Why I Started Teaching Phonological Awareness
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I graduated as a speech therapist in South Africa in December 1999. I had loved my studies at the University of Pretoria, and I looked forward to making a career of helping mainly children to talk, listen, read and write.
I started at a rural junior school in the rolling hills in one of South Africa's provinces, Kwazulu Natal. I saw individual clients with stuttering and articulation issues, and I was responsible for Grade R phonics instruction.
It was this class that made me come alive. Before me every morning, I had 40 little children whose names I could hardly pronounce. My maiden name proved difficult, too. I simply became Missy.
We sang a lot. I remember they enjoyed singing Wendy Fine's 'Why can't I plant a chewing gum tree?" over and over again. I planted a piece of chewing gum right before their eyes, and we watered it to see if it would germinate.
One day, we sang 'The foolish man built his house upon the sand and the house on the sand went crash!' One wide-eyed little girl called Nomthandazo jumped up and pointed to the building where, just the previous year, they had attended crèche. "There, Missy, is the crash!"
That was my very first intimation that very many children find it difficult to distinguish between /a/ and /e/. If they could not hear the difference, I thought, how would they be able to spell it?
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, and identifying the syllables in a word. The most sophisticated — and last to develop — is called phonemic awareness.Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and playing with the sounds in spoken words.