Reading is a rather important part of the further education and forming of the personality of young children. If a child has no reading skills, consequently he or she can not adequately communicate and develop as far as education is based on writing and reading skills.
Reading, in its turn, consists of several elements some of which are to be discussed in this paper. Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction are the initial stages for every child to start acquiring reading skills, and these are namely the points we are going to examine in this essay. The paper will be based upon the National Reading Panel (NRP) report that, according to the program of Congress, studied a lot of research in the field of reading instruction so that to increase the number of children with well-developed reading skills.
To start with, let us state that phonemic awareness can be taught and learned. But to understand its importance it will not be out of place to define phonemic awareness: “Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds—phonemes—in spoken words.” (NRP, p. 1) Thus, it can be taught to children by means of examples and practical exercises, and it can undoubtedly be learned by children who get interested in reading and who are attentive in class.
Phonemic awareness, besides everything else, helps children in learning to read. As far as it is concerned with identifying separate sounds, it helps children to identify them in words, associate with certain graphical symbols, and read with proper pronunciation. Consequently, spelling is also affected by phonemic awareness because children are to memorize not only the sound form of a phoneme but its graphical representation. To make the phonemic awareness instruction more effective, it is better to carry out this course using examples from sounds of the language combined with the letters of the alphabet.
This will allow children to learn sound and graphical forms of the phonemes and succeed in reading and spelling. Needless to say, that is better to teach children using one or two approaches to phoneme manipulations that are the easiest. This allows children to get a good command of the approaches and not to be confused about which to choose. Besides, children get more profound knowledge, while if numerous approaches are taught none of them is considered in enough detail (NRP, pp. 1 – 53).
As the logical continuation of phonemic awareness, phonic instruction is taught to children as the guide to the relations between graphemes and phonemes. This instruction teaches children to see the above-mentioned relations and use them to read and write words and further on more complicated units of language like sentences and texts. The use of systematic phonic instruction programs proved to be the most effective way of teaching in phonic instruction.
Systematic programs teach sets of relations of sounds and letters and are properly structured. Moreover, systematic programs presuppose the usage of books, practical exercises, and special assignments for children that get more and more complicated as children acquire more and more reading and spelling skills. According to the research data, children from kindergartens or schools where such programs are implemented have better reading and writing skills.
The same is true about the skills in reading comprehension that are at a much higher level when children are taught systematically. Furthermore, explicit phonic instruction and systematic programs are of use for children of all social groups irrespective of their families’ income levels. Thus, phonic instruction in state-owned and private schools provides greater access to initial education for all social groups and layers (NRP, pp. 89 – 145).
Systematic programs and explicit phonic instruction are of great help in teaching the students with potential reading problems or those who already experience them. This can be explained by the fact that these programs presuppose the use of a multidirectional methodology that can influence any student, whether successful or not. If implemented at early stages, in kindergartens or first grades f schools, these programs are most effective as far as they presuppose teaching children the shape and sound form of letters as well as their names and all possible combinations of relations between the letters and sounds learned.
Another advantage of systematic phonic instruction is that it teaches how to use the already familiar relations of sounds and letters to read and write simultaneously with the study of new relations (NRP, pp. 89 – 145).
It goes without saying that phonic instruction is not the entire reading program. The whole program, if properly structured and balanced, includes subsequently phonemic awareness, phonic instruction, fluency and vocabulary development, and text comprehension. Compare to other parts of the balanced reading program, phonemic awareness and phonic instruction can be called the most important ones as they are initial ones and form the basis for all other elements. But the importance of vocabulary development and text comprehension should not be underestimated, as far as the exclusive skills in phonemic awareness and in reading letters and words is worth little in comparison to the ability to read texts and books which is of vital importance for further education (NRP, pp. 89 – 145).
To conclude, let us state that in this paper we managed to disclose the importance of phonemic awareness and phonic instruction in the further education and information of initial reading and writing skills of the beginning readers. Phonemic awareness is fundamental for identifying and learning sounds, while phonic instruction provides children with ideas of interrelation between sounds – phonemes – and their graphical representations – graphemes.
References
National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications on Reading Instruction. Reports of the Subgroups.