Description

Phonological awareness is an overall term that refers to the phonological or sound system that comprises oral language. It is critical for reading success and when a child’s awareness of the phonological structure is evaluated, the results can help predict later reading ability. It is a child’s knowledge that sentences are comprised of words that have syllables and then sounds. Phonological awareness skills should be mastered by approximately 1st grade. However, many children in elementary, middle school, and even high school lack effective phonological awareness.

There is a developmental hierarchy of phonological awareness as skills increase in complexity and build on each other to maximize reading success. Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness and refers to a child’s knowledge of individual sounds.

There are eleven components of this Phonological Awareness Progress Monitoring Tool. Teachers, speech-language pathologists, and literacy specialists should administer this data check or informal progress monitoring tool to children prior to beginning targeted intervention services in this area. It is intended primarily for elementary & middle school age children with the intent of improving weak reading skills so that children and adolescents CAN read grade level material.

The entire tool may be administered or you can select the portion(s) of the tool that you would like to assess based on previous data that you may have. This tool has various types of questions related to rhyming, phoneme isolation, sentence segmentation, syllable segmentation, phoneme segmentation, syllable blending, phoneme blending, compound word deletion, phoneme deletion, phoneme addition, and phoneme substitution.

After several speech-language therapy or intervention sessions, read aloud the same sections previously administered in this informal assessment tool. This may be used for children receiving speech-language therapy or Response to Intervention (RTI) for phonological awareness or pre-literacy needs.

You should record the score on each form. You may also write the data on the summative progress monitoring form. This Phonological Awareness tool will provide information about the skills children can and/or can not do on the date(s) of the informal evaluation. The results can assist in future speech/language therapy session planning, reading/dyslexia therapy, or to make decisions for students in the reading RTI process in the public school system.

Literacy definitions and the Hierarchy of Phonological Awareness are provided.