Teaching ELL Pre-literacy to Adult English Learners

I found the hand out on Developing Phonological Awareness that I got from the Iowa Culture and Language Conference (ICLC) 2015 to be very useful in teaching the ELL pre-literacy class we are now offering in Muscatine.  Most of the students who are attending this class are illiterate not only in English but also in their own language. 

Phonological awareness is the awareness of sounds and speech that a person makes or hears.  Here are the different types of phonological awareness in English:

1. Word Awareness is the knowledge that words have meaning. Example: a student needs to know that the spoken word dog represents a creature that has four legs and barks before he or she can understand the meaning of the printed word dog.
2. Rhyme Awareness is the understanding that certain word endings sound alike, and therefore contain the same sounds.
   
3. Syllable Awareness is the awareness that words are divided into parts, each part containing a separate vowel sound.
   
4. Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of the smallest units of sound in a word.