A teacher guides their class in clapping out each syllable of the word “banana.” One child correctly identifies that “hat” rhymes with “bat.” Another splits up the word “tree” into three different sounds. All of these are examples of an important literacy-related skill: phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound patterns of language as well as their ability to manipulate said patterns. It is an umbrella term that includes manipulation and recognition of a variety of language patterns such as rhyming, alliteration (when the same sound occurs at the beginning of each word – for example, “she sells seashells by the seashore”), and segmenting (of sentences into words, words into syllables, and syllables into individual sounds) (Reading Rockets, n.d.). A child with strong phonological awareness skills is adept at recognizing these patterns and “messing with them” at will – for example, they would be able to change the ending sounds of “toy” to make the words “tea” or “too” while recognizing that all three words have the same beginning sound of “t”.
Phonemic awareness is a more specific subcategory of phonological awareness. It refers to an individual’s ability to recognize and manipulate individual phonemes (Reading Rockets, n.d.). Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up spoken language, and the number of phonemes does not necessarily match up to the number of letters in a word. For example, the letters “kn” in “knock” correspond to one phoneme: the /n/ sound. When we speak, we put phonemes together to create meaning. When phonemes change, the meaning of the word also changes. For example, if we replace the /f/ phoneme in “free” with a /t/ phoneme, we get “tree.” Thus, a child with strong phonemic awareness would be skilled at switching around individual speech sounds, or phonemes, to create different words.
Phonological awareness skills grow over the course of children’s development. They begin emerging before the age of 4. At age 4, 80-90% of children are imitating rhyme and alliteration; phonological awareness continues to develop at least until the age of 9, when children are now skilled in deleting one consonant from a consonant pair (for example, “tree” becomes “tee”) (see this article from Reading Rockets (Moats, L., & Tolman, n.d.) for a table describing phonological awareness milestones).
Why is phonological awareness important? In short, phonological awareness is important because it is a predictor (and likely a causal factor) of reading ability. For instance, a study of 570 children found that phonological awareness in kindergarten, above and beyond letter identification abilities, predicted subsequent word reading ability in 2nd grade (Hogan, 2005). In addition to phonological awareness in general, phonemic awareness in particular may play an important role in reading ability. A meta-analytic review found that phonemic awareness uniquely predicted reading ability even when accounting for other skills (i.e., rime awareness and verbal short-term memory), suggesting that phonemic skills in particular are a promising intervention target in early childhood (Melvy-Lervåg et al., 2012).
How can parents and educators support children’s phonological awareness skills? Reading Rockets recommends targeting phonological awareness skills using fun and engaging activities that are appropriate for a child’s developmental level, suggesting activities such as guiding children in segmenting the sounds in their own names as well as guessing words that have been heavily segmented into their individual phonemes or have had phonemes deleted; skills should be targeted from easiest to most complex, and a tiered system may be necessary for children who need extra support (Chard & Dickson, n.d.).
Thus far, we have discussed phonological awareness only in monolingual English-speaking children. An important question remains: How is phonological awareness different for bilingual children? Some evidence points to bilingual children having an advantage over their monolingual peers in terms of phonological awareness. In one integrative review of eight papers, five papers found that bilingual children (representing many different language combinations) had a phonological awareness advantage, while two papers found that monolingual children had the advantage (de Medeiros et al., 2020). Another study found that, although the Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking children studied had similar phonological processing in 1st grade, the Cantonese-speaking children in 2nd grade (who were now effectively becoming bilingual, in contrast to their monolingual Mandarin-speaking peers) showed an advantage in some aspects of phonological processing that disappeared by 4th grade; the researchers hypothesized that possible causes of this advantage could be the Cantonese-speaking children’s status as being bilinguals or their unique exposure to the comparatively rich phonological system of Cantonese (Chen et al., 2004). In contrast, Bialystok et al. (2003) found no consistent evidence of a phonological awareness advantage for bilinguals.
At any rate, phonological awareness in the early years appears to be a resilient skill, regardless of variations in children’s language exposure. Scott et al. (2013) found that when children adopted from China before the age of 24 months completed a phonological awareness assessment, they scored within the average range when compared to the assessment’s normative sample. These children experienced a drastic linguistic change: they went from hearing only their native language to hearing almost only English. Yet, as a whole, their phonological skills were intact.
How can teachers and parents promote phonological awareness across languages? First, stakeholders must understand the differences between the child’s languages, as different languages emphasize different aspects of phonological awareness. For example, tonal awareness (awareness of how variations in pitch change the meaning of individual words) and syllable awareness are very useful in Cantonese, a tonal language in which meaning maps onto syllables very closely, while phonemic awareness is more useful for English speakers and more difficult for Cantonese speakers (Chen et al., 2004). Stakeholders should also learn about phonological aspects that children’s languages have in common. For example, words in both Spanish and Japanese commonly have the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (for example, “luna” in Spanish and 猫 (“neko”) in Japanese). Thus, stakeholders can tailor their activities to target common phonological aspects (getting the biggest “bang for your buck”) as well as unique phonological aspects (to fill in any gaps).
Which language should you target phonological awareness in? The answer, whenever possible, is all languages! A literature review by Soto et al. (2019) identified two studies that found that when English-Spanish bilinguals received bilingual phonological awareness intervention, they made gains (albeit disparately sized gains) in both languages. The authors also make the following recommendations for phonological awareness intervention for Spanish-English bilinguals, which could reasonably be extended to other bilinguals:
- Make instruction explicit.
- Allow children multiple opportunities to respond.
- Draw attention to the salient aspects of each language.
- Do not directly translate materials from one language to another. (As discussed above, each language emphasizes unique aspects of phonological awareness!)
We have seen that phonological awareness is an important skill that is related to later reading ability, and it is a skill that can be targeted across languages. Most importantly, perhaps, working on phonological awareness can be incredibly fun! How will you incorporate phonological awareness into activities with the children in your life?
References
Melvy-Lervåg, M., Halaas Lyster, S. -A., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 322-352. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026744
