Phonological Awareness 

 Phonological awareness refers to the understanding of the sound structure of language; an awareness of the sounds that people use when speaking. Research shows that there is a very strong relationship between phonological awareness and achievement in reading. Children who develop phonological awareness before learning to read have higher levels of achievement as they grow older than children who fail to develop phonological awareness. Moreover, research shows that failure to develop phonological awareness is associated with development of learning disabilities or dyslexia.

The key areas of phonological awareness that children must develop are sensitivity to rhyme and to initial sounds. There is a developmental sequence that characterises most children’s development of phonological awareness.

Rhyme. The first phonological skill to develop for most children is awareness of rhyme. Awareness of rhyme emerges from early childhood experiences with nursery rhymes. Thus, young children and children who have difficulty in learning to read should be provided with experiences with nursery rhymes and rhyming poetry. When children are familiar with nursery rhymes they can be given experiences with Reading GOLD Phonological Awareness Activity cards: Rhyme. These cards will introduce some formal experiences with rhyming words. When children begin to understand the concept of rhyming words, they can complete Reading GOLD Phonological Awareness Workbook 1: Rhyme. This workbook contains a series of carefully structured activities develop awareness of rhyme.Early activities are relatively easy for the child to complete. As he or she become more confident, activities become more complex and difficult. When they have completed the workbook, children will have mastered the concept of rhyme

Onset. When children can identify a rhyme they can hear the rime in a word. The rime is the final vowel and consonants (eg the rime in cat is at; in train is ain). After they recognise that rhyming words have the same rime, children are able to break away (or segment) the rime from the word. Thus, the can begin to recognise the initial sounds. For example, when the rime at is segmented from cat, children are left with the initial consonant c. When the rime ain is segmented from train, the onset tr is left.

The initial consonant to consonant blend is called the onset. Thus, the onset in the word cat is c. The onset in the word train is tr. Thus, after children develop awareness of rhyme, they progress to awareness of onset. While, rhyme is generally the first phonological awareness skill to develop, it has the weakest relationship with later reading. It appears that rhyme is essential because it facilitates the develop of more sophisticated phonological skills such as awareness of onset. But rhyme is not as critical in learning to read as awareness of initial sounds.

After children have mastered the concept of rhyme they should be introduce to onset. This can be done using GOLD Phonological Awareness Activity Cards: Onset. When children can sort the cards into categories of words with the same onset, they can commence the onset section of GOLD Student Workbook 2: Initial Sounds.

Initial Phonemes. A phoneme is a single speech sounds. For example, the letter-sounds s, t, r, a, m are all phonemes. After children learn to hear the onset in words, they come to realise that onset made up of initial consonant blends (eg st in stand or cl in clap) can be split into its phonemes. Thus, the onset in stand is st initial phoneme is s.

When children have completed the onset activities in GOLD Phonological Awareness Workbook2: Initial Sounds they can work with GOLD Activity Cards: Initial Phonemes. They can then complete the initial phoneme activities in Workbook 2.

Final Phonemes. After children learn to hear the initial phoneme in words, they learn to hear the final phoneme. Many children have difficulty in hearing the final sound in words, so teachers will need to encourage them to articulate words clearly. In some cases it can be helpful to elongate the final phoneme so that it is easier for children to recognise (eg busssss).

Phonological Awareness is an Oral Skill

Teachers should remember that phonological awareness refers to the ability to hear sounds in spoken language. It does not refer to the spelling of words. Thus, words like comb end in the sound m even though the spelling is different from the sound.

In some cases older students who lack phonological awareness but can recognise some words by sight will say that the end sound in words is the same as the spelling. For example, they would say that comb ends in the sound b, or that come ends in the sound m. It is important forall students who cannot read or who have very limited reading skills to learn to attend to the sounds in words. Thus, students should be encouraged to focus on the sounds rather than the spelling of words.

Accurate spelling is important as students grow older. Thus, to complete an effective decoding program, students should be taught to focus on different elements of words; sounds when sounds are required and spelling when accurate spelling is required. However, before children learn to read and spell words, they need to be able to attend to the sounds independent of spelling.

Assessment of Phonological Awareness

It can be useful to screen young children’s phonological awareness before commencing a program and to use assessment to monitor children’s progress. There are many different methods of assessing phonological awareness. For example, matching tasks ask children to identify a word out of a list of specified words that has the same kind of sound as a given word. For example:

Can you tell me which word rhyme with hat;

Cat, mat or rat?
  
Supply tasks differ from matching tasks in that children are not provided with a list of alternatives from which they can choose. For example:

Can you tell me a word that rhyme with hat?

One of the key differences between these two kinds of tasks is that in the case of matching tasks it is possible for children answer correctly purely by chance. If there are two alternatives from which children can choose, then on each item they have a 50% chance of scoring correctly. If there are three alternatives from which to choose then students have a 33% chance of scoring each item correct.

Reading GOLD Phonological Awareness Assessment uses a series of supply tasks. It assesses children’s ability to identify rhyme, onset and initial phonemes.

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