Reaching Middle School Quantitative & Qualitative Lexile Levels of 925L>? Taking a closer look at teaching Phonemic Awareness (PA)

By Don Allen, Journal of A Black Teacher (2024)
Lexile Level explanation - parent guide (MDE)

In fact, phonemic awareness development might be quite tough for underserved students in the Twin Cities and even within Black and Brown communities due to a generational achievement gap and inequity that exist in our educational systems. Many students in these communities come from generations of individuals who have not been in a place to support their own students due to socio-economic barriers: underfunded schools, large student-to-teacher ratios, and a lack of early childhood education opportunities. Often, this gap leaves parents unable to provide the resources needed for their children's literacy development. Phonemic awareness perhaps is the most critical requisite for early reading, dependent on rich, language-based environments that may not have been consistently provided to under-served students at home or via school experiences. Other disadvantages that can also counter these students include poverty, unstable housing, and under-resourced schools, which plunge them into schools already lagging behind in literacy skills. In this respect, the generational achievement gap continues because each new cohort of students struggles to catch up without adequate intervention or support.

Phonemic awareness is considered a foundational skill for early literacy, involving the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. Its importance extends beyond elementary age and is relevant for middle school students who are beginning to engage with complex texts and academic expectations. The efficiency of word decoding ability is significantly related to their success. Understanding the significance of phonemic awareness for middle school students provides valuable insights for educators, parents, and policymakers aiming to support adolescent literacy. This article explores the importance of phonemic awareness for middle schoolers in the Twin Cities, the challenges they face, and effective ways to reinforce this skill.

PA is important as it helps students decode new words, hence improving reading fluency and comprehension. At this stage, they start transitioning from learning to reading to reading to learning. Their texts become more challenging with advanced vocabularies that include multisyllabic words. According to Kilpatrick, a student with good phonemic awareness skills can decode complicated words by breaking them down into their constituent phonemes, hence making them less complex and easy to deal with. Without this ability, students can easily be challenged by unfamiliar words, thus affecting comprehension and limiting academic success.

Middle school students face higher demands because they are supposed to engage in informational texts and academic vocabulary that require more sophisticated decoding skills. Phonemic awareness will thus allow them to be able to handle these challenges with ease. Indeed, studies have indicated that students who develop phonemic awareness during and throughout their school years are likely to perform better in reading comprehension and critical thinking. The brain-awareness in middle school students is an important foundation that is sometimes rarely developed within literacy lessons at this level of schooling. Most educators develop the belief that phonemic awareness is mastered during elementary school. However, middle school students, especially underrepresented and low-income students, may fail to completely develop these foundational skills at an early age of schooling. As a result, these students are often left to struggle with decoding and may become frustrated, disengage, and develop an aversion to reading.

Two huge challenges involve increased text complexity. Middle school texts begin to contain multisyllabic words, irregular spellings, and academic language that are difficult for a person without strong phonemic awareness to decode. According to Moats, students who lack these skills guess at words, an activity that grossly compromises reading comprehension. This often begets a cycle of poorly performing low self-esteem individuals who are further discouraged from reading. (See examples of Text Complexity here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cdrXZHMM9n-uP9UkyYuVao8K6mu3ebemoRHeNRMq_q4/edit?usp=sharing)

To extend, students at the junior high school level are at an age when they can be prone to social and emotional issues that may also aggravate reading problems. Teenagers tend to be more comparative with their peers than younger students, so many poor readers at this age feel ashamed or embarrassed. The tendency is for these students to engage in the avoidance of reading tasks, which, of course, exacerbates rather than ameliorates their phonemic awareness deficits (Kilpatrick, 2015, p. 58).

With the importance of phonemic awareness among middle school students, teachers should adopt certain approaches to help develop it better. The application can be done by integrating phonemic awareness into other subject areas. For example, an English Language Arts teacher can have students identify difficult vocabulary by segmenting it by phonemes and syllables. This will not only enhance their decoding but also allow them to understand the meanings of those words within the text of a sentence or paragraph (Moats, 2020, p. 49).

There is also a chance for phonemic awareness teaching with technology. Computer programs that have speech recognition and auditory feedback allow students to practice phoneme manipulations in a low-stakes environment. Such tools are especially valuable for students who can be too shy about their reading abilities to practice phoneme manipulation with a partner or in a small group—they can practice privately and get immediate feedback.

Another effective approach is creating a classroom environment that encourages talk about language and its structure. Middle school students can think in more abstract ways, discussing how sounds create words and how those words work in various contexts. When teachers weave phonemic awareness into the everyday talking of the classroom, the process of decoding becomes less mysterious, and students can take more responsibility for their own reading development.

PA is not solely bound to the domain of early readers, but it is a present and clear component of literacy throughout middle school. As students move progressively into more and more complex texts, their ability to decode unfamiliar words serves as a dividing line between academic success and failure. If middle school English teachers acknowledge the sustained relevance of phonemic awareness and then subsequently offer concentrated practices to build it, we can help middle school students acquire what they need to be accomplished independent readers. By doing so, they actually prepare them to embrace the challenges presented by increasingly complex academic expectations.

References

Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Wiley.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers (3rd ed.). Brookes Publishing.

Stanovich, K. E., & Siegel, L. S. (2019). Phonological processing in reading disabled children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81(1), 123–134.