The Phonological Awareness for Literacy (PAL) is an

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commercial literacy therapy program designed to improve the

phonological awareness Phonological awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading (process), reading ability and has, therefore, been th ...

skills required for

literacy Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...

in children aged 8 to 12. Developed by the

University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...

, the program's goal is to promote the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language. It aims to create and strengthen awareness of the relationship between phonological awareness skills and reading and writing. The program was adapted from Auditory Discrimination in Depth (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1975), which is known as the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) Program.

Intervention description

The PAL introduces identification, segmentation, blending, and manipulation of speech sounds in syllables. It does not encourage reading using the whole-word approach, but instead teaches children to break written words up into individual

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

s and match letters with their corresponding

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s before reassembling the phonemes back into words to read. The manual, colored blocks, letter tiles, record sheets, a file or folder, and suitable reinforcement (stickers, stamps etc.) are required materials. Therapy should be delivered by a suitably qualified

speech therapist Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...

Key skills taught

Developing an awareness of linguistic terms: This checks a child's understanding of literacy terminology used and teaches the child how to talk about language (

metalinguistic Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of how different parts of speech and communication interact with each other and reflect the way people live and ...

skills). Sound–symbol association: Determines a child's knowledge of how letters and sounds correspond, and that there can be several representations of each sound. Block representation of consonant or vowel sequences: This component facilitates the child's ability to segment words into individual phonemes through developing auditory analysis skills. A single block represents an individual sound, and a row of blocks represent a string of sounds; so that the number of blocks directly correlates to the number of sounds in the sequence. Block representation of syllables: Once the child understands that syllables consist of sounds, they then have to count the number of sounds, the order and distinguish between phonetic features. N.b. all block representation tasks deal only with non-words; this is to prevent the child from using pre-learned spelling patterns to respond to the tasks. Reading and spelling non-words: This builds on previously learnt skills by using block representation to read and spell non-words. The child is encouraged to employ metalinguistic knowledge to describe changes. Reading and spelling real words: Children learn to transfer the aforementioned foundation skills to simple or regular real words, which do not require specific spelling rules.

Components of therapy

Each level consists of subsections of teaching, auditory analysis, decoding and encoding. Children progress from non-words to real words within each level, prior to commencing the next level. The design of the program ensures that the child is not exposed to more difficult tasks before acquiring the necessary skills at preceding levels.

Level 1 – Simple words

The focus of this level is to provide the ability to decode and encode CVC syllables, before applying this skill in reading and spelling. This incorporates the learning of long and short vowels in addition to consonants. Words used at this level have consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs).

Level 2 – Complex words

Consonant clusters are introduced, in addition to application of specific rules. This includes the introduction of the soft C, the soft G, and the silent E, which may change its preceding vowel into its "long" vowel sound.

Level 3 – Multisyllabic words

This level builds on the previously learned abilities of segmenting and manipulating sounds by transferring these skills to syllables within multisyllabic words. It also provides specific teaching on how to break words up into syllables and the introduction of grammatical morphemes.

Alternative interventions

* Reading Freedom Remedial Reading Program (Calder, 1992) * Sounds Abound. Listening, Rhyming & Reading (Catts, 1993) * Auditory Discrimination in Depth (Lindamood and Lindamood, 1975) * A Sound Way (Love and Reilly, 1995)

References

{{Reflist Speech and language pathology