that is offered through LBLP.

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66

with these sounds and can explain themeaning of the labels, they engage in anextensive series of problem-solving exer-cises that involve representing sequencesof phonemes with either mouth-formpictures or colored blocks. This training isdesigned to help them focus on mouthmovements in order to feel the identity,number, and sequence of sounds in syl-lables, and it also enables them to learn torepresent these sequences with concretevisual objects.

As children learn to label each phonemewith a descriptive name, they are alsotaught to associate specific letters witheach phoneme. So, once children becomefacile at representing sequences of soundwith concrete objects, it is a natural transi-tion to begin to represent them with let-ters. Children learn first to encode (spell)syllables with letters and then learn todecode (read) syllables by blending theseparate phonemes together. Much of thisbeginning work with spelling and decodingsimple patterns (CV, VC, CVC combina-tions) includes the use of nonwords inorder to reinforce the habit of feeling andhearing the individual sounds in words.

Research Base

According to the research review includedin the LiPS package, there have been fewpublished reports of tightly controlledresearch studies of the LiPS program itself.However, a number of recent studies havebeen reported that support the utility ofthe program in teaching beginning readingskills to children with phonological dis-abilities. Several studies (for example,(Alexander, Anderson, Heilman, Voeller, &Torgesen, 1991; Torgesen, Wagner,Rashotte, Alexander, & Conway, 1997)have demonstrated that the program isvery effective in increasing both the phono-logical awareness and phonemic readingskills of older children with severe readingdisabilities. There is also good evidencethat the program can be used successfullywith very young children identified ashighly at-risk for reading failure if it isoffered during the initial stages of learningto read (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte,1997).

General

This is an excellent and comprehensiveprogram for use with children who havesevere difficulties acquiring phonologicalawareness and learning phonemic readingskills. For older children with severe read-ing disabilities, the typical length of treat-ment is about 80 hours of individual in-struction, but it can sometimes range upto 160 hours. The primary limitation of theprogram is that it requires thorough,specialized teacher training in order toobtain beginning-level skills in its use.

Auditory Discrimination in Depth

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Softwareto BuildPre-ReadingSkills

Section 4

This section provides a brief description ofsoftware that is currently being massmarketed to provide instruction and prac-tice in a variety of pre-reading skills. Theseprograms are primarily intended for homeuse but are also being used in many kin-dergarten and first-grade classrooms. Weinitially reviewed this material to determinewhich programs contained activities explic-itly designed to stimulate phonologicalawareness. Very few programs containedsuch activities, although a number of themdid provide experiences with rhyme andalliteration (listening for the first sounds ofwords). Most of the programs containsimple phonics activities that require someknowledge of letter/sound correspon-dences. However, many of the activitiesinvolving letters should reinforce and buildon a child’s current level of phonemicawareness. We deliberately did not reviewsoftware that is marketed to teach phonicsskills once children begin to learn to read.Although there is a substantial amount ofsuch software, we felt that it was beyondthe scope of our purposes to consider it inthis review.

We will first list all the programs we con-sidered and then will provide a brief de-scription of the type of phonemic aware-ness or phonics activities contained ineach program. We will conclude with ourrecommendations of programs that arebest for stimulating phonemic awareness.Only programs that included oral languageactivities (usually involving pictures) thatdid not require knowledge of letters arelisted as training phonological awareness.

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A to Zap Sunburst K to G2 No

Bailey’s Book House Edmark 6 to 8 Yes

Beginning Reading Sierra 4 to 6 No

Curious George ABC Adventure Houghton Mifflin Interactive 3 to 6 No

Curious George Young Readers Series Houghton Mifflin Interactive 2 to 5 Yes

Darby the Dragon Broderbund 5 to 8 No

Elmo’s Preschool Deluxe Creative Wonders 3 to 5 No

First Phonics Sunburst K to G2 No

Fisher-Price A-B-C’s Davidson 3 to 5 No

Franklin’s Reading World Sanctuary Woods 4 to 7 No

Get Set for Kindergarten Creative Wonders 4 to 6 Yes

Green Eggs and Ham Broderbund 3 to 7 Yes

Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon School Zone 4 to 7 No

Interactive Learning Center—Kindergarten School Zone 4 to 6 No

Interactive Learning Center—Phonics School Zone 6 to 8 No

Interactive Learning Center—Preschool School Zone 3 to 5 No

Interactive Phonics Workbook School Zone 6 to 8 No

Interactive Preschool Workbook School Zone 3 to 5 No

Jump Start First Grade Knowledge Adventures 5 to 7 No

Jump Start Kindergarten Knowledge Adventures 4 to 6 Yes

Jump Start Pre-K Knowledge Adventures 3 to 5 No

Jump Start Preschool Knowledge Adventures 2 to 5 No

Jump Start Toddlers Knowledge Adventures 18m to 3y No

Kid Phonics Davidson 4 to 7 No

Let’s Make a Word Creative Wonders 4 to 6 Yes

Letters Creative Wonders 3 to 5 ??

The Little Engine Packard Bell Interactive 4 to 7 No

The Little Samurai Davidson 3 to 9 No

Reading Blaster Davidson 7 to 10 ??

Reading Blaster Junior Davidson 4 to 7 Yes

Reading Who? Reading You! Sunburst K to G2 No

Ready to Read with Pooh Disney Interactive 3 to 6 Yes

Richard Scarry’s Best Reading Program Ever Macromedia 3 to 6 Yes

Toddlers Deluxe Creative Wonders 2 to 4 Yes

Program Name PA Activities?Publisher Ages

Software Considered in This Review

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Phonemic AwarenessActivities in SoftwarePrograms

Bailey’s BookhouseChoosing rhyming words, choosing wordsbeginning with same sound, choosingwords to complete a rhyme

Curious George Young Readers SeriesChoosing a word to complete a rhyme

Get Set for KindergartenChoosing words that rhyme with oneanother

Green Eggs and HamChoosing a word to complete a rhyme

Jump Start KindergartenChild can click on a letter, hear the soundof the letter, hear a word that starts withthe sound, and see a picture of the word;matching game to find words that rhymewith one another

Let’s Make a WordChoosing words that rhyme

Reading Blaster JuniorChoosing objects beginning with a givensound; matching words that rhyme

Ready to Read with PoohChoosing words to complete a rhyme

Richard Scarry’s Best ReadingProgram EverIndicating if two words rhyme; findingwords that end with the same sound asanother word; matching words on the basisof their first sounds; telling whether twowords begin with the same sound

Toddlers DeluxeFinding words that begin with a givensound; selecting words to complete arhyme

Most HighlyRecommended SoftwarePrograms

Bailey’s BookhouseThis is an excellent program that not onlycontains activities that will stimulatephonological awareness, but also othersthat teach about letters and their soundsand story construction. The guide thataccompanies the program provides ex-amples of home exercises the child andparent can participate in together. Thedirections for the program are clear andeasy to follow.

Green Eggs and HamThe is actually a book on CD that includesseveral different activities to build phono-logical awareness and beginning skills withletters. It not only provides extensive expe-rience with rhyme, but also gives childrenthe opportunity to hear how new wordscan be made by changing the first letter.

Ready to Read with PoohThis is a very entertaining program that isalso very easy to use. In addition to givingrich experience with rhyme, the programincludes many activities to teach beginningletter/sound knowledge.

Richard Scarry’s Best ReadingProgram EverThis program contains the richest varietyof activities to stimulate phonologicalawareness, and it also provides extensivepractice on these activities. It also containsmany activities designed to teach lettersounds and to communicate the idea thatletters stand for the sounds in words.

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Adams, M. J. (l990). Beginning to read:Thinking and learning about print. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Alegria, J., Pignot, E., & Morais, J. (1982).Phonetic analysis of speech and memorycodes in beginning readers. Memory &Cognition, 10, 451-456.

Alexander, A., Anderson, H., Heilman, P.C., Voeller, K. S., & Torgesen, J. K. (1991).Phonological awareness training and reme-diation of analytic decoding deficits in agroup of severe dyslexics. Annals of Dys-lexia, 41, 193-206.

Barker, T. A., & Torgesen, J. K. (1995). Anevaluation of computer-assisted instruc-tion in phonological awareness with belowaverage readers. Journal of EducationalComputing Research, 13, 89-103.

Beck, I. L., & Juel, C. (1995) The role ofdecoding in learning to read. AmericanEducator, 19, 8-42.

Blachman, B. A., Ball, E. W., Black, R. S.,& Tangel, D. M. (1994). Kindergartenteachers develop phoneme awareness inlow-income, inner-city classrooms: Does itmake a difference? Reading and Writing, 6,1-18.

Bradley, L, & Bryant, P. (1985). Rhyme andreason in reading and spelling. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Byrne, B., & Fielding-Barnsley, R. (1993).Evaluation of a program to teach phonemicawareness to young children: A 1-yearfollow-up. Journal of Educational Psychol-ogy, 85, 104-111.

Cunningham, A. E. (l990). Explicit versusimplicit instruction in phonemic aware-ness. Journal of Experimental Child Psy-chology, 50, 429-444.

References

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Ehri, L. C. (in press). Grapheme-phonemeknowledge is essential for learning to readwords in English. In J. Metsala & L. Ehri(Eds.). Word recognition in beginning read-ing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence ErlbaumAssoc.

Fletcher, J. M., Shaywitz, S. E.,Shankweiler, D. P., Katz, L., Liberman, I.Y., Stuebing, K. K., Francis, D. J., Fowler,A. E., and Shaywitz, B. A. (1994). Cognitiveprofiles of reading disability: Comparisonsof discrepancy and low achievement defini-tions. Journal of Educational Psychology,86, 6-23.

Foster, K. C., Erickson, G. C., Foster, D. F.,Brinkman, D., & Torgesen, J. K. (1994).Computer administered instruction inphonological awareness: Evaluation of theDaisyQuest program. Journal of Researchand Development in Education, 27, 126-137.

Hoien, T., Lundberg, I., Stanovich, K. E., &Bjaalid, I. (1995). Components of phono-logical awareness. Reading and Writing, 7,171-188.

Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Peterson, O.(1988). Effects of an extensive program forstimulating phonological awareness in pre-school children. Reading Research Quar-terly, 23, 263-284.

Lundberg, I., Olofsson, A., & Wall, S.(1980). Reading and spelling skills in thefirst school years predicted from phonemicawareness skills in kindergarten. Scandi-navian Journal of Psychology, 21, 159-173.

Mann, V. A. (l993). Phoneme awarenessand future reading ability. Journal ofLearning Disabilities, 26, 259-269.

Mathes, P. G., Howard, J. K., Allen, S. H.,& Fuchs, D. (in press). Peer-assisted learn-ing strategies for first grade readers: Re-sponding to the needs of diverse learners.Reading Research Quarterly.

Mathes, P. G., Howard, J. K., Torgesen, J.K., & Edwards, P. (1997, July). Peer-as-sisted learning strategies for beginningreaders: Three experimental studies ofefficacy and feasibility. Paper presented atthe annual project director’s meeting forthe U.S. Office of Education, Office ofSpecial Education Programs, Division ofInnovation and Development, Washington,DC.

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