Scenario: You have six students in your second-grade class who scored Emergent level in reading after taking the AZELLA.

Scenario: You have six students in your second-grade class who scored Emergent level in reading after taking the AZELLA. You will be working with these students in a small group and focusing on phonemic awareness.

Review the English Language Proficiency Standards on the Arizona Department of Education website and find the second-grade Reading Domain standards.

Review Standard 2: Phonemic Awareness and the Emergent level performance indicators. Hint: There are six Emergent level performance indicators that focus on phonemic awareness labeled E-1, E-2, etc.

Choose two performance indicators to focus on and create a 30-minute small group activity that will assess those indicators.

Note: Use teaching strategies from 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners.

Incorporate skills and strategies that would apply to Emergent level learners including grouping techniques and/or cooperative learning strategies.

MODEL ANSWER

Phonemic awareness refers to a child’s ability to hear, manipulate, and identify the sounds of the English language (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018). This skill is an indicator of early reading and spelling skills at the prekindergarten, kindergarten, and beginning of first grade level of education. Emergent level learners tend to ‘pretend read’ by creating stories or repeating familiar stories.

The second-grade reading domain standards for the emergent child, according to Arizona’s Department of Education, states that children in this stage have limited ability in comprehending text independently (OELAS, 2010). Some of the reading standards set for children at this level include locating features of a sentence, organizing the letters of the alphabet using a visual model, distinguishing between the different printed letters, and tracking of text form the left to the right. The Arizona Department of Education also has some set domain standards for phonemic awareness. The first standard is the child’s ability to distinguish between initial and final spoken sounds when producing words. Secondly, the child should be able to compare three pictures and identify those that have the same initial sound (OELAS, 2010). Thirdly, the identification of short and long vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable…