Actividades Para Trabajar La Conciencia Fonológica Y Habilidades Fonológicas

Conciencia Fonémica en Español (Phonemic Awareness in Spanish)
Hallie Kay Yopp, Lilia Stapleton

Encouraging English-language learners to build phonemic awareness in their native language leads to gains in their English reading skills.

its cross-language transfer, and conclude with suggestions for supporting its development in Spanish.

Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is theinsight that the speech stream consists of individual sounds, or phonemes. It is the ability to attend to, and manipulate, these smallest sounds of spoken language. Students who are phonemically aware can unpack a spoken word into its constituent sounds, telling us that the spoken word fish consists of three separate sounds: /f/-/i/-/sh/. They can blend individual sounds into words; that is, theyrespond with cup when asked what word these three sounds form when combined: /k/-/u/-/p/. Matching, identifying, and deleting phonemes from spoken utterances are also indicators of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the most difficult aspect of phonological awareness—a term that encompasses awareness of phonemes and larger units of spoken language—and typically is attained after students developan awareness of rhyming words, syllables, and onsetrime units (Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988; de Manrique & Gramigna, 1984; González & González, 1993).

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iteracy in English for all students is a national goal in the United States, and children who have a primary language other than English make up a sizeable portion of the nation’s students. Recent demographic dataindicate that English-language learners (ELLs) in public pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade schools number more than 5 million, or 10.1% of total enrollment. In some states, such as California, the number of ELLs exceeds 25% of total enrollment, and in many schools and classrooms ELLs make up 100% of the student population. The primary language of the vast majority (nearly 80%) of ELL students in theUnited States is Spanish (Capps et al., 2005; National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs, 2006). With the percentage of ELLs promising to increase in the years ahead, more and more teachers and school districts will be charged with providing quality education for students who are new to the English language. A fundamental part of thateducation involves learning to read. Reading is a complex process, and many factors— linguistic, cognitive, affective, sociocultural, and political—contribute to students’ reading achievement. This article focuses on only one aspect of reading development: phonemic awareness. We begin with a definition of phonemic awareness, then discuss its role in reading for English speakers and speakers of otherlanguages, describe its development, share information on

Phonemic Awareness and Reading
Ample evidence indicates that phonemic awareness in English speakers is significantly related to success in learning to read. In fact, phonemic awareness is one of the most potent predictors of reading acquisition, more so than traditional measures of intelligence or reading readiness (Juel, Griffith, &Gough, 1986; Share, Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984; Stanovich, 1986),

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The Reading Teacher, 61(5), pp. 374–382 DOI:10.1598/RT.61.5.2

© 2008 International Reading Association ISSN: 0034-0561 print / 1936-2714 online

and a lack of phonemic awareness is related to difficulties in learning to read (Adams, 1990). Why is this ability to mentally capture the smallest sounds of speech relatedto learning to read in English? The answer lies in the nature of the written system. English has an alphabetic orthography; it maps speech to print at the level of sounds. That is, the symbols we use to write in English largely represent the individual sounds of the spoken language. The letters c-a-t, for example, stand for /k/-/a/-/t/, the sounds of the word that usually refers to a furry...