Fox, Phonemic Awareness; What is it? How much time should we spend learning it?

 For this week's deeper dive discussion, I was the leader. I focused on phonemic awareness and chapter 4 of the Tompkins text. Coming from a background in communication sciences and disorders, I found it easy to draw connections between my past experiences and knowledge to what I am currently learning as a future educator. The Yopp and Yopp article that I chose to go with the Tompkins chapter allowed for some great insight into phonemic awareness and how important it is to focus on it as a teacher. As I mentioned in class, there is a common misconception about language learning and phonemic awareness that it is the job of a literacy teacher, reading specialist, or an SLP to focus on these topics. Another misconception is that phonemic awareness is not a topic that needs to be learned before learning how to read and write and understanding all of the concepts included in phonemic awareness. From both the article and the textbook, we get a deeper understanding and concise view/description of phonemic awareness and its importance to the language and literacy learning process. I chose the Yopp and Yopp article because it provides detailed reports of these concepts and activities that you could use to teach phonemic awareness. A quote from the article I found interesting and discussed during my deeper dive was related to time spent learning phonemic awareness. "The duration of instruction was anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes per session: in some studies, instruction occurred daily; in other studies, the instruction was less frequent, occurring two or three times a week… Unfortunately, time allocations do not consider individual differences among learners." (Yopp& Yopp, 2000 p. 134) Before reading this article, I had not considered the amount of time that actually needs to be spent focusing on phonemic awareness and honing in on those skills. I also found it interesting that the time spent learning phonemic awareness was not consistent across schools, as well as how little time is spent working on these skills.

 Phonemic awareness is the awareness that the speech stream consists of a sequence of sounds- specifically phonemes, the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in communication. (Yopp & Yopp, 2000 p. 130) After understanding this definition, you should be able to realize that phonemic awareness is crucial and essential to the language learning process. It is the building block to learning and understanding language. Suppose educators only spend the bare minimum amount of time on these concepts. In that case, I believe this could cause significant issues and even delays in students' language and literacy learning process. Also, if phonemic awareness is not covered enough or in-depth, students will struggle with developing meta-linguistic awareness. Meta-linguistic awareness is the ability to recognize and control one's language. If students are not given the proper tools to build their language capacities, they will struggle with their language and have control and understanding over it. As a future educator with a background in speech-language pathology, I want to be a good educator and provide my students with the correct tools so they can be successful. I will be sure to spend enough time on phonemic awareness and other language-learning skills, including fluency, spelling, reading, and writing. I will also ensure that I am going at a decent pace so that students can understand each concept entirely and not get "left behind" by my moving too fast or not spending enough time on something.