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
Bialystok, E., Majumder, S., & Martin, M. M. (2003). Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage? Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(1), 27-44. https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271640300002X
Chard, D. J., & Dickson, S. V. (n.d.). Phonological awareness: Instructional and assessment guidelines. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness/articles/phonological-awareness-instructional-and
Chen, X., Anderson, R. C., Li, W., Hao, M., Wu, X., & Shu, H. (2004). Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(1), 142–151. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.142
de Medeiros, A. C. D., dos Santos, M. F. P., da Costa Varela, F. V., de Lima Rocha, T. A., Messias, B. L. C., & Azoni, C. A. S. (2020). Bilingualism in the development of phonological awareness skills: An integrative literature review. Revista CEFAC, 22(4), e0320. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-0216/20202240320
Hogan, T. P., Catts, H. W., & Little, T. D. (2005). The relationship between phonological awareness and reading: Implications for the assessment of phonological awareness. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 36, 285-293. https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2005/029)
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
Moats, L., & Tolman, C. (n.d.). The development of phonological skills. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/developmental-milestones/articles/development-phonological-skills
Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Phonological and phonemic awareness: introduction. https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101/reading-101-learning-modules/course-modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness
Scott, K. A., Pollock, K., Roberts, J. A., & Krakow, R. (2013). Phonological processing skills of children adopted internationally. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 22(4), 673–683. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(2013/12-0133)
Soto, X., Olszewski, A., & Goldstein, H. (2019). A systematic review of phonological awareness interventions for Latino children in early and primary grades. Journal of Early Intervention, 41(4), 340-365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053815119856067