Phonological awareness
Encyclopedia
Phonological awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading
ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.
s, and (3) phoneme
s. Awareness of these sounds is demonstrated through a variety of tasks (see below). Although the tasks vary, they share the basic requirement that some operation (e.g., identifying, comparing, separating, combining, generating) be performed on the sounds. It is assumed that the individual performing these tasks must have awareness of the units of sound in order to perform the operation.
Phonological awareness is one component of a larger phonological processing system used for speaking and listening. Phonological awareness is different from other phonological abilities in that it is a metalinguistic
skill, requiring conscious awareness and reflection on the structure of language. Other phonological abilities: such as attending to speech, discriminating between sounds, holding sounds in memory: can be performed without conscious reflection. However, these other phonological abilities are prerequisite to the development of phonological awareness. Therefore, general listening skills are often among those included in phonological awareness instruction.
The terms phonemic awareness
and phonics
are often used interchangeably with phonological awareness. However, these terms have different meanings. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that focuses specifically on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest units of sound. Phonics requires students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn the rules of spelling, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. Phonological awareness relates only to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters or sound-spellings, so it is not necessary for students to have alphabet knowledge in order to develop a basic phonological awareness of language.
Phonological awareness tasks (adapted from Virginia Department of Education (1998): and Gillon (2004)
Listening skills:
The ability to attend to and distinguish environmental and speech sounds from one another
Syllable-structure awareness tasks:
Onset-rime awareness tasks:
Phonemic awareness tasks:
The development of phonological awareness is closely tied to overall language and speech development. Vocabulary size, as well as other measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology, are consistent concurrent and longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness. Consistent with this finding, children with communication disorders often have poor phonological awareness.
Phonological development and articulatory accuracy is often correlated to phonological awareness skills, both for children with typical speech and those with disordered speech. In addition to milestones of speech and language development, speech and language processing abilities are also related to phonological awareness: both speech perception and verbal short-term memory have been concurrently and predicatively correlated with phonological awareness abilities.
The relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is often explained in terms of its role in decoding and encoding. In reading, decoding refers to the process of relating a word's written representation to its verbal representation. Especially in the early stages of reading, decoding involves mapping letters in the word to their corresponding sounds, and then combining those sounds to form a verbal word. Encoding: a process used in spelling: is similar, although the process goes in the opposite direction, with the word's verbal representation is encoded in a written form. Again, especially in the early stages of reading, encoding involves determining the sounds in a verbal word, and then mapping those sounds onto a letter sequence in order to spell out the written word. In both encoding and decoding, phonological awareness is needed because the child must know the sounds in the words in order to relate them to the letter sounds.
, alliteration
, onomatopoeia, and prosody
. While exposure to different sound patterns in songs and rhymes is a start towards developing phonological awareness, exposure in itself is not enough, because the traditional actions that go along with songs and nursery rhymes typically focus on helping students to understand the meanings of words, not attend to the sounds. Therefore, different strategies must be implemented to aid students in becoming alert to sounds instead. Specific activities that involve students in attending to and demonstrating recognition of the sounds of language include waving hands when rhymes are heard, stomping feet along with alliterations, clapping the syllables in names, and slowly stretching out arms when segmenting words. Phonological awareness is technically only about sounds and students do not need to know the letters of the alphabet to be able to develop phonological awareness.
Students in primary education
sometimes learn phonological awareness in the context of literacy activities, particularly phonemic awareness. Some research demonstrates that, at least for older children, there may be utility to extending the development of phonological awareness skills in the context of activities that involve letters and spelling. A number of scholars have been working on this approach.
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.
Overview
Phonological awareness involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: (1) syllables, (2) onsets and rimeSyllable rime
In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
s, and (3) phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s. Awareness of these sounds is demonstrated through a variety of tasks (see below). Although the tasks vary, they share the basic requirement that some operation (e.g., identifying, comparing, separating, combining, generating) be performed on the sounds. It is assumed that the individual performing these tasks must have awareness of the units of sound in order to perform the operation.
Phonological awareness is one component of a larger phonological processing system used for speaking and listening. Phonological awareness is different from other phonological abilities in that it is a metalinguistic
Metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to culture and society. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. The neologism 'metalinguistics' emerged between 1950 and...
skill, requiring conscious awareness and reflection on the structure of language. Other phonological abilities: such as attending to speech, discriminating between sounds, holding sounds in memory: can be performed without conscious reflection. However, these other phonological abilities are prerequisite to the development of phonological awareness. Therefore, general listening skills are often among those included in phonological awareness instruction.
The terms phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning...
and phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
are often used interchangeably with phonological awareness. However, these terms have different meanings. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that focuses specifically on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest units of sound. Phonics requires students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn the rules of spelling, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. Phonological awareness relates only to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters or sound-spellings, so it is not necessary for students to have alphabet knowledge in order to develop a basic phonological awareness of language.
Phonological awareness tasks (adapted from Virginia Department of Education (1998): and Gillon (2004)
Listening skills:
The ability to attend to and distinguish environmental and speech sounds from one another
- Alertness: Awareness and localization of sounds
- Discrimination: Recognize same/different sounds
- Memory: Recall of sounds and sound patterns
- Sequencing: Identify order of what was heard
- Figure-ground: Isolate one sound from background of other sounds
- Perception: Comprehension of sounds heard
Syllable-structure awareness tasks:
- Syllable segmentation: e.g., "How many syllables (or parts) are in the word coffee?"
- Syllable completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a rabbit. I'll say the first part of the word. Can you finish the word ra_____?"
- Syllable identity: e.g., "Which part of complete and compare sound the same?"
- Syllable deletion: e.g., "Say finish. Now say it again without the fin"
Onset-rime awareness tasks:
- Spoken word recognition: e.g., "Do these words rhyme: shell bell?"
- Spoken rhyme detection or rhyme oddity task: e.g., "Which word does not rhyme: fish, dish, hook?"
- Spoken rhyme generation: e.g., "Tell me words that rhyme with bell?"
- Onset-rime blending
Phonemic awareness tasks:
- Alliteration awareness (aka phoneme detection and sound or phoneme categorization): e.g., "Which word has a different first sound: bed, bus, chair, ball?"
- Phoneme matching: e.g., "Which word begins with the same sound as bat: horn, bed, cup?"
- Phoneme isolation: e.g., "Tell me the sound you hear at the beginning of the word food"
- Phoneme completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a watch. Finish the word for me: wa_____ "
- Phoneme blending with words or non-words: e.g., "What word do these sounds make: m...oo...n?"
- Phoneme deletion, also referred to as phoneme elision: e.g., "Say coat. Now say it again but don't say /k/"
- Phoneme segmentation with words or non-words: e.g., "How many sounds can you hear in the word it?
- Phoneme reversal: e.g., "Say na (as in nap). Now say na backwards"
- Phoneme manipulation: e.g., "Say dash. Now say it again, but instead of /æ/ say /I/"
- Spoonerism: e.g., felt made becomes melt fade
Development
Although some two-year-old children demonstrate phonological awareness, for most children, phonological awareness appears in the third year, with accelerating growth through the fourth and fifth years. Phonological awareness skills develop in a predictable pattern—similar across languages—progressing from larger to smaller units of sound (that is, from words to syllables to onsets and syllable rimes to phonemes). Tasks used to demonstrate awareness of these sounds have their own developmental sequence. For example, tasks involving the detection of similar or dissimilar sounds (e.g., oddity tasks) are mastered before tasks requiring the manipulation of sounds (e.g., deletion tasks), and blending tasks are mastered before segmenting tasks. It should be noted that the acquisition of phonological awareness skills does not progress in a linear sequence; rather, children continue to refine skills they have acquired while they learn new skills.The development of phonological awareness is closely tied to overall language and speech development. Vocabulary size, as well as other measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology, are consistent concurrent and longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness. Consistent with this finding, children with communication disorders often have poor phonological awareness.
Phonological development and articulatory accuracy is often correlated to phonological awareness skills, both for children with typical speech and those with disordered speech. In addition to milestones of speech and language development, speech and language processing abilities are also related to phonological awareness: both speech perception and verbal short-term memory have been concurrently and predicatively correlated with phonological awareness abilities.
Phonological awareness and reading
Phonological awareness is an important determiner of success in learning to read and spell. For most children, strong readers have strong phonological awareness, and poor readers have poor phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness skills in the preschool and kindergarten years also strongly predict how well a child will read in the school years. In addition, interventions to improve phonological awareness abilities lead to significantly improved reading abilities. Phonological awareness instruction improves reading and spelling skills, but the reverse is also true: literacy instruction improves phonological awareness skills. The relationship between phonological awareness and reading abilities changes over time. All levels of phonological awareness ability (syllable, onset-rhyme, and phoneme) contribute to reading abilities in the Kindergarten through second grade. However, beyond the second grade, phoneme-level abilities play a stronger role.The relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is often explained in terms of its role in decoding and encoding. In reading, decoding refers to the process of relating a word's written representation to its verbal representation. Especially in the early stages of reading, decoding involves mapping letters in the word to their corresponding sounds, and then combining those sounds to form a verbal word. Encoding: a process used in spelling: is similar, although the process goes in the opposite direction, with the word's verbal representation is encoded in a written form. Again, especially in the early stages of reading, encoding involves determining the sounds in a verbal word, and then mapping those sounds onto a letter sequence in order to spell out the written word. In both encoding and decoding, phonological awareness is needed because the child must know the sounds in the words in order to relate them to the letter sounds.
Intervention
Phonological awareness is an auditory skill that is developed through a variety of activities that expose students to the sound structure of the language and teach them to recognize, identify and manipulate it. Listening skills are an important foundation for the development of phonological awareness and they generally develop first. Therefore, the scope and sequence of instruction in early childhood literacy curriculum typically begins with a focus on listening, as teachers instruct children to attend to and distinguish sounds, including environmental sounds and the sounds of speech. Early phonological awareness instruction also involves the use of songs, nursery rhymes and games to help students to become alert to speech sounds and rhythms, rather than meanings, including rhymeRhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
, alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
, onomatopoeia, and prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
. While exposure to different sound patterns in songs and rhymes is a start towards developing phonological awareness, exposure in itself is not enough, because the traditional actions that go along with songs and nursery rhymes typically focus on helping students to understand the meanings of words, not attend to the sounds. Therefore, different strategies must be implemented to aid students in becoming alert to sounds instead. Specific activities that involve students in attending to and demonstrating recognition of the sounds of language include waving hands when rhymes are heard, stomping feet along with alliterations, clapping the syllables in names, and slowly stretching out arms when segmenting words. Phonological awareness is technically only about sounds and students do not need to know the letters of the alphabet to be able to develop phonological awareness.
Students in primary education
Primary education
A primary school is an institution in which children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as primary or elementary education. Primary school is the preferred term in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth Nations, and in most publications of the United Nations Educational,...
sometimes learn phonological awareness in the context of literacy activities, particularly phonemic awareness. Some research demonstrates that, at least for older children, there may be utility to extending the development of phonological awareness skills in the context of activities that involve letters and spelling. A number of scholars have been working on this approach.
See also
- DyslexiaDyslexiaDyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
- Phonological Awareness for LiteracyPhonological Awareness for LiteracyThe Phonological Awareness for Literacy Program is a commercial literacy therapy program for use by speech therapists designed to improve phonological awareness skills required for literacy in children aged 8 – 12...
- Phonological deficitPhonological deficitThe phonological deficit hypothesis is a prevalent neurological explanation for the cause of reading difficulties and dyslexia. It stems from evidence that individuals with dyslexia tend to do poorly on tests which measure their ability to decode nonsense words using conventional phonetic rules,...
hypothesis
External links
- WikEd's Phonemic Awareness Page
- Phonological Awareness Activities and Information
- Dr. Laura Ann Petitto on Phonological processing