What is "Phonological Awareness?"
Phonological awareness (or phonemic awareness) is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonological awareness skills are considered to be the basic building blocks required for learning how to read. They are generally acquired in a hierarchical order, i.e., children usually need to master one skill before acquiring the next in the hierarchy. Research has determined that phonemic awareness is the best predictor of reading success.
Adams (1990) describes 5 levels of phonemic awareness in terms of abilities:
- to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes
- to do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration)
- to blend and split syllables
- to perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of sounds in a word)
- to perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular sound and regenerating a word from the remainder).