Implications for Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)
This is the second post in a blog series about four common universal screening measures. Universal screeners are an important type of literacy assessment used in grades K-6 to identify students who are at risk for future challenges with reading. If you missed my blog post about the different types of assessment, you can read about them here. It will give you an overview of universal screeners and their importance.
The four universal screening measures we will talk about in this series are:
FSF (First Sound Fluency): assesses basic phonemic awareness at the beginning of Kindergarten.
PSF (Phoneme Segmentation Fluency): assesses phonemic awareness from the middle of Kindergarten through the beginning of first grade.
NWF (Nonsense Word Fluency): assesses basic phonics from the middle of Kindergarten through the beginning of second grade.
ORF (Oral Reading Fluency): assesses advanced phonics, word attack skills, fluency in connected text, and reading comprehension from the middle of first grade through the end of sixth grade.
These four measures align with the progression of early literacy skills from grades K-6, and are indicative of reading performance at any given time in a school year. Each of the above measures have been shown through research to correlate with the skills students need to become proficient readers.
In the last post, we discussed FSF, which you can read about here. In today’s post, we’ll discuss PSF.
Since today’s post is about another phonemic awareness assessment measure, first we’ll recall why phonemic awareness is important for learning how to read.
Why is phonemic awareness important?
According to the National Early Literacy Panel (2020), the two most important phonemic awareness skills are segmenting and blending. This is because these two skills have a causal effect on learning how to read and spell. Blending causes children to read words. Segmenting causes children to spell words. Blending is being able to hear the individual sounds in a word and blend those sounds together to produce the correct word. Segmenting is being able to hear a word and break it apart into its individual sounds. Blending facilitates the ability to read and segmenting facilitates the ability to spell. The ability to perform the skills of blending and segmenting require that a student is able to detect individual phonemes in words. Since this is not a natural skill it needs to be explicitly taught to most children. When a child is successful at both blending and segmenting, their chances at being proficient readers in the future are significantly increased. Because phonemic awareness is so predictive of future reading outcomes, a quality universal screener will include a phonemic awareness measure. PSF is one of those measures.
What is PSF?
Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) assesses phonemic awareness from the middle of Kindergarten to the middle of first grade. It can also be used for older struggling readers to identify gaps in phonemic awareness skills. If a student is proficient in PSF, they can hear a word and parse it into its individual sounds. For example, if the student hears the word “clay”, they can tell you that the sounds in “clay” are /c/ /l/ /ay/.
For some, learning to blend and segment is challenging, especially in words that include consonant blends, liquid sounds, or nasal sounds, for example. This is because of a phenomenon called co-articulation. In a word like “man”, it can be difficult for students to detect the vowel sound because it is continuous and is coarticulated with the final sound /n/. /N/ is a nasal sound, which means it is produced through the nose. Because of this, the vowel sound distorts as the nose and mouth prepare to produce the /n/ sound. The result is a “whiny” short A sound.
In my post about FSF, we discussed the word “train”. The first sound, /t/, is coarticulated, or spoken together with the sound /r/, because the mouth is preparing to say /r/ as it finishes producing the /t/ sound. Because of coarticulation, when asked to segment sounds in a word like “train”, students might say /ch/ /r/ /ai/ /n/. This will lead them to spell the word like this: “chrain”. Drawing students' attention to how these sounds are coarticulated is the type of instructional detail we must include if we want our students to be proficient spellers.
I also cautioned in my previous post about boxed phonemic awareness programs. This is because phonemic awareness instruction is so specific and targeted, and it is important to use our data, specifically the errors students make on a measure like PSF, to guide our instruction.
Analyzing PSF
Let’s talk about how to analyze PSF data so that you can design intentional instruction. When students take the PSF measure, you say a word and ask them to give you the sounds in that word. If you say the word “spot”, a correct response from the student would be /s/ /p/ /o/ /t/. Students who are at or above benchmark in this skill will be able to give you each sound in a given word, automatically. Students who fall below benchmark may make a number of different errors.
Error Types
A correct response for a word on PSF is shown below:
Teacher says “boat”, student says /b/ /oa/ /t/.
When you look at your data, keep an eye out for the following possible data patterns:
Student gives one or more incorrect sounds.
Student combines one or more sounds.
Student omits sounds.
Error Type #1: Student omits sounds.
The word is “stop”. The student’s response is /s/ /o/ /p/.
This would indicate that the student is struggling to hear the second sound in consonant blends, which will impact their spelling.
For instruction: Model stretching out the sounds in consonant blends. Model how the two sounds should sound individually, and how they should sound when together. In the “st” consonant blend, /s/ and /t/ are the individual sounds. Tell the students when /s/ and /t/ are pronounced in a word, this is how it sounds, “st”. Then have the student practice reading and spelling words including this “st” blend. I typically use my virtual phonics review decks for this purpose, because my program doesn’t teach blends.
A slide from my blends digital flashcards.
Error Type #2: Student gives one or more incorrect sounds.
The word is “mat”. The student says “/m/ /e/ /t/”.
This would indicate that the student confuses vowel sounds. The implication here is to focus on the proper articulation of vowels.
For instruction: Conduct a vowel intensive daily. For a vowel intensive, show students each vowel letter. Model the correct sounds and have students echo you. Then, point to a vowel and have the student practice saying the vowel sound. You can also do the opposite– say the vowel sound and have the student write the correct vowel letter. Then, have students practice reading and spelling words with the vowels that cause confusion for the student.
Error Type #3: Student combines one or more sounds.
The word is “flat”. The student says “/fla/ /t/”.
This indicates the student needs practice segmenting sounds in words with 4 sounds.
For instruction: First determine if the student can segment words with three sounds. You can do this by looking at the errors on other words in the PSF assessment. Did they successfully segment words like “sit”, or “soap”? If so, you can rule out three sound words and focus on teaching four sound words. If not, check to see if they can segment sounds in two sound words. If they did well with two sound words, but not with three sound words, start instruction with three sound words. Model segmenting each sound in the word, attaching those sounds to letters, and spelling the word. For the word “flat”, you would say the word slowly “ffffffffllllllllaaaaattttttt”. Then ask the student, “what is the first sound you hear?” The student should say “/f/”. Ask the student to spell the sound /f/. They should write F. Continue like this until the word “flat” is spelled. Repeat with 5-10 words daily.
Where to Begin Instruction
When we are trying to determine where to begin phonemic awareness instruction, we can use the guideline below for gauging where to start.
In the previous example of the student who said /fla/ /t/, for the word “flat”, we would start by looking at how the student performs with 3 sound words that begin with stop sounds, because that is the next skill down from 4+ sound words with consonant blends.
2 sound words that begin with a continuous sound (e.g “at” or “me”)
3 sound words that begin with a continuous sound (e.g “sun” or “map”).
2 or 3 sound words that begin with stop sounds (e.g “top” or “bun”)
4+ sound words with consonant blends (e.g “flag” or “bend” or “strong”)
Once students reach the PSF benchmark, you don’t need to teach phonemic awareness any longer, unless you notice the student is struggling to blend and segment sounds in print. In the next post, we’ll discuss NWF, or nonsense word fluency (my favorite).
