Hallie Kay Yopp’s article, “A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children”, describes a tool to measure a student’s phonemic awareness and predict his/her success with other branches of reading, such as vocabulary and comprehension.  The assessment is user-friendly and quick, taking only 5-10 minutes per student. The students are given an example by the teacher, practice words to ensure understanding of the task, and then 22 words to break down into phonemes, or sounds of a word.  The student is scored based on how many words they correctly segment. Each word is either correctly or incorrectly segmented. Therefore, if the student segments two sounds correctly but one sound incorrectly on the word, it is incorrect. If the student spells the word but states the letters and not the sounds, it is also incorrect.  This tool can help teachers profile a student’s reading ability and help them with his/her own individual needs. By analyzing the notes and scores, teachers can decide which students have proficient phonemic awareness, which are emerging, and which are still on a lower level. They can then adapt their strategies to help each student.

Although I am a secondary teacher, I still feel that this assessment could be useful to me as a special education teacher.  I have students with reading needs and have taught a resource room English class. I could use this measurement to go back to basics and see where the issue with reading lies.  I have actually observed a teacher in a similar setting that has had to review phonemic sounds on a weekly basis with a group of high school students who have disabilities that pertain to reading.  If I were an elementary school teacher, I would definitely take advantage of the suggested phoneme awareness activities, like changing phonemes in words of songs.