PA and Reading Development

What role does phonological awareness and phonemic awareness play in reading development?

Student who can manipulate the sounds of our language, particularly through segmenting and blending sounds, will likely have an easier time mapping those sounds onto the letters of our alphabet (once they have learned which letters can represent which sounds and understand the alphabetic principle).

PA and Phonics

What is the difference between phonological awareness and phonics skills?

Phonological awareness activities are activities that can be completed at the aural/oral level- you do not need to "see" anything to participate in these. Phonics skills come into play when you introduce letters into the activity. Oftentimes phonological (including phonemic) awareness activities are combined with letter to facilitate the alphabetic principle.

Strategies to Promote PA

What are some strategies teachers can use to promote students' phonological and phonemic awareness?

Engaging students in language play through songs, rhymes, and read aloud helps children hear the bigger sound units in our language.  Having students build words based on common phonograms (i.e., -it, -and, and -ed) can support students' understanding of onset-rime. Blending and segmenting activities build phonemic awareness. Specific activities, such as the use of Elkonin Boxes, support these as well. Picture cards are extremely useful in helping students manipulate language. Here is link to other phonemic awareness activities: http://phonologicalawareness.org/6.html.

Levels of PA

What are the various levels of phonological awareness?

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness 1.0

Objective 1 requires you to understand phonological and phonemic awareness. At the most basic level, phonological awareness is an umbrella term under which phonemic awareness falls. 

Phonological awareness refers to the awareness that oral language is comprised of smaller units (complete thoughts, words, syllables, and individual sounds). 

The individual sounds are referred to as phonemes. The awareness and manipulation of phonemes is a specific type of phonological awareness called phonemic awareness. 
Both phonological and phonemic awareness are speaking and listening skills. You do not need to see anything to demonstrate phonological and phonemic awareness. 

The Foundations of Reading (90) MTEL covers ten objectives. The specific objectives and the percentage of points associated with each can be found here: Foundations of Reading Test Objectives.

 

The test is largely organized by objective, with cluster of questions related to a specific objective. Objective 9 (Understand multiple approaches to reading instruction) is more of a "catch-all" objective in which the test makers can integrate information from various objectives and apply them to instructional situations. Objective 10 (Prepare an organized, developed analysis on a topic related to one or more of the following:  foundations of reading development; development of reading comprehension; reading assessment and instruction.) are the open response questions.