PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS & BLENDING RATIONALE
What is Phonological Awareness and Blending?
Phonological awareness (PA) refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure in a spoken word (Gillon, 2007). There is widespread agreement that PA skills such as blending words are the foundations for children learning to read and write, as children begin to understand the word’s sound structure allowing them to sound out a word when reading and writing (Otaiba, Puranik, Zilkowski, Montgomery, 2009). In order to boost the early literacy sounds of pre primary students it will be necessary to target their understanding of letter sounds and how they form a word. Blending specifically requires the child to join syllables or sounds together to produce understandable words, the ability to master this skill is highly predictive of later literacy development (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997).
Stackhouse and Wells & Development:
The psycholinguistic model of Stackhouse and Wells (1997) suggests that speech and sound disorders (SSD) can result from a breakdown in the child’s processing at different levels including input, output and/or storage of information (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). These processing systems are essential for speech production, literacy development and PA. During pre primary these skills are beginning to emerge and will benefit from targeted and specific intervention (Owens, 2012). PA requires speech processing skills of input (auditory) and output (articulatory) as well as orthographic knowledge in order to suitably develop (Stackhouse, Wells, Pascoe & Rees, 2002). Stackhouse and wells models assumes that the child receives information of different kinds (e.g. auditory, visual) about a spoken utterance or written form, remembers it and stores it in a variety of lexical representations within the lexicon, then selects and produces spoken and written words (Stackhouse, Wells, Pascoe & Rees, 2002). The pattern of a child’s performance will indicate where difficulties are arising within his or her speech processing system, therefore, PA is not independent, and often presented but rather a product of a child’s speech processing skills (Stackhouse, Wells, Pascoe & Rees, 2002). As PA develops, children begin to understand a word’s sound structure allowing them to decode/sound out a word in print (Calfee, Lindamond & Lindamond, 1973). Between the ages of 5;0 and 5;5 established PA skills for children include syllable segmentations, rhyme awareness, alliteration awareness, and phoneme isolation, with phoneme segmentations becoming established between the ages of 5;6 and 5;11 (Dodd & Gillon, 2001). In addition, between the ages of 5;0 and 6;0 typically developing children blend 3 to 4 sounds to make a word, while children between the ages of 4;0 to 5;0 blend words by onset rime or can blend given sounds into words (Dodd & Gillon, 2001).
References:
Calfee, R. C., Lindamond, P., & Lindamond, C. (1973). Acoustic-phonetic skills and reading: Kindergarten through twelfth grade. Journal of Educational Psychology, 64(3), 293.
Dodd, B., & Gillon, G. (2001). Exploring the relationship between phonological awareness, speech impairment and literacy. Advantages in Speech Language Pathology, 3(2), 139–147.
Owens, R. E. (2012). Language Development: An introduction. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.
Stackhouse, J., & Wells, B. (1997). Children’s speech and literacy difficulties: A psycholinguistic framework (Vol. 17): Whurr London
Otaiba, S., Puranik, C., Zilkowski, R., Montgomery, T. (2009). Effectiveness of early phonological awareness interventions for students with speech or language impairments. The Journal of Special Education 43(2), 107–128. Doi: 10.1177/0022466908314869
Stackhouse, J., Wells, B., Pascoe, M., & Rees, R. (2002) From Phonological Therapy to Phonological Awareness. Seminars in Speech and Language, 23(1), 27–42. doi: 10.1055/s-2002–23509
