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Structured Literacy: A Focus on Phonemic Awareness – Summer Institute 2024

Literacy research verifies the importance of phonemic awareness (the ability to think consciously about and manipulate individual sounds within words) as a precursor to successful reading. Many students, especially those with language-based learning disabilities, need to be explicitly taught strategies to improve phonemic awareness skills. This 5-day course uses published materials developed by Charles, Patricia, and Phyllis Lindamood to teach participants how to identify individuals with poorly developed phonemic awareness, as well as enhance students’ ability to perceive, compare, and manipulate sounds within words.

Upon completion, participants will be able to:

• Identify weak phonemic awareness through the use of formal and informal testing
• Determine whether phonemic awareness instruction is the appropriate intervention for a student based on testing
• Help students discriminate similarities and differences between individual speech sounds (consonants and vowels) through a conscious awareness of the oral-motor movements required to produce them
• Develop techniques students can use to perceive and represent the sameness or difference, number, and order of speech sounds both in sequences of isolated sounds and in syllable units
• Explain how students can associate speech sounds with the alphabetic symbols that represent them, and use these sound-symbol associations to spell and read real words, including multisyllable words
• Develop example lesson plans focusing on sounds, reading, and spelling for each level of instruction
• Discuss how to integrate specific spelling expectancies and phonics tasks into phonemic awareness instruction  
• Establish strategies to help students more efficiently read and spell; understand useful cueing techniques to help students use these strategies  
• Gain a deeper understanding of how language is constructed at the sound, syllable, and multisyllable levels  
• Create a scope and sequence of phonemic awareness instruction based on learned methods

LEVEL

This course is appropriate for educators at all levels (elementary, middle, secondary).

MATERIALS

Materials will be provided on-site. Note that an additional fee is included in the course cost.

GRADUATE CREDIT

Graduate credit is offered through Fitchburg State University and is included in the course fee. Once you register for graduate credit through Fitchburg, the grad credit portion of the course fee ($295) is non-refundable. Details about the graduate credit including timelines to register and refund policies will be embedded in the “Course Welcome” module of the course.

ADDITIONAL COURSE LOGISTICS

Delivery mode: In-person.

Attendance: Live, on the date and time listed in the course information section.