Phonological Awareness - General Information

Phonological awareness is now a focus of your child's literacy instruction in the early grades.  It is a little confusing to parents who are new to this term, but you will find once you explore this section of the portal that it is something that you have been doing with your children all along but never knew it!  

Phonological awareness is the understanding that speech can be broken up into parts such as whole words, syllables and individual sounds.  Anything we do to highlight spoken words and the parts of spoken words is a phonological awareness activity.  When young children learn to recognize that speech can be slowed down and that words can be broken up into syllables and individual sounds, they have an easier time figuring out how written language works.  While phonics teaches children about letters and letter patterns, phonological awareness teaches children about speech sounds and sound patterns.  When your children learn how to make the sounds that letters represent they are doing a phonological awareness activity.  When they are making up silly rhyming words they are doing a phonological awareness activity.  When they practice clapping out the beats to represent the syllables in their name they are doing a phonological awareness activity.  The activities you can do at home to support the development of your child's phonological awareness skills are truly endless!

The diagram below reveals that phonological awareness skills encompass many different levels of spoken language.  For the purposes of this parent portal, we will be providing general information only and fun activities that you can do at home to support your child's early literacy development. One thing to note is that bigger parts of speech like whole words are easier for your child to recognize than smaller parts of speech, such as syllables or individual sounds.  So preschoolers and kindergarten students should be doing lots of whole word and syllable activities, while children in grade one and up will benefit from activities that focus on individual speech sounds.  Remember – every time you do a phonological awareness activity with your children, you are making them better readers and writers!

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Why are Phonological Awareness Skills So Important?

Decades of reading research have shown that:

• A child's level of phonological awareness upon entering school is one of the best predictors of how well he or she will learn to read and write.

• The primary problem experienced by children with reading disorders is a deficit in their phonological awareness skills.

• Phonological awareness enables children to learn letter sounds and how to blend and segment sounds, skills that are needed to learn to read and spell words.

• Good phonological awareness skills support the development of good reading comprehension, since they enable children to read words quickly and efficiently.