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Phonemic Awareness Assessment
Phonemic awareness assessment: Future difficulties
Phonemic awareness assessment is vital in the development of young children who are having difficulties in one or more of the basic areas. Research has found that adult non-readers are unable to consistently perform almost all phonemic awareness tasks. Very few adult non-readers possess even the most basic phonemic awareness ability (National Institute for Literacy). As with normally developing children, phonemic awareness of non-reading disabled adults improves as reading ability improves. It continues to develop until decoding skills are established. However, adult poor readers who report having had difficulty learning to read as children show persistent poor phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness assessment: Evaluation
Phonemic awareness assessment evaluation begins with children as young as five. Risk factors and indicators that might indicate a need for assessment include the following:
Pre-K to Kindergarten
- Failure recognizing rhymes
- Slow developing normal speech
- Difficulty remembering names of friends and peers
End of 1st Grade
- Struggle spelling common words
- Fear of reading aloud
- Difficulty blending sounds
- Difficulty sounding out words
- Inability to apply phonics (the mechanics of sounds within words) to reading and spelling
End of 2nd Grade
- Difficulty correctly spelling previously studied and commonly seen words
- Fear of reading aloud
- Unable to sound out words, including multi-syllable words
- Struggles recalling facts and details
Difficulty in any of these areas at any age may be overcome by strengthening the child’s ability to function in any, or all, of the following: phoneme isolation (recognizing individual sounds of words); phoneme categorization (recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words); phoneme identity (recognizing the common sound in different words); phoneme blending (listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word); phoneme segmentation (breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound).
Phonemic Awareness Assessment — There is hope
- Phonemic awareness assessments are generally valuable in the early-reading years if a child is struggling in one or more sound related areas. If your child is struggling with any of the above difficulties, your next step is to schedule a complete cognitive skills assessment, including a phonemic awareness assessment. This can be done at a
- . Once we’ve identified your child’s hidden skill weaknesses, we can structure an effective one-on-one training program that meets the specific needs of your child. We’ve helped thousands of children around the nation reach their true learning and reading potential.