Clinical Suggestions
The results of this training study again reinforce the importance of
including instruction in phoneme segmentation in the kindergarten reading
readiness curriculum. Although we are not suggesting that phoneme
awareness skills are the only skills necessary for success in early reading,
phoneme awareness skills are an important component of readiness for
beginning reading. Reading programs that incorporate this emphasis into
a rich oral language environment will enhance prereading instruction for
a substantial number of children.
There are a number of interesting and creative techniques in the literature
which have been used to increase phoneme awareness (see for example,
Camp, Winbury, and Zinna 1981; Liberman et al. 1980; Rosner
1975). The entertaining games used by Olofsson and Lundberg (1983) provide
many ideas. For example, in their game "Spider Web," the teacher
holds a ball of yarn and says a sound (e.g., m) followed by a word (e.g.,
ice) which, when blended with the sound, will form a new word. The
teacher tosses the ball of yarn to one of the children, but she holds onto
the end of the yarn. The child, to whom the ball is thrown, repeats each of
the two segments and then blends them together to form the new word
(mice). The teacher then produces another combination and the ball is
tossed to the next child. Each child holds the yarn in hand when tossing
the ball. This continues until a spider web is formed. When complete, a
spider song is sung after which the ball is slowly rewound with each child
repeating his word and the two original parts (see Olofsson and Lundberg
1983 for details and several more games).
Bradley and Bryant (1983, 1985) use a clever sound categorization task
to teach phoneme segmentation skills. In this activity, words are grouped
together according to rhyme, matching initial sounds, matching final
sounds, or matching middle sounds. The children are to choose one of
four pictures that does not fit a particular sound categorization grouping.
For example, after naming each picture in a rat, cat, bat, and mug series,
the child must decide which picture is the "odd-one-out," or which picture
does not belong with the others (see Bradley and Bryant 1985 for a
full description of sound categorization activities). We adapted the Bradley
and Bryant activity for group instruction by using large pictures with
magnetic tape affixed to the backs. This permitted us to display the pictures
on a magnetic board where they could be seen easily and manipulated
by all the children.
The say-it-and-move-it procedure used in this study required only
those materials that are readily available in any classroom and included
activities that can be used with groups of children (see procedures). We
began by instructing children to represent a single continuant phoneme
with a disk and systematically progressed to three-phoneme items. An
example of a say-it-and-move-it lesson will be described below, followed
by a sketch of the skill progression which we used in our study.
At the start of the lesson, each child is given the maximum number of
disks (or buttons, tiles, blocks) needed to segment items on that particular
day. Their disks are placed "on board" the sailboat or, for example, on the
clown's ears or nose, to indicate a ready and listening position (see Figures
I and 3). Disks are stored on the picture when children are not actively
segmenting an item. Typically a new item is introduced to the
group with the instructor or a child modeling the correct segmentation of
the item. For example, the instructor pronounces "it," places her finger
on a disk, moves the disk down below the line onto the arrow while saying
iiiii in a drawn-out fashion. She returns to the boat, places her finger
on another disk, and moves that disk to the arrow while pronouncing t.
The teacher repeats the item in its original blended form while running
her finger across the two disks now on the arrow (see Figure 3). The two
disks are then returned to the boat. After observing the correct model,
the children are cued that it is now their turn ("all aboard!"). The item (it)
is again pronounced by the teacher. When the children hear the teacher's
cue, "say-it-and-move-it," they place a finger on a disk and say each
sound as they move each corresponding disk to the appropriate place on
the arrow. After moving the disks, children are asked to repeat the original
blended item. The same procedure is used with single, double, and triple phoneme items. It is important to coordinate each speech segment
with the appropriate disk during segmentation. Modeling and corrective
feedback are used as needed.
The first series of say-it-and-move-it lessons instructs children to represent
single continuant sounds or a single continuent sound produced
twice (e.g., i, i). The second series to say-it-and-move-it lessons adds twophoneme
combinations (vowel-consonant). Typically a single sound (e.g.,
"i') is represented with a disk first and a two-phoneme combination, including
the first sound, follows (e.g., "it"). After the children segment
each item and move the disks, they are encouraged to "read" the disks by
sweeping a hand across the arrow and repeating the word. Segmenting
three-phoneme items is the last series of lessons included in say-it-andmove-
it. Again, a portion of each three-phoneme lesson includes the
building of words (segmenting "a," then "at," then "sat") or removing
phonemes ("sat," then "at," then "a'). Three-phoneme items beginning
with a continuant sound are introduced first (e.g., sat, sam). Words with
stop consonants in the initial position are the last items on which children
receive instruction, since these appear to be the most difficult. Noting the
difficulty of segmenting a word with a stop consonant in the initial position,
one rather clever child had a solution for the group. He said, "It's
easier to move two disks down for "ba" and one for "t" when we do "bat"
(rather than the more distorted disk-by-disk "buh ah tuh"). In fact, it may
be helpful for the teacher to point out this alternative to children who
have difficulty segmenting items with stop consonants in the initial
position.
To further establish the link between the sound-segments of speech
and alphabet letters, it may be beneficial to extend the segmentation task
by adding a grapheme to a disk, once a child has mastered that particular
grapheme-phoneme relationship. All children need not work with the
same letters or the same number of letters. Thus, segmentation instruction
can be individualized by providing more challenging tasks for those
children who have an understanding of phoneme segmentation and who
have mastered certain sound-symbol correspondences.
It is important to reiterate that our study provides additional strong
support for including segmentation training in the kindergarten curriculum.
Despite the accumulated evidence supporting the value of such
early intervention, these activities are not yet included in the majority of
our beginning reading programs. Activities that focus the child's attention
on the internal sound structure of the word, particularly those activities
that increase phoneme awareness, have the potential to increase
the child's early reading ability. It is hoped that our description of these
activities will serve as a springboard and enable teachers to include phoneme
awareness instruction in the kindergarten curriculum. No doubt
creative teachers will be able to expand on this series of instructional ideas
and develop a broad range of techniques suitable for their students.