In the 1960s, listeners from Los Angeles to London were charmed by Shirley Ellis and her catchy tunes. Archival footage shows her poised in dazzling gowns cinched at the waist just so, the vigor and verve of her vocals holding audiences rapt.
The Congress Records songstress had a single on the Billboard Hot Rhythm and Blues Top 10 list in January 1965, alongside the Temptations’ “My Girl,” Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” the Supremes’ “Come See about Me,” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Going to Come.” Her hit still resounds, although Ellis is too often regarded as an American music history footnote, not a legend like those contemporaries.
The song, inspired by a rhyming game she played as a child, has stayed in rotation through the years in television, movies, commercials, and cover versions. Runway models walked to its rhythms in a Stella McCartney fashion show to rave reviews from Women’s Wear Daily the same year that a major retailer’s commercial featured a family singing it on a road trip. Howard Stern says singing the ditty’s his “schtick with kids.” Academy Award winner Jessica Lange performed a show-stopping rendition on American Horror Story that catapulted the oldie-but-goodie to meme status on TikTok. And the song’s title continues to be invoked as a tortured metaphor for trade articles about everything from corporate rebranding efforts to the merits of monogramming.
Yes, “The Name Game” endures. Odds are you know the tune. Something in its rhythm and rules—remove the first consonant of a name; replace it with a B, F, or M; then add a bo, fo, fee, fi, or mo in the designated spots—keeps the song humming along. Despite prognostications that it was a “novelty tune” destined to disappear when the freshness of its nonsensical humor wore off, it lives on. The inventive wordplay and nods to the hand-clapping, jump-roping culture of black girlhood also won Ellis credit for ushering in a new form of American music. Her picture is the image in an encyclopedia entry documenting “proto-rap,” the pre-1980s stylistic forebear to hip-hop’s beats, rhymes, and banter. I’d argue that she’s also a standard bearer for another movement that she scarcely could have anticipated—early support for phonological awareness.
What Is Phonological Awareness?
Phonological awareness is the conscious ability to recognize and manipulate sound segments within words, and it’s right up there with oral language and letter knowledge as a pillar of literacy. It’s critical to understand that spoken words can be divided into smaller sounds in order to read in alphabetic writing systems like English. Letters exist to represent, in writing, the sequences of sounds that we hear in speech. When kids struggle with reading, an underlying and overlooked cause can be that they have difficulty processing speech sounds. Yet most parents don’t think to devote time to bolstering kids’ sensitivity to the sounds in words.
To do our part, parents need to begin paying attention to how words can be sliced and diced into different sound units, such as syllables and less-familiar units like—stay with me here—onsets, rimes, and phonemes. Syllables are pronunciation units that include a vowel sound and optional consonant sounds before and/or after the vowel. For example, the word soccer has two syllables and basketball has three. An onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster sound in a word—the /t/ sound in team, for example, or the /sp/ sound in spoon. Some words like air don’t have an onset. The rime unit (fraternal twin to rhyme), by contrast, is the vowel sound within a syllable plus any consonant sounds that follow the vowel. For example, the “eam” in team. Phonemes (e.g., /t/, /ē/, or /m/) are the smallest speech sound units in English—and there are forty-four.
If that sounds like a lot to learn and teach, you can take comfort in a couple of things. One, kids don’t need to know all these terms and details. You just need to help them perceive and manipulate the different sounds, which can happen through play. Second, kids’ awareness of sounds within words generally develops in a predictable sequence, from larger units like syllables to smaller and smaller ones. And within each size unit there’s a range of ways kids can manipulate the sounds, from rudimentary to complex. Plus, all of this development happens over the course of years, so you’ve got plenty of time to get up to speed on what skills to nurture now—and next.
In terms of order, children typically recognize that breakfast has two syllables before grasping that it starts with a /b/ sound or that it has eight sounds in all—/b/, /r/, /e/, /k/, /f/, /i/, /s/, and /t/. Their ability to blend, segment, and recombine sounds within words also develops with time and experience. Kids can usually compare and contrast words (e.g. notice that cup and pup rhyme) before they can come up with rhyming words themselves or name the sounds within words. And little ones typically can blend /c/ /u/ /p/ sounds to say cup before they can break down cup into its three sounds.
Think of these different phonological awareness activities (isolating, blending, segmenting, etc.) at the syllable, onset, rime, and phoneme levels as different presentations of the same fundamental ability. Knowing that these sound-analysis skills are all located along a single continuum will help you see how your child is progressing on the road to literacy, according to Jason Anthony, a professor at the University of South Florida who specializes in language and literacy acquisition. In general, children who do well at noticing, pondering, and manipulating sound units within words early on are going to continue to do well and learn to read without difficulty. “The reason it’s important to understand that all of these things fall under phonological awareness is that you can actually play with your child, do these sound activities, and encourage their literacy development long before they ever reach formal reading instruction,” he explains.
It also means that professionals can identify early which kids are likely to have more difficulty. “We don’t have to wait until third grade to decide, ‘This child is failing school, he can’t read,’” Anthony explains. “Now we’re in a much better place to identify a child at risk of reading failure at kindergarten entry or even preschool.”
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
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