{"id":10370,"date":"2015-03-20T14:07:37","date_gmt":"2015-03-20T21:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.speechbuddy.com\/blog\/?p=10370"},"modified":"2015-09-22T08:36:27","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T15:36:27","slug":"what-is-phonological-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.speechbuddy.com\/blog\/apps\/what-is-phonological-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Phonological Awareness & Why You should Learn Now!"},"content":{"rendered":"

March is National Reading Month, so to celebrate raising awareness of this crucial life skill\u00a0we’ll\u00a0discuss the links between speech and language development and early literacy skills. A number of skills that would fall under the speech and language umbrella are enormously important to the development of early literacy. What can\u00a0parents can do to promote early literacy in their children, from 12 months (or even earlier!) through pre-adolescence? We’ll discuss that too. You may already actively do some or all of these things with your child(ren), but let’s explore\u00a0some\u00a0evidence-based lessons\u00a0as you continue to stimulate your child\u2019s reading development. Learning to read and to \u2665 love reading \u2665<\/span> is a childhood-long project for both children and parents and the work you do as a parent and this post aims to be another support for this noble endeavor.<\/p>\n

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What is Phonological Awareness?<\/h2>\n

\"SoundsOne of the key terms that speech and language clinicians concern themselves with as they work to enhance speech development in children, is phonological awareness<\/strong><\/em>. As the term denotes, phonological awareness refers to a child\u2019s knowledge of the sound structure of words. A sister term, phonemic awareness<\/em>, refers to a child\u2019s ability to distinguish between sounds in a language that can change a word\u2019s meaning. For example, a four-year old child with good phonemic awareness would be able to tell you, without any conversational context, that the words thin<\/em> and fin<\/em> are indeed different, even though the \/f\/ and \/th\/ sounds (read, phonemes here) are acoustically quite similar. One common cause of a child being unable to say the \/th\/ sound correctly in his\/her perceptual confusion with the \/f\/ sound, for example. In fact, many children say \/wIf\/ for \u201cwith\u201d and this may come from actually not hearing the difference between the two sounds.<\/p>\n

Phonological awareness is a pretty general term I should add and encompasses a number of sub skills. The skills include not just the sounds themselves, but also the syllable. An assessment of phonological awareness might ask a child to identify which syllable is shared by two words (e.g. in market and marmalade), or to say how a word would sound if a syllable were taken out (e.g. \u201chow might \u201cmarket\u201d sound if we took out \u201cmar\u201d). Another part of such an assessment might ask about rhyming: which words rhyme or don\u2019t rhyme, or to generate a list of words that rhyme with given stimulus word. The child would also need to identify which two words are alliterative, or start with the same sound.<\/p>\n

Similarly, phonemic awareness would be concerned with a child\u2019s knowledge of sounds, but would be more associated with individual sounds rather than with syllables or with how sounds may be associated with each other through, say rhyming. Sub-skills that might be found on an assessment could be sound\/phoneme:<\/p>\n