Phonics screeners are the best way to evaluate one’s letter-sound matching skills. Here are our top five picks.
Phonics screeners are a way of assessing a child’s understanding of how each sound matches the letters of the alphabet (i.e., the graphemes). Phonics screening checks are usually administered very early on (e.g., in the first grade) as they provide instructors with insight into every student’s ability and prepare them for any necessary interventions.
Phonics assessment can come in many forms. It can be conducted in person or online, and it can be done individually or in small groups. Each method focuses on word reading and decoding skills exercises, sound-letter correspondences, phoneme manipulation, and word segmenting.
In the paragraphs below, we have a short list of the top five phonics screeners and assessment tools.
What is a phonics intervention and why it would be necessary for reading skills
Phonics interventions are a sort of intensive reading instruction meant to help struggling readers understand the correspondences between oral language and the alphabet, that is, between each sound and the letters we use to represent them in writing.
If the diagnostic assessment shows that the child has trouble keeping up with their peers, the instructor relies on phonics instruction. Learners, of course, start slowly, focusing on one letter at a time. Eventually, as their phonics skills improve, the child focuses on digraphs (e.g., th) and other kinds of consonant-vowel combinations (e.g., igh).
The exercises involved in phonics instructions include letter name repetition, sounding out syllables, reading texts out loud, and manipulating syllables and words to construct new speech segments.
The reason phonics is essential for a student’s progress is that mastering the relationships between sounds and letters is essential for building reading comprehension and combating reading difficulties.
Those who do not develop good phonics skills and phonological awareness early on often have issues reading even simple words. They cannot keep up with other children on the same grade level and have bad grades not just in English but in other subjects as well since reading fluency is an essential aspect of everyone’s academic journey.
The best phonics screeners
There is a great variety of phonics and reading assessment screeners used to assess and monitor children’s phonics skills. The best approach will always depend on each child’s strengths and weaknesses, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment and try out various methods.
The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)
This is one of the most widely used reading assessment methods. It features a phonics screening segment ( Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, or PSF, for short), and it measures the child’s word segmentation skills and sound manipulation.
The Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS)
PALS is a rather popular phonics assessment method. It is quite comprehensive, as it measures not only the child’s phonics skills but also their phonemic awareness and word recognition skills. It can also be used to evaluate the child’s awareness of the alphabetic principle, so it’s somewhat of a universal screening test for reading competency.
The Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT)
GORT is another comprehensive reading skill benchmark. It measures the child’s oral and reading fluency, word recognition, reading comprehension, and, of course, phonics skills.
The test is administered to children in grades K-12, so it’s quite versatile. It features sight word reading components and passage comprehension. The word list is a mix of regular and nonsense words, and the passage reading section features a sequence of texts of varying difficulty to accommodate learners of all grades.
The test is done individually, and it takes about 30 minutes to complete.
The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP)
CTOPP is another K-12 test. Like GORT, it measures a whole range of phonological skills: phonemic awareness, phoneme manipulation, and phoneme blending. The test takes about 30 minutes to complete, and once done, it provides instructors with a comprehensive view of the child’s phonological skills, allowing for proper further intervention.
The Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA)
TOPA is just as comprehensive as CTOPP and GORT, but it features some additional tests for rhyming skills and syllable awareness. However, it is meant for students in grades K-6, so it’s not as versatile as some other screening methods.
The test is administered individually, but it takes less time to complete than some other tests do. Usually, it takes the child between 15 and 20 minutes to complete it.
What to know about helping children improve their literacy skills
Assessment is only the first step. To make sure your students can progress quickly and develop essential literacy skills, you’ll have to address each of their problems and help them work on cumulative language skills, and you’ll have to adjust your approach whenever necessary. For starters, you can:
- Make sure your instructions are clear: When you start teaching struggling readers and those with dyslexia, you’ll have to adjust your approach accordingly. The first step to optimizing your lessons is to provide clear, explicit instructions. Children with reading difficulties have enough trouble as it is, so making sure they don’t get discouraged from the get-go will do wonders for their progress.
- Provide your students with more opportunities to practice and create a welcoming learning environment: Repetition and revision are staples of every quality curriculum. You need to give your students a chance to practice on their own and immerse themselves in literature and other reading material. You can assign group work and encourage kids to work together too.
- Use assistive technology: We live in a world of constantly evolving technology, so it would be a tragedy not to rely on it in the classroom. With assistive tech, you can enable your students to work more independently and develop their skills at their own pace.
- With text-to-speech and speech-to-text programs like Speechify, you can allow children to finish their writing assignments by dictating instead of writing.
- Speechify is especially useful because it was developed for dyslexic users specifically, so it features all the necessary tools children will need to practice listening, pronouncing and differentiating real words from misspelled ones, etc.
FAQs
Is the phonics screening check effective?
Yes. Phonics screening checks are widely regarded as a viable, accurate assessment method, and the number of subscribers some of the most popular methods have speaks for the effectiveness of these tests.
What type of assessment is the quick Phonics screener?
Quick phonics screeners are, in essence, a stripped-down version of more comprehensive tests. They are meant to be administered quickly should the need for it arises, and they typically focus on one aspect of phonics.
