PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

Phonological Awareness



Phonological Awareness

Outline Of The Theoretical Background

Phonological awareness is the ability of the phonological process that is most strongly linked to literacy. It includes the awareness of phoneme, the ability to control individual sounds in words, and the skills required for phonemes including judging whether two words rhyme or not. The idea behind the development of phonological awareness is to reduce an individual's difficulty to read and to enhance his or her reading skills for the betterment of his educational level (Yopp et al. 2004: 8).

It is considered that the phonological awareness is an essential element for learning and to read properly in alphabetic languages like English.

During the early years of school, a child starts to develop sensitivity to the sounds and meanings of words spoken by him (Phillips et al. 2008: 15). However, because the child is in the initial phases of oral development, it is possible that he/she has issues in sequencing sounds because sounds are difficult in nature. Phonological awareness involves the development of these skills which are subsequently connected to a child's understanding of the written word (Yopp et al. 2004: 13).

The role played by the phonological awareness is now broadly defined and identified to manipulate phonological units of language that is, the ability to learn and read is largely acknowledged. The schools have now admitted that the child is able to read if he or she has enough understanding of the phonologic (Ehri et al. 2002: 113).

Phonological awareness requires the ability to control phonological units including syllables, rhymes, and phonemes. However, it has been identified that the development of phonological awareness starts at the age of four or five, and the child becomes competent at age six or seven. Therefore, the development of phonological awareness is needed at the time of the child's kindergarten or first-grade levels (Castles et al. 2004: 87).

PICOT Question

Does Phonological Awareness intervention improve literacy skills in children with spoken language and/or expressive phonological impairments, compared to no intervention?

Literature Review

Many studies have been conducted to teach the phonological awareness to children and to see that whether these training sessions are helpful and effective or not. Moreover, randomized intervention studies demonstrated that there is a relationship between the phonological awareness and literacy that is the awareness of phonemes improved literacy of a child (Casalis et al. 2000: 303).

Jason et al. (2005) have observed in a research that the child, who receives phonological awareness program, makes significantly more gains in his or her phonological awareness ability than a child who receives the other kinds of speech and language programs (Jason 2005: 255-257).

A recent study conducted by Keri et al. (2007) has shown that the training sessions provided to children proved to be very effective. The program included the progress of students from large to smaller phonological units. For instance, when a child was trained, he was told to break the sentence into words, and then to break the syllables into phonemes. The training resulted in a successful ...