I believe that stressing phonemic awareness by giving intensive one on one instruction in individual letter sounds and having the students read and create non-sense words is a good strategy to do just one thing, build phonemic awareness. The only skill that this type of activity will assess is whether the student can successfully recognize letter sounds and put them together in a sequence after hearing them. It is an important part of learning to read, but not the most important.
A reader also needs to be able to understand what reading is for and why we do it; the functions of literacy are what will ultimately motivate young learners. This can be accomplished with modeling reading and writing and talking about it. The environment also needs to be full of opportunities to read that are relevant to children such as environmental print. This will help them to notice letter patterns which will foster their phonemic awareness on a broader scale than one to one letter instruction.
Finally, I do not believe that non-sense words have anything at all to do with proficient reading. Reading is a language based activity. It does not make sense to me that reading words with no meaning in isolation could promote proficient reading.
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