Fortescue Optometrists

Auditory thinking skills are essential pre-cursors to the development of phonics.

Phonics is a skill which is used when the visual identity of a word is not immediately recognised. It involves ‘sounding out’ words. ‘Sounding out’ aids the recognition and retrieval of words from memory. It is a more laborious way of reading yet is a crucial foundation to the reading process.

Auditory thinking skills normally develop on a reasonably predictable scale if the child can hear and speak normally and is not deprived of the experiences of exploring these stimuli. For example between the ages of 4 to 6, most children are aware that phonemes make up words. There is one significant exception to this children who suffer chronic middle ear infections during their pre-school years. They seem to be more at risk of delays in the development of auditory perceptual skills. The delay is due to sporadic hearing impairment owing to fluid accumulating behind the eardrum. The impairment disappears as the chronic infection subsides but the child’s auditory perceptual skills are often delayed.

i. Auditory Discrimination (listening skills). Is the ability to recognise that sounds can be similar or different. ie. The ability to tell the difference between similar sounds such as the letters “b” and “d”, & “m” and “n”.

ii. Auditory-Visual Integration. Are the non-language skills that a child must acquire before they can begin working with sounds. It relates to the ability to understand concepts such as pitch, intensity, duration and pause of sounds and to match these functions with symbols and mental constructs. For example a long vowel sound such as “-a” in the word “bay” is longer in duration than the short “-a” sound in “cat”.

Auditory memory is a measure of the amount of sequential vocal information that can be stored in memory by the child. Auditory memory is the auditory equivalent of visual attention span. Poor auditory memory will limit the quantity of auditory information that may be stored and processed at any instant. Thus it is important to the phonetic construction of words as well as the analysis of the sounds in words prior to spelling. For example if the word "satisfactory" was spoken aloud the child must remember each syllable. Ie. “Sa-tis-fac-tor-e”. In this example the child is required to recall five sound units in succession. A child who can only recall a sequence of three ‘sound bits’ will have obvious difficulty spelling longer words which are spoken aloud.

iii. Phonemic Awareness. The acquisition of language skills is dependent on essential knowledge of phonemes. Phonemes (pronounced: fo-neems), are the smallest meaningful units of language. For example 'cat' contains three phonemes: kuh, aah and tuh. There are 44 phonemes in the English language. For most people, the process of breaking words into phonemes occurs automatically, without conscious thought. Just as we break down phonemes without thinking about it, we also merge them in our speech automatically: "cat" is one syllable, but made up of three distinct sounds.

Knowledge of sounds begins with an understanding of the alphabet. Simple as the alphabet is many children do not know it by heart, are unsure of its sequence or cannot discriminate between letters. For example when the alphabet is recited as a song many children speed up when they reach ‘l, m, n o, and p’, consequently these letters are often clumped together as one sound.

Once the child understands the names of the letters of the alphabet they are then required to learn the sound each letter makes. The skill of being able to recognise all the letters of the alphabet by sound is essential to becoming a competent reader. One of the major problems for children when learning to read is that they confuse letter names with letters sounds. ie. When asked for the sound of a letter the child will reply with the letter’s name. This is appropriate for letters such as ‘t’ because the sound is contained within the name yet it fails for the letters ‘y, c, g, w’ and for all 5 vowels. For example the name of the letter ‘c’ sounds like ‘see’ therefore children incorrectly mis-sound it as ‘sss’. In the case of the vowels children often identify them by their name (or long vowel sound) rather than by the short vowel sound.

Once the child becomes aware of the basic sound units of speech they are then able to manipulate these sounds to form words or alternatively break words into their individual sound units, which is known as auditory analysis. The awareness of these individual sound units (bits) and their relative position in words is essential to a child developing adequate word attack and manipulation skills.

A child who lack basic phonemic awareness or has poor auditory analysis will be unable to distinguish or manipulate SOUNDS within SPOKEN words or syllables. They would be unable to do the following tasks:

Phoneme Segmentation: What sounds do you hear in the word 'hot'? What's the last sound in the word 'map'?
Phoneme Deletion: What word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from 'cat'?
Phoneme Matching: Do 'pen' and 'pipe' start with the same sound?
Phoneme Counting: How many sounds do you hear in the word 'cake'?
Phoneme Substitution: What word would you have if you changed the /h/ in 'hot' to /p/?
Blending: Is the ability to combine sounds to form words. For example what word would you have if you put these sounds together? /s/ /a/ /t/. Studies have shown that 53% of 7 year old children have difficulty with blending.
Rhyming: Tell me as many words as you can that rhyme with the word 'eat.

If a child lacks auditory analysis, they will have difficulty learning the relationship between letters and the sounds they represent in words, as well as applying those letter/sound correspondences to help them "sound out" unknown words.

Children who perform poorly on auditory analysis tasks (via oral language) in kindergarten are very likely to experience difficulties acquiring the early word reading skills in primary school.

Written words represent spoken words. In order to read and write, a child has to link the sound of a letter with its written symbol. This is known as phonological coding. The ability to grasp the ‘sound structure’ of words in this way is crucial to reading and writing. Learning to read and write is a slow process, because written letters have no direct and obvious correlation with their sounds. For example, you can’t guess how to pronounce the symbol ‘a’ just by looking at it - you have to rely on your memory.

Phonics is the skill of knowing which speech sounds are represented by which written letters. Phonics teaches how the written letters blend together to produce words, how the sounds of the letters change depending on the letters that surround them, the rules regarding adding suffixes and prefixes, and so on. In other words, phonics teaches students the internal linguistic structure of words.