Phonological Awareness In Spoken Language

The process of learning to read is not considered to be an innate developmental function of the brain and therefore it requires explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (Department of Education, Science and Training, 2005). When all of these components are taught together children develop an understanding of the relationship between the sounds in spoken language, the letters and letter combinations that make up written words and their meanings (Emmitt, Hornsby & Wilson, 2013). This essay identifies the key characteristics of emergent readers and describes a range of strategies used by educators to enhance the process of learning to read.

Children aged between three and seven are considered to
Phonological awareness can be divided into three categories; they are syllabic awareness, onset and rime, and phonemic awareness (Professional Development Service for Teachers PDST, n.d.). Although phonological awareness compromises of several levels, the phoneme level is most crucial to decoding and encoding skill development (Colorado Department of Education and Training, 2017). Syllabic awareness involves blending, segmenting and isolation of syllables. According to Sawers & Sheils (2002) activities involving counting words in a sentence or syllables in a word scaffold children’s ability to isolate phoneme synthesis and segmentation and therefore aid in the development of decoding skills. Onset and rime awareness develops as children learn to recite nursery rhymes and select or generate rhyming words. To effectively teach phonemic awareness, instruction needs to be child appropriate, deliberate, purposeful and explicit (PDST, n.d.). This can be achieved through instructional sequencing. For example, the educator plans the skill to be taught, the order to teach it in (e.g., compound words, syllables, phonemes), and how it is going to be taught (e.g., whole-group, one-to-one etc.). The educator can then reinforce the connections made throughout the day to further scaffold the learning of that skill (Phillips, Menchett &Lonigan, 2008). As children become aware of
All reading instruction should serve the purpose of increasing comprehension (Lane, 2014). The mental process of comprehension begins before a child starts to read and continues throughout the entire reading process. The role of the educator in teaching comprehension is to model, share, guide and apply strategies whilst gradually releasing the responsibility onto the child. This begins with the educator demonstrating and explaining strategies, then scaffolding and encouraging the child to participate, practice and apply the strategies across all curriculum areas (PTSD, n.d.). According to (Department of Education WA, 2014) comprehension strategies are explicitly taught to emergent readers to develop their understanding of texts. Examples of these strategies are previewing and summarising. Previewing encourages children to make predictions about the text; it can also pique their interest. Children taught to summarise, can learn to determine the essential ideas within the text, intern furthering their comprehension skills (Department of Education WA,