10 Principles for Teaching Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is an essential skill that lays a foundation for success in reading. Excerpted and adapted from the third edition of Speech to Print by Louisa Cook Moats, Ed.D., this post offers 10 basic principles for effectively teaching phonological awareness to your students.

Follow a progression of phonological skill development and recognize the rela­tive difficulty of each task. The goal of instruction is progressive differentiation of the internal details of the spoken word for deep, accurate representation in memory.

Focus students’ attention on speech sounds as separate from letters. Work with phonemes, not letters, until you’re sure students can “tune into” speech. Describe phonemes as the “parking spots” that letters and letter groups will match, once attention is turned to print. Transition to working with letters as appropriate.

Encourage mouth awareness. Phonemes are speech gestures as well as speech sounds. Ask students to look in a mirror to determine whether their mouths are open or closed and whether they are using their tongue, teeth, or lips when they make the sound.

Include all English phonemes in the instruction. All phonemes can be taught, including all vowel sounds (such as /ʊ/ in foot) and sounds represented by digraphs (e.g., as /tʃ/ in itch or as /ð/ in that).

Think multisensory or multimodal. Involve students’ hands, eyes, bodies, and mouths whenever possible.

Keep it brief. A few quick activities—about 5 to 10 minutes—a day for 12 to 20 weeks are all that most young students need to improve phonological awareness. Older students with reading problems may need daily practice within their literacy lessons for several years.

Use the I do-we do-you do method. Show students what you want them to do [I do]. Practice together [we do]. Then let students take turns while you supervise [you do].

Give immediate corrective feedback. For instance, if a student gives a letter name instead of a sound, then explain the difference to the student and elicit the correct response.

Use letters and graphemes to represent sounds as soon as young students have a clear concept of what they represent. Letters reinforce phoneme aware­ness and support it once students have learned to attend to sounds.

Keep going. Continue to include work on advanced phoneme awareness, to a high stan­dard of proficiency, until students no longer experience lags in reading or spelling.

Use these 10 principles as guidelines as you teach phonological awareness skills to your students. And for a strong foundation of language essentials that will enhance the way you teach, get the bestselling book behind today’s blog post!