Deleting Phonemes
Deleting phonemes is a strategy that helps develop phonemic awareness, which is a part of phonological awareness. This is an advanced activity in which students take words apart, remove one sound, and pronounce the word without the removed sound (Caldwell, Jennings, and Lerner, 2014). In this strategy, the teacher explicitly teaches students how to manipulate words by purposely deleting individual phonemes in a word. Usually, phoneme deletion takes place orally, not using the written word, but this strategy can be utilized along with magnetic letters, or letter cards with a pocket chart to incorporate tactile learning while manipulating letters and phonemes.
This activity can be introduced by starting with compound words and removing a part of the word. For example, use a word such as dollhouse, and ask the students to say it without doll. Students will say house. Next, tell students to say playground, without the ground.
Once students become familiar with removing parts of a compound word, transition them into omitting single sounds. This helps them recognize individual phonemes. For example, ask students to say ball without the /b/. They say all. Try this with many words by first omitting beginning sounds, then moving on to ending sounds. When the students can omit beginning and ending sounds successfully, they can start to omit middle sounds. As with many strategies, it is best to start this strategy with a lot of modeling and thinking aloud for the students as a form of scaffolding before asking them to do it on their own.
This activity can be introduced by starting with compound words and removing a part of the word. For example, use a word such as dollhouse, and ask the students to say it without doll. Students will say house. Next, tell students to say playground, without the ground.
Once students become familiar with removing parts of a compound word, transition them into omitting single sounds. This helps them recognize individual phonemes. For example, ask students to say ball without the /b/. They say all. Try this with many words by first omitting beginning sounds, then moving on to ending sounds. When the students can omit beginning and ending sounds successfully, they can start to omit middle sounds. As with many strategies, it is best to start this strategy with a lot of modeling and thinking aloud for the students as a form of scaffolding before asking them to do it on their own.
The video above shows a teacher using the phoneme deletion strategy in her classroom. For this lesson, she utilizes a book that the students had heard before and using riddles with phoneme deletion. This is a primary grade classroom, which is typical with this type of strategy because phonemic awareness is a strong foundational skill for beginning readers.