Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education (3-8 years)
expect full mastery of phonemic awareness before formal reading instruction begins.
Phonics knowledge As young children move into more formal reading, teachers will begin to look at their ability to identify letter sounds. Initially, this can occur in informal contexts such as storybook reading (e.g. What is the beginning sound in this word? What other word in this sentence has the same beginning sound? Which of these words have the same beginning sounds? What are the other sounds in this word?). Over time, teaching and assessment will become more formal. In general, the transition to more formal approaches will occur at around 5 or 6 years of age (i.e. after preschool), when the child has a sufficient level of phonemic awareness to benefit from phonics instruction. The following are key aspects of phonics that can be assessed using printed text: • knowledge of the sounds of letters and letter clusters • ability to use analogies to identify unknown words (e.g. identify ‘sat’ if ‘cat’ is already known) • ability to use the initial sound and context to identify a word • ability to identify the initial and final sounds in a word • ability to blend sounds into words • ability to apply knowledge of letter patterns (e.g. long vowel sound in CVCe words) • ability to self-check whether an attempt is meaningful. 233