Phonological Awareness for Improving Reading Skills of Students

Reading ability serves as the foundation for all other learning. However, for many children, mastering the fundamental abilities required for reading can be a challenging process. This is where the concept of phonological awareness comes into play as an important skill to develop early on.

Understanding Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the capacity for a person to identify and control the sounds of spoken language. It entails understanding and using the sounds of spoken words, including syllables, onset and rime, and individual phonemes (a language’s smallest units of sound). It is an important pre-reading skill since it serves as the foundation for phonics, spelling, and word recognition.

Fostering Phonological Awareness

1) Rhyming Games and Songs: Engage children in rhyming activities such as singing nursery rhymes, playing rhyming word games, or reciting silly rhymes. Rhymes assist children in identifying common sound patterns as well as improving their capacity to differentiate and manipulate sounds.

2) Sound Segmentation: Encourage children to break down words into distinct sounds or syllables.  Choose known short poems, such as “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” Allow children to clap their hands after each syllable. Ask children to segment their names into syllables, such as Har-per, Ez-ra, Ab-ra-ham, and Ja-son. When children have mastered removing a word’s first phoneme (sound), teach them to segment short words into separate phonemes, such as s-u-n, p-a-t, and s-t-o-p.

3) Wordplay: Wordplay is manipulating words’ sounds by adding, deleting, or swapping them. For example, tell children to speak “bat” without the /b/ sound or “pan” without the /p/ sound. These activities help students understand how sound manipulation impacts word meaning.