CIL 621

Assessment Experience #4
Phoneme Segmentation
Melissa is a young, 6th grade girl, who is 12 years old. She lives at home with her mother
and two younger siblings. Her household is monolingual. She attends a public school and is
currently in a self-contained, SLD (specific learning disability) classroom. She is in a classroom
with 16 students, one teacher and one teacher assistant. Melissa has been eligible for special
education services since 2011. She has been in a resource room, classroom setting until the
current 2015-2016 school year; the team decided with parent agreement to move Melissa to a
more restricted environment to help support her educational needs last 2014-2015 school year.
Melissa is currently reading at 2.1 (second grade and 1 month) grade level.
The purpose of phoneme segmentation assessment is to assess students phonemic
awareness. This assessment assesses students ability to orally produce letter-sound
relationships. This skill is important in the beginning stages of reading and writing. Therefore,
identifying students ability to segment words by their letter sound is extremely important for
their literacy growth.
From the previous assessment, the Attitude/Survey Interest Inventory, Melissas score for
recreational reading is at the 83%ile and for academic reading she is at the 99%ile in 6th grade.
Her full score is at a 97%ile in 6th grade. When giving the concepts of print Melissa understands
where to begin when reading a text and the direction of print. She can differentiate between
letters and words, but struggled with punctuation (i.e. quotation marks and comma). Melissa can
correctly identify and write the letters of the alphabet.

When giving Yopper-Singer of Phoneme segmentation, Melissa was able to

segment 20/22 words. She correctly broke the word apart when given a word orally by the
examiner. Melissa struggled with the word three. She attempted to segment the word three but
struggled 3 times. She would begin to start with th sound but just could not isolate the word
sounds. She would end up saying the word three each time. Melissa also struggled with the
word ice. She segmented the word i/ze with a z sound.
In conclusion to this assessment, I was able to hear Melissa orally segment the words.
This allowed me to see if Melissa can phonetically hear and segment the letter sounds without
reading the word. As mentioned from the article, it not necessary to assess Melissa with this
assessment because she is already reading; however, since Melissa is in a restricted, classroom
setting for special education services, this documentation is beneficial to have. This assessment is
still important to have for special education students and emerging readers, because it
demonstrates phonemic awareness.
The overall procedures of this assessment were easy to produce as an examiner. The
examiner needs to ensure there is a quiet environment for the teacher and student to hear
accurately. There were no challenged when administering. Due to being a middle school teacher,
my impression of this assessment was not outstanding. The only reason is because it is not
necessarily needed to administer at my grade level. However, one is not to say that I will never
use this assessment, so I am glad to have a resource to use if I ever needed to. As educators, we
need to understand that all students will have different literacy strengths, weaknesses and
experiences; despite their grade level.