Phonological Awareness
(P.A.) includes oral language skills that involve the ability to notice, think
about, or manipulate the individual sounds in words. It differs from both phonics
and general print awareness.
Phonological Awareness
is the sensitivity to the different sounds in spoken words, called phonemes.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that makes a difference
in a word's meaning. Words in all languages are composed of strings of phonemes.
All words are created by using the various combinations of the 44 different
speech sounds.
Students' Phonological Awareness skills progress from being sensitive to rhyme,
to judging whether words have the same first or last sounds and the ability
to pronounce the individual sounds, to telling how similar words are different
from one another when pronounced.
Why Phonological Awareness is Essential
Without at least
emergent levels of phonemic awareness, the rationale for learning individual
letter sounds, and "sounding out" words is not understandable (Torgesen,
2001).
Weak skills in
PA have been identified as a primary cause for reading difficulties (Fitzpatrick,
1997).
PA leads to a better
understanding of the alphabetic system and of how print represents spoken words.
Without the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words, children
have difficulty learning to map the sounds to letters and letter patterns -
the essences of decoding (Adams, 1990).
Characteristics of Effective Instruction in Phonological Awareness
PA can be taught in 15 minutes a day, blended with other reading experiences.
Although the preferred time to teach children PA is during kindergarten or
first grade, these skills can be offered to any beginning reader.
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