5.1: Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness provides the essential support or foundation upon which other literacy skills, such as reading and writing, are built. It is a fundamental skill that is necessary for the development of more advanced literacy abilities. It starts with basic sound recognition in early language development and progresses through phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, and early reading and writing. By ensuring that phonological awareness is integrated at each stage of the continuum, educators can support a strong foundation for literacy development, leading to successful reading and writing outcomes for children.

Emergent Literacy Continuum of Skills

When examining what is happening during the emergent reading stage, it is helpful to recognize the elements of procedural knowledge that emergent readers need. Emergent reading elements can be identified as either a constrained skill or a continuous component.

Constrained skills include phonological awareness, concepts of print, and alphabetic principle.

Continuous components include comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency.

Constrained skills are considered finite, meaning that once a child has acquired the specific understanding it does not need to be relearned. Examples of constrained skills include knowing the names of the 26 letters of the alphabet and recognizing common sight words.

Continuous components include knowledge that is acquired over time, such as vocabulary. Both constrained skills and continuous components are important emergent literacy qualities of the first 5 years of life. The figures in each section span from birth to age 5 and are separated into six stages, including early infancy, later infancy, early toddler, later toddler, early preschool, and later preschool. These stages are used to highlight typical developmental time frames and demonstrate complexity as children progress. The Continuum of Emergent Reading Development is part of the Virginia Unified Early Learning and Development Standards for All Children Ages Birth-5 and serves as a resource to help early childhood educators more effectively support student learning. To view all of the Virginia Unified Early Learning and Development Standards for All Children Ages Birth-5, go to https://www.doe.virginia.gov/home/sh...90605072570000

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is a constrained set of skills, but critical to the developing reader’s ability to understand language and eventually print.

Phonological awareness is a broad term encompassing an awareness of various-sized units of sounds in spoken words such as rhymes (whole words), syllables (large parts of words), and phonemes (individual sounds). Sometimes referred to as a metalinguistic skill (Goswami, 2002), phonological awareness involves the ability to hear and distinguish the auditory components of spoken language.

Rhyming is usually the easiest and earliest form of phonological awareness that children acquire. Being able to break the spoken word “teacher” into two syllables is a form of phonological awareness that is more sophisticated. Additionally, we may hear another child say, “Cat sounds like my name, Caroline!” This child was able to recognize that the word “cat” starts with the same sound, or phoneme, as her name. Phonemes are the smallest individual units of sound in a spoken word. Phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and register phonemes, is the most advanced level of phonological awareness. Upon hearing the word “sleigh,” children with phonemic awareness will recognize that there are three separate speech sounds—/s/ /l/ /ā/—despite the fact that they may have no idea what the word looks like in its printed form and despite the fact that they would likely have difficulty reading it. It is important to understand that all of these phonological skills are focused on auditory and verbal feedback and are not connected to visual symbols or letters.

In the table in the next section, indicators for phonological development are listed under each of the six age bands. You will see that children move from listening to familiar words to imitating sounds. Eventually, children begin playing with language in ways that demonstrate an understanding of rhyming words, segmenting individual sounds, and blending sounds in words. For instance, we may hear a young child playing with language and saying, “bad, fad, cad, sad, mad, wad” as they are starting to recognize that some words rhyme, or end with that same sound.

References

Goswami, U. (2002). Early phonological development and the acquisition of literacy. In. S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 111- 125). Guilford Press.