If you move on to the next task, the segmentation, as I told you already, this is the counterpart of the former task. This time you say while Ming needs to know about the phonemes of the language, the little sound of English. And so she will say words, and what you have to do is to tell her, or tell him, how to divide a word into smaller chunks. So you can have a word like 'story', now you can ask the children to divide the word into syllables, and the syllables are going to be 'stor ree'. 'dragonfly', which leads to 'dra gun fly'. 'alligator', leading to 'a li ga tor'. You can also obviously work with onsets in rime, (as in) in any task. And also with phoneme, 'bird' is 'b uh d'. 'fish' is 'f' 'i' 'sh'. Let's move onto the next task, the deletion task. You can introduce this task by saying Ming is progressing; she's doing much better in English but sometimes she says word in a funny way, and she's adding; she's saying too many things at the beginning of the word, at the end of the word, or in the middle of the word. Now, be aware that deleting a phoneme in the middle of the word is more difficult compared to the end of the word, which is the easiest, and the beginning of the word, which is in between the two others. So for syllables, again Ming said 'unhappy' when she meant to say 'happy'. What do you need to take away? 'Quickly', when she wanted to (say) 'quick', you need to take away the 'ly'. 'pilot', when she wants to say 'lot', and you need to take away the 'pi'. For sounds again, for phonemes, sorry, she meant to say 'eat' but she said 'meat', What do you need to take away? The 'm'. 'plan' as she wants to say 'pan', That's in the middle of the word so the 'l' should be removed. 'boat', when Ming meant to say 'oat' and 'b' should be taken away. Let's move on to substitution. Here you can say that meaning sometimes mixes up words and that's you children, the children, your children are going to help her. Again, for example, Ming intended to say 'bat' but she replaced 'b' with 'p'. What did she want to say? 'Pat'. And here again, you can mix up words with pseudowords. You can say Ming said 'dack', but should have said 'b' instead of 'd'. What word did Ming intend to say? 'Back'. Let's move on to the next phonological task, the fusion. Now you can say that Ming is finding (it) very hard to say two words and can only say the first sound of each word. Can the children tell you, one sound Ming would make by joining the first bit of two words, (as in) in' bigger animal', 'b' and 'a' which leads to 'ba'. 'nice orange', 'n', 'o', that's 'no'. 'small island', 's', and 'i', that's 'si'. Let's move on to the inversion task, the more complex, which you can use with adolescents, and even adults. You can now see that Ming is reversing the two sounds of words, the two first sounds of words when she says two successive words. For example she meant to say 'big roo'f, but she reverted the first two phonemes or sounds. What did she say? What did she mean to say? What did she actually say? And so you take 'big roo'f and you inverse the two first phoneme and it is 'rig boof'. Another few examples, because this is a complicated task, 'play bad'. She said 'blay pad'. 'poor thing'. She said 'thor ping'. 'long time'. She said 'tong lime'. As you can see the possibilities are endless and again, you can do this with syllables, onset/rime, phoneme, and you can do easier or more complex activity depending on the abilities and the age of the children you are working with. The second point is that it's very preferrable, and as you can see in the film, to use colored counters or objects, whatever objects you can find, be it lids from bottles, or even stones, or little sticks of wood, to teach phonological awareness. Ideally what you should have, but it's not mandatory, is three different colors for three different objects. One is representing the syllables, one color is representing the syllables, and then you would have two shades, two tones of the same color, let's say blue for the onset and the rime. And then you would have possibly the favorite color of your child to represent the phonemes. And remember, this is a link to multisensory, this is really a multisensory task, because if you give them counters they can then use the counter to link the auditory and visual modalities to the manual- kinaesthetic modality. This is going to help them a lot to do phonological awareness tasks. When you're teaching phonological and phonemic, it's also important to introduce the alphabet. And the third point is it's a very simple aid is to have at your disposal, a wooden or plastic alphabet which the child can feel and manipulate. The tactile sense will reinforce the visual sense, where again you are introducing the manual kinaesthetic modality to the visual modality. So get the children in the class to copy the letters of the alphabet in order to stimulate the manual- kinaesthetic modality, including the muscular memory the children are going to memorize, and consciously, the muscular movements to copy the various letters. Now if you think about it, it is better to start with (the) upper case alphabet compared to (the)lower case alphabet because it's easier to confuse letter of a lower case alphabet. Think about B and D, obviously. P and Q, but also reversal from top to bottom, like N, U, M, W, F, and T. With an upper case alphabet, these pairs of letters are less confusable.
