Teaching English Learners: Matching Sounds with Print: Literacy Instruction for English Learners

So we have talked about phonological awareness, that ability to process the sounds, manipulate the sounds, play with the sounds, which includes blending and manipulation and segmenting from a word into the sound. But now I want to talk to you about how we're going to link that to print. Very valuable, and we want to make those connections. So what I'd like to model for you is we know a challenging sound in the English language for English learners is the sound /j/. So I'm going to model for you how we might apply that and bring that sound to print now. That's called graphophonemic knowledge, taking that print, the grapheme, right, and linking it to the sound, the phoneme. So say these words after me: jet, jam, jog.

What sound did you hear at the very beginning of each of those words? The sound was /j/. For some students, you may have trouble saying this new sound /j/, especially students who may speak Spanish in their home language. So what I want you to do is touch your vocal chords and say /ch/, /ch/, /ch/. They didn't vibrate. Now let's turn on our vocal chords: /j/, /j/, /j/. Now they vibrate. Since you have that sound for the 'ch' /ch/ in your home language ... it also exists in English ... but it is a pair with that new English sound /j/. It's a connection to be made. Now I want you to show you the letter. Look at the letter. Do you see? It's the letter 'j'. The sound is /j/. I'm going to give you a key word to unlock the sound. The key word is jaguar. Can you say it? Jaguar. Do you have that word in your language?

You do? Jaguar. In your home language, you say /h/ for that letter 'j'. In English, look at the letter 'j' again. The sound is /j/. And I might use this picture of a jaguar to help you link and remember that new sound. Now we want to help the student not only have that phonological awareness ... we're linking the letter and sound together ... now we want to link it to print. And we want to have our students then move into that ability to read words with their new targeted sound. That's integrating phonological awareness with graphophonemic knowledge, getting on that journey to decoding and reading words and sentences.