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thing that can be taught.

C Most successful first-grade readers can’t count the syllables in a word.

D Phonemic awareness can be taught deliberately and learned.

Answer

Choice D is the correct response. If phonemic awareness were not teachable, there would be a great
deal more illiteracy in the United States.

Mastering rhyme and alliteration will make the phonological concepts of onset and rime more
accessible to your students, but experts recommend swinging past sentence segmentation and
syllable segmentation on the way to onset and rime. Such segmentation lessons lend themselves
to kinesthetic learning, as you may ask your students to clap, slap, snap, or hop for each word in a
sentence or for each syllable in a name or word.

The activities listed above—poems, finger plays, etc.—are not done simply to take up time or
because kids like them, although the former means you can squeeze lessons into transitions during
the school day, and the latter is just plain fortuitous. When you’ve determined from some form of
assessment the type of lesson your students need, you then choose the type of phonemic awareness
activity that will facilitate your teaching objective.

Make sure that your instructional methods address specific goals--they need to be explicit and
systematic. See below for an example.