Phonological Awareness

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As mentioned before, phonological processing includes phonological awareness, phonological working memory and phonological retrieval. Each skill is important in developing speech production and the development of spoken and written language. Phonological awareness is critical to the development of literacy and it involves the auditory and oral manipulation of sounds. It is the ability to detect and manipulate phonological units of all sizes from phones, to syllables, onsets and rhymes, to words and sentences. It places less of a burden on our memory. Phonological awareness and reading are closely related, such that, during pre-school and kindergarten, it provides critical insight into the skills that children use to learn to read (Adam, 1990). …show more content…

In generalization, phonological awareness is a general ability that has multiple dimensions. These dimensions have to do with, a) the range of difficulty of phonological awareness tasks and b) the factors that affect difficulty. According to Yopp (1988), phonological awareness tasks can be sorted from easiest to more difficult: - rhyme, auditory discrimination, phoneme blending, word-to-word matching, sound isolation, phoneme counting, phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. Children who are able to identify and make oral rhymes, clap out the number of syllables in a word and can recognize words with the same beginning sound, like ‘bat’ and ‘ball’, are deemed to have phonological awareness skills. More and more research is inferring that students with poor phonological awareness skills have difficulties with reading and spelling. In the brain, the angular gyrus and corresponding regions in the occipital and temporal lobes are responsible for phonological processing abilities. Neuro-imaging of dyslexic brains reveals disruption in this area of the …show more content…

Also, identify the exact phoneme awareness task on which you wish to focus and select developmentally appropriate activities for engaging children in the task. These activities should be fun and exciting and not be drilled. The use of concrete representations of sound is another effective approach. For example, when modelling deletion, the teacher can use a number of physical objects to represent each sound and can illustrate deletion by removing from the array the object that represents the sound to be deleted. Modelling of the production of sounds show how the articulatory mechanics responsible for the production of each speech sound helps students know how it feels to produce sound and what happens in the mouth. Explicit instruction is another approach that involves the modelling of a sound by the teacher, the production of the sound by the student, the direct teaching of phonological awareness skills and the use of concrete representation and scaffolding of difficult areas. Teaching phonemic awareness together with letter-sound correspondences is learned more efficiently when presented in conjunction with letter-sound correspondences (Module 2 Unit 2 Pgs.

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