Phonological Awareness

About Phonological Awareness

The 2000 report of the National Reading Panel defines phonemic awareness as the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words.

The Put Reading First publication describes phonological awareness as a broad term that includes phonemic awareness.

Phonological awareness activities can involve work with:

•   Phonemes
•    Rhymes
•    Words
•    Syllables
•   Onsets and rimes

National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis showed that teaching children to manipulate sounds in language helps them read better. (2000 report ).

Instruction in phonological awareness helped all types of children improve their reading, including:

•          Typically developing readers
•          Children at risk for future reading problems
•          Students with disabilities
•          Preschoolers
•          Kindergartners
•          First graders
•          Children in second through sixth grades (most of whom were students with disabilities)
•          Children across various socioeconomic levels, and C
•          Children learning to read in English as well as in other languages.        (NICHHD, 2000).

For both young readers and pre-readers:  Familiarity with letters and sensitivity to the phonetic structure of oral language were strong predictors of reading achievement; even more so than IQ (Adams, 1990).

The National Reading Panel supports the following tasks presented in a sequential order based on developmentally appropriate phonological awareness skills. The studies they reviewed found that the researchers used the following tasks to assess children’s phonological awareness or to improve their phonological awareness through instruction and practice:

•           Phoneme isolation
•           Phoneme identity
•           Phoneme categorization
•           Phoneme blending
•           Phoneme segmentation
•           Phoneme deletion.