What Is It?
Phonological awareness is sensitivity to the sound structure of language. It’s the ability to recognize that spoken language can be broken into smaller units of sound, such as words, syllables, and very small segments called phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in language, and we usually think of a phoneme as the sound represented by a letter.
Why Is It Important?
Phonological awareness is important because
it is one of the strongest predictors of later
reading abilities. That is, a child with strong
phonological awareness is very likely to learn
to read words well, while a child with weak phonological
awareness is highly likely to struggle to learn
to read words. Phonological awareness is the foundation
for the development of decoding skills.
How Does It Develop?
From a very young age, most children start
to notice things about the way language sounds,
separate from its meaning. As they engage in
activities such as hearing nursery rhymes and
language play, children learn to attend to the
sounds of language.
We hear children play with language when they
sing songs like “Nanna, nanna,
bo-banna, fee-fi-fo-fanna, nanna, bo-banna”
(The Name Game, Shirley Ellis) or chant on the
playground with their friends
“bo-eee, fo-eee, clo-eee.” Children
learn to manipulate
sounds and
learn to think about sounds in language when
they play these kinds of games in the classroom
and on the playground.
You can think of the term “phonological
awareness” as an umbrella term that includes
several different levels of ability. The development
of phonological awareness begins in preschool.
The development of phonological awareness proceeds
from an ability to hear separately and manipulate
the biggest, concrete sound sections in words
(like words in a sentence, or word parts in
a compound word) to an ability to hear and
manipulate the smaller, more abstract sound
sections of words, like syllables. Later, children
will be able to distinguish the smallest sound
parts, called phonemes. By the time children
finish kindergarten, they should be able to
blend phonemes into short words.
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- Phonological awareness is...?
- Spoken language is broken down
into smaller units. What are they?
- How do children learn to use and think about sounds in language?
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