War Child Music
I was fascinated to discover information about how the importance of phonological awareness was discovered. After World War II the U.S. government sought how to facilitate the transition back into life for disabled veterans, including returning home blinded in battle. A young psychologist Alvin Liberman, had the task of building a reading machine for the blind. The idea was to create a machine capable of vocalizing in print as a finger passed over the Braille letters.
Although the machine was too slow work on the articulation of individual sounds to resemble speech. The listeners could not join the machine sounds for any sense out of them. However, the team of scientists from Liberman had hit a new understanding of the reading process.
It involuntarily had identified the complicated relationship between the language to read the letters of [] and the language we speak [sounds] and found one of the main reasons that may be difficult to learn to read. Like the blind listeners can not make sense to sounds from the machine reading, reading problems have difficulty for blending the different sounds that make up a word.
Many young students find it very difficult to distinguish small segments of sounds - "Phonological awareness." Its difficulty has nothing to do with an ability to recognize individual letters, but what word is formed when strung. More a third of all beginning readers have difficulty to identify, discriminate, isolate and sounds.
The phonemes are the sounds that form words unspoken to the individual letters. For example, the word "on" has two phonemes: / o / y / n /. We hear a single word, because it mixes individual phonemes in a unit of measurement to pronounce the word. The groups of letters representing individual sounds (th, sh, oo, ough, or ck) are also important for children to have into account. The word "but" is not decipherable only by the individual letter sounds, there must be an understanding of phonics as well. Phonemes are not the sounds that letters make, but the sounds of speech that can be represented by letters.
Effective reading instruction must include teaching phonological awareness and phonics. Helping your child recognize the sounds that letters make and how they are combined is as important as understanding points itself.
Jeanette McLeod
Interactive digital books for children
Emmanuel Jal: The music of a war child