We did not observe many instances of teachers explicitly teaching skills to improve learners’ phonemic awareness.30 Of the 15 teachers, about a third appeared to incorporate phonemic elements into their teaching.
In most cases where learners made errors in their de-coding of words, the teachers simply supplied the correct word, which the learner usually repeated and continued on with the next piece of text.
| L: | histo, histo … | |
| T: | Historic, yeah. | |
| L: | Uum … | |
| T: | But the larger word is? | |
| L: | Historic? | |
| T: | Yes, historic hotel, great. |
In contrast, the following example illustrates a teacher who taught not only the initial (or onset) phonemes, but also the subsequent parts of the word in order to decode it in its entirety.
| L: | …that was … ob, ob … | |
| T: | Oh yeah, that one. But just picking out part, you know, looking at the beginning, the middle and the end of the word … | |
| L: | obsince, is it? | |
| T: | Well, you’ve got the ob OK, and the s, now what about looking here … | |
| L: | s, e? | |
| T: | Yeah, I think you just about said it there. What about that part of the word? | |
| L: | scene … | |
| T: | Yeah a sc and a, yeah … | |
| L: | ob … scene | |
| T: | OK. | |
| L: | Obscene right. | |
| T: | Yeah. |
This teacher focused on the final sounds of ‘didn’t’ in the course of doing a spelling test.
| T: | Didn’t, he didn’t know how to do it, didn’t. | |
| L: | Did. Did. | |
| T: | Good, that d, that’s great. Did [long pause[ he did know, that’s good, now we want didn’t, didn’t. On the end here, just keep going, didn’t. | |
| L: | n | |
| T: | [intonation – agrees] And one more letter, didn’t, what can you hear at the end? You say it. | |
| L: | T [writes didn’t] | |
| T: | That’s right, didn’t. Excellent. |
30 Phonemic awareness is the insight that spoken words are made up of a sequence of phonemes (the smallest units of sounds).