The What, the Why and the How of Sound Segmentation

While the words syllable and rhyme may resonate more readily with educators, the term sound segmentation may be less familiar. Yet a primary student's ability to isolate and blend sounds within words is a necessary skill for literacy success in any language.

WHAT IS SOUND SEGMENTATION AND WHY SHOULD WE TEACH IT?

Simply put, sound segmentation involves a student's ability to hear and isolate each individual sound in a word prior to blending those sounds:

Ex: When segmented, the word "café" has 4 audible sounds: c a f é

When segmented, the word "chat" has 2 audible sounds: ch at

Once the individual sounds are identified, the student can then blend the sounds together to form a word.

Sound segmentation is the primary skill that underscores the writing process. Think back for a moment to the last time that you penned an unfamiliar word while writing. What process did you engage in to commit that word to paper? Consider for a moment the French word: hylonomus. In trying to spell this word, you would begin by sounding out all audible letter sounds, one at a time, in sequential order....y ( or i if unsure) l o n o m u s. Given that the letter H in French is silent, chances are that you might forget to add the H until your computer's spell check shows you otherwise. Once you have isolated each audible letter sound, you blend those sounds together to finally arrive at the word: hylonomus. Accordingly, by helping primary students learn to segment and blend individual letter sounds, we are encouraging students to develop an essential writing skill.

HOW CAN SOUND SEGMENTATION BE TAUGHT IN THE FRENCH IMMERSION CLASSROOM USING ELR?

Given that sound segmentation is the most challenging of all the phonological skills, this skill is best taught once primary students are familiar with initial/final sound identification, syllable isolation/blending and rhyme. La devinette des sons is a simple ELR activity that introduces primary students to sound segmentation once all three texts in a sound unit have been presented and students have had the opportunity to work on the aforementioned pre-requisite phonological skills.

LA DEVINETTE DES SONS

To prepare for this activity, a teacher would select familiar key words from all three texts presented in an ELR sound unit in addition to any "sound related" vocabulary discovered during the reading of other literature sources shared with students. Using the Kira le grand boa unit as our continued example, a possible selection of familiar words highlighting the unit consonant's /b/, /d/, /p/, /t/ and the vowel sound /a/ could be as follows:

ELR Unit Texts

Kira le grand boa

Select words: Kira, boa, banane, pizza,

La salade

Select words: salade, tomate, salami, rat, ananas

Le chat et le rat

Select words: chat, bas, fromage, arbre,

Books selected from the supplemental resource list at the end of the KIra le grand boa unit

Les pirahnas ne mangent pas d'ananas (Aaron Blabey)

Select words: piranha, Boris (h is silent)

La meilleure pizza du monde ( série: Alpha Jeunes)

Select words: pepperoni (p is silent)

From the above vocabulary, a teacher will choose two words at at time to play La devinette des sons over several sessions.

Using a pocket chart and ELR letter tiles, the teacher will introduce the sound segmentation exercise through the recitation of a devinette that encourages students to listen closely to the individual sounds in a familiar word in order to guess the missing sound:

Ex 1: Dans ce mot il y a un /b/

Dans ce mot il y a un /o/

Devinez...c'est quoi mon troisième son?

Est-ce /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ ou /u/ ?

Réponse: /a/

Bravo que vous êtes bons!

Ex.2: Dans ce mot il y a un /s/

Dans ce mot il y a un /a/

Dans ce mot il y a un /l/

Dans ce mot il y a un /a/ et un /e/ qui ne parle pas.

Devinez...c'est quoi mon cinquième son?

Est-ce /b/, /d/, /t/ ou /p/?

Réponse: /d/

Bravo que vous êtes bons!

As the teacher works through the different letter sounds, we strongly suggest that letters are presented by their sound rather than their letter name to avoid confusion with English.

LA DEVINETTE DES SONS-EXTENTION EXERCISE

Using a pocket chart and letter tiles, the teacher can continue the sound segmentation exercise by asking students the following questions:

-Combien de sons entendons-nous dans le mot "boa" ?

-Comptons-les!

-Reponse: b-o-a 3

-Dites le mot "boa".

-Enlevons le son /b/.

-Quels sons entendons-nous maintenant? Réponse: o--a

-C'est quoi le nouveau mot? Réponse: oa

-Dites le mot "boa".

-Je fais un petit changement: -oba-

-Quels sons entendons-nous maintenant? Réponse: o---b---a

-C'est quoi le nouveau mot? Reponse: oba

-Dites le mot "salade"

-Je fais une petit changement: dasale

-Quels sons entendons-nous maintenant? Réponse: d---a---s--a--l (le /e/ ne parle pas)

-C'est quoi le nouveau mot? Réponse: dasale

ADVANTAGES OF TEACHING SOUND SEGMENTATION TO PRIMARY STUDENTS

There are many advantages to helping primary students learn to segment sounds in French. First, the isolation of each individual sound allows students to hear and encode letter sounds correctly. If students are not hearing sounds correctly, then they are encoding sounds incorrectly. When they attempt to mentally retrieve these sounds to either read or spell a word, a child's sound selection will be inaccurate. Barring any physical issues with a child's hearing, when children encode letter sounds incorrectly, this inaccuracy will manifest as they attempt to retrieve letter sounds when reading or writing. Consider the following letter sound inaccuracies in the writing of one of my grade 3 students with considerable attention issues:

une samain (as opposed to une semaine)

un louten (as opposed to un lutin)

pati (as opposed to petit)

Playing sound segmentation games with this student obliges him to slow down his thought process and actually pay attention to how a sound is produced. By paying attention to proper sound production, he can then encode a sound correctly and, over time, retrieve that sound correctly when committing words to paper or reading.

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Interested in learning more about how the brain encodes language? Dr. Steven Feifer's webiner entitled, The Neuropsychology of Learning Disabilities provides insight into how the brain learns language and suggestions on to help students with literacy challenges.

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Finally, sound segmentation activities allow the teacher to introduce students to the many "silent" letters in French words. Letters at the end of French words such as silent e (une semaine), silent d (un nid), silent s (les chats) or silent t (un lit) can be explicitly pointed out to students during sound segmentation exercises. These silent letters become obvious when students are asked to count how many sounds they can actually hear in a word. As more and more French words with silent letters are introduced, students begin to develop a mental repertoire of these words and, over time, will begin to incorporate silent letters into their writing.

Should you wish to contact us regarding the information published in this blog or to learn more about the Ecoutons, lisons, rions resource, please send us an email at fumoguerriero@gmail.com.

IN OUR NEXT BLOG:

Sound Skills Screeners: What are they and what are the advantages of using them in conjunction with our Ecoutons, lisons, rions material.