Phonemic Awareness Literature Review

The title of the article is called “The Stop and Go Phonemic Awareness Game: Providing Modeling, Practice, and Feedback” and it is written by Jill Howard Allor, Kristin A. Gansle, and R. Kenton Denny. The authors define phonemic awareness as “the ability to recognize the individual sounds within spoken words” and it is a critical skill needed to be successful with reading acquisition (Allor, Gansle, & Denny, 2006). The authors discuss the importance of explicitly teaching phonemic awareness skills to children who are struggling with reading. One purpose of the study was to track the progress of a select group of students using a curriculum-based measurement, called the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). The other purpose …show more content…
The intervention was the Stop and Go Game, which was designed to help students with sound blending and segmentation. The length of each session varied for each student. The game materials included letter cards with two vowels and eight consonants, a laminated paper with a traffic light, a game board, and a game piece. Letters were labeled as stop sounds like, /t/, and go sounds like, /s/. This concept of stop and go sounds was explained to the students in the beginning. The game was played by the student choosing a letter card and having to place it in the correct location, either it was a stop sound so it was placed next to the red light on the traffic light or it was a go sound so it was placed next to the green light on the traffic light. The student and tutor would take turns choosing the cards. The student would get reinforcement if they were correct and feedback if they were incorrect. If the player got it right, he or she was able to move the game piece on the board. After enough cards were selected, the tutor would then make a word with the cards and ask the child to help her sound out the word. This task was designed to help get the child to blend sounds correctly. The task for segmentation involved the tutor saying a word using the letters chosen and having the child say the word slowly, saying one sound at a time. The child then had to build the word …show more content…
For one of the suggestions, I like the idea of the Stop and Go Game. I think it is a great intervention and I would use it for isolated sound recognition and segmentation practice. The Stop and Go Game would be played with letter cards and the child would be required to say the sound correctly and label the letter as a stop sound or a go sound on the traffic light. Then after all the letters have been selected, the clinician would pick a word from the letters and the child would have to separate the sounds in the word. They can do this task by counting on their fingers. To increase difficulty, the child would have to choose the correct letters that make up the word. I would continue adding more vowels and consonants to the letter cards to increase the difficulty and length of the words. This suggestion would be for children starting in kindergarten and after the child gains some phonemic awareness, difficulty can be increased. This game also has a game board and game pieces. The child would be reinforced every time they are correct and would be able to move the game piece on the board. After the client chooses a word, the child would be required to segment the word into phonemes and then would be rewarded with a move on the game board if they got it correct. If they did not, the clinician would model it for the child and the child would