[1][2][3] Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.
Available published tests of phonological awareness (for example PhAB2[7]) are often used by teachers, psychologists and speech therapists to help understand difficulties in this aspect of language and literacy.
Although the tasks vary, they share the basic requirement that some operation (e.g., identifying, comparing, separating, combining, generating) be performed on the sounds.
Vocabulary size, as well as other measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology, are consistent concurrent and longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness.
[20][30][24][31][32][33][34][35][36] Consistent with this finding, children with communication disorders often have poor phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness is an auditory skill that is developed through a variety of activities that expose students to the sound structure of the language and teach them to recognize, identify and manipulate it.
Early phonological awareness instruction also involves the use of songs, nursery rhymes and games to help students to become alert to speech sounds and rhythms, rather than meanings, including rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and prosody.
While exposure to different sound patterns in songs and rhymes is a start towards developing phonological awareness, exposure in itself is not enough, because the traditional actions that go along with songs and nursery rhymes typically focus on helping students to understand the meanings of words, not attend to the sounds.
Specific activities that involve students in attending to and demonstrating recognition of the sounds of language include waving hands when rhymes are heard, stomping feet along with alliterations, clapping the syllables in names, and slowly stretching out arms when segmenting words.
[64] Some research demonstrates that, at least for older children, there may be utility to extending the development of phonological awareness skills in the context of activities that involve letters and spelling.