Annotated Bibliography
Allor, J.H., Fuchs, D., &, Mathes, P.G., (2001). Do students with and without lexical retrieval
weaknesses respond differently to instruction? Journal Of Learning Disabilities, volume 34
(number 3) pp. 264-275.
This is a research article about the effect of lexical retrieval ability on learning to read. A
research study was conducted to see if phonemic awareness training was changed due to
a student’s lexical retrieval ability. The authors stated that a student with low lexical
retrieval ability and low phonemic awareness ability will have the most serious reading
disabilities. They used the term “double deficit hypothesis” to describe these students.
Their conclusions included the statement that students with lexical retrieval difficulties
may benefit from techniques specifically tailored to these weaknesses.
I found this article to be helpful in my search to find ways to help my students who are
struggling with phonemic awareness. I had not heard of lexical retrieval before. I would
like to do more research in this area to see what techniques could be used to help a
student if this is what will help the student with reading difficulties. I could also include
this research and activities I develop from it, in my Professional Development plan.
Allor, J.H., Gansle, K.A., & Denny, R. K., (2006). The stop and go phonemic awareness
game:providing modeling, practice, and feedback. Preventing School Failure, volume
50, (number 4), pp. 23-30.
The authors of this article describe how important phonemic awareness training is for
reading success. They use the DIBELS assessment to identify kindergarten students who
are experiencing difficulty with phonemic awareness and then prescribe an intervention
done by a paraprofessional for twenty-six minutes a day. The results of the study showed
significant improvement in all of the students at the end of the study.
I learned about a game called Stop and Go from this article. It was the intervention used
by the tutor in this study. The game was conducted on a one on one basis. It was
designed to provide students with opportunities to practice blending and segmenting. I
liked this game because it used letter cards to help the student with blending and
segmenting. In my Professional Development Plan, I want to find and teach more
approaches to teaching phonemic awareness that would have more hands on activities to
help the struggling students in my class and from the other early childhood teachers in
my school this seems to be a need in all the classes.
Blischak, D.M., Shah, S.D., Lombardino, L.J., & Chiarella, K. (2004). Effects of phonemic
awareness instruction on the encoding skills of children with severe speech impairment,
volume 26, (number 21/22), pp. 1295-1304.
This article reviews the research that has been done on the need for explicit instruction in
phonemic awareness for students with all kinds of learning disabilities. Children with
severe speech impairment can also benefit from this training. The research questions
posed by the authors included questions about instruction in phoneme-grapheme
correspondence prior to the introduction of phonemic awareness tasks and are the effects
of instruction in the encoding of CVC pseudo- and real words maintained following
termination of instruction.
The results of the study showed that students with SSI do benefit from the phonemic
awareness instruction given. I would like to try an intervention of this type with a student
I have with SSI. The method is clearly presented in this article and I would like to
include this in my Professional Development plan.
Bradley, B.A., Jones, J.,(2007). Sharing alphabet books in early childhood classrooms. The
Reading Teacher, volume 60, (number 5), pp. 452-463.
This article is about the importance of establishing a firm foundation for literacy in young
children. This is combined with the importance of presenting alphabet knowledge to
young children. The authors describe an exploratory study about how early childhood
teachers use alphabet books as read-alouds in teaching young children about literacy.
Some of the ideas discussed in the article include the importance of knowing the
alphabet, letter shape knowledge, letter name knowledge, letter sound knowledge, and
letter writing ability. Another part of the article tells about the use of alphabet books by
parents to teach their young children about the alphabet. In addition the article describes
how early childhood teachers use alphabet books in the classroom.
Since the Pre-K teachers at my school indicated a need to help some of their student gain
a better knowledge of alphabet letter names, I thought this article would be helpful in
writing my Professional Development plan. One aspect of the article that I learned is that
the style used by the teacher to read the alphabet book has a lot to do with how much the
components of the alphabet are taught in reading the book. I would need to plan an
activity that would demonstrate the best way to share the book with young children.
Craig, S.A., (2003). The effects of an adapted interactive writing intervention of kindergarten
children’s phonological awareness, spelling, and early reading development. Reading
Research Quarterly, volume 38, (number 4), pp. 438-440.
This article is a summary of a dissertation written in 2003. It won an outstanding
dissertation award from the IRA in 2003. The purpose of the study was to examine how
metalinguistic games can be used to teach phonological awareness and alphabetic
knowledge to young children. It also describes the use of interactive writing in this
instruction.
I learned from this article that interactive writing is important in order to give a context to
what children are learning about letters and sounds. The writing is given an authentic
purpose when it is done in response to what the students have read. The article confirms
what I have already learned about the importance of phonemic awareness and the
connection between reading and writing and how writing can improve phonemic
awareness.
Gerber, A., Klein, E. R., (2004). A speech-language approach to early reading success.
Teaching Exceptional Children, volume 36, (number 6), pp.8-14.
This article describes how using information gained from speech pathologists work with
young children with articulation disorders expanded into a program of intervention with
struggling readers without articulation problems. Research shows that there is a strong
relationship between phonological awareness and acquisition of reading skills and the
program developed by these authors has produced significant improvement in reading
skills of children trained in this program.
This article gives a very practical and easily implemented way to improve the phonemic
awareness of young children. It can be used in Professional Development to help
teachers find another way to differentiate instruction for students having difficulty
learning how to hear individual sounds in words. I have several students in my class that
I would like to try some of these strategies with. I think the use of the picture sound
symbols and the stories related to the sound would engage my struggling students and the
activities will help them gain the level of phonemic awareness they need for reading. I
think other teachers would benefit from this strategy and I will include it in my
Professional Development plan.
Manyak, P.C., (2008). Phonemes in use: multiple activities for a critical process. The Reading
Teacher, volume 61, (number 8), pp. 659-662.
In this article, not only is the emphasis put on the teaching of phonemic awareness but
also the use of vocal gestures is described in helping students in this critical area of
reading instruction. The article then describes a variety of activities involving
segmenting and blending within the context of reading and writing that can be used to
teach phonemic awareness.
The activities in this article would fit right into my idea of more hands on activities to
teach alphabet and phonemic awareness. I would like to try them and if possible include
them in my Professional Development plan. I think other teachers at my school would
also be interested in them. The materials used to teach the games could be included in a
make and take session in my overall plan.
McGee, L.M., Ukrainetz, T.A., (2009). Using scaffolding to teach phonemic awareness in
preschool and kindergarten. The Reading Teacher, volume 62, (number 7), pp. 599-603.
The purpose of this article is to provide teachers with a successful method to scaffold
instruction of phonemic awareness to give children feedback as they learn to isolate and
manipulate sounds in words. The authors begin the article with a description of a teacher
attempting to have a student tell what the first sound in a word for a given picture is. The
students in the narrative are clearly not getting the idea. The article continues with a
detailed description of how to scaffold the lesson in order to complete the task. Three
levels of scaffolding are included in the article.
I have faced this same dilemma in my classroom with children who just could not get the
idea of “first sound in a word”. This article will be a help to me with these students and I
think it will be beneficial to share with my kindergarten team and the pre-k team when I
do my Professional Development.
Norman, K.A., Calfee, R. C., (2004). Tile test: a hands-on approach for assessing phonics in the
early grades. The Reading Teacher, volume 58, (number1), pp. 42-52.
This article describes an efficient, flexible, and clinical way to assess a child’s
understanding of the English orthographic system. This understanding is essential to
reading success. The assessment is hands-on and interactive. This Tile Test allows the
teacher to see and hear what students know and how they know it and also provides
feedback for instruction. The emphasis in this article is on understanding the speech
sounds and not just rote memory. The hands on use of letter tiles reveals their ability to
identify and represent phonemes. The authors also include in the article a website to get
complete instructions and materials to conduct the Tile Test with students.
In this article the areas covered in the Tile Test include, letters and sounds, words,
spelling, metalinguistic questions, sight words and sentences. This test has been shown
to be reliable. It can be administered in a short time period and materials are easily
created.
This test is a new one to me and it sounds like it could be very useful. I intend to go to
the website and view the complete test. I will try it out to see if it could be part of my
Professional Development plan.
Roush, B.E., (2005). Drama rhymes: an instructional strategy. The Reading Teacher, volume
58, (number 6), pp. 584-587.
The author of this article explains that children no longer come to school unable to recite
or sing the simplest nursery rhymes. She states that the speaking and listening skills of
children have deteriorated. Her focus in this article is in using nursery rhymes to give
young children an important first step toward the grasp of literacy and number skills. The
activities she shares in her article include active participation in acting out the nursery
rhymes.
I know children enjoy acting out the nursery rhymes and I do it in my class whenever
possible. What I learned that was new was the way the author described how she added
understanding to the rhyme by building background using pictures, videos, and real
objects. She includes a list of these items for one rhyme, Hickory Dickory Dock. This is
a very useful article to provide ways to help children learn to identify rhyming words.