Phonological awareness is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words. Phonics is the understanding that there is a relationship between letters and sounds through written language. Children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words.
Need for Teachers to teach phonological awareness skills
The ultimate aim of phonological awareness training is to enable children to acquire proficient reading and writing skills. Without the ability to decode words skillfully, children will have difficulty comprehending an author’s message and fail to make sense of a written text, whether in storybook form or in expository text. An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be …show more content…
As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness in kindergarten is a strong predictor of later reading success. Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school .While phonological awareness is easily taught to children in the early years, the absence of strong oral language, reading, and word play in the home can lead to reading difficulties and a failure to progress in reading development as per Hammill & McNutt.The level of phonemic awareness that a child possesses accounts for as much as 50 percent of the variance in reading proficiency by the end of 1st grade .The degree of phonological awareness that the child has developed upon entry into school is widely held to be the strongest single determinant of the child's reading success