What is phoneme awareness?
It is the understanding that words are composed of distinct sounds; and the ability to breakdown words into their distinct sounds.
“Blending” or putting sounds together is something that takes a lot of time to learn to do.
Children with phoneme awareness can understand when words rhyme or when they have the same initial sounds. Many researchers think this is difficult for children but experiments show it to be easy.
In an experiment on Italian children with Down’s Syndrome, children performed badly on a phoneme awareness test but performed well on a word reading test. Why is that? The author thinks because the Italian writing system is transparent.
The author will answer what kind of phoneme analysis is easiest to teach and most beneficial to learning to read?
Conclusions
Infants have implicit sensitivity to phonemic units in words and syllables: Yes
Explicit awareness of phonological units develops over childhood from larger to smaller units: words, syllables, onset rimes, phonemes: No
Explicit phonological awareness develops slowly, and phoneme awareness emerges at age 6 or later: No
If phonological awareness fails to develop in the sequence and time frame set out in the theory, this indicates some type of impairment. (There is no room for natural variation in this model) : No
Phonological processing is a strong causal agent in reading skill: No. there is no evidence that natural development of speech perception or speech production plays a causal role in reading skill.
There is no way to segment consonant phonemes due to coarticulation. This make it difficult to reach an alphabetic writing system. Unless children develop phoneme awareness, they will have trouble learning to read. No
Training in phonological awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes improves phoneme awareness and reading skill. No
Speech perception may appear in normal in poor readers, but this masks subtle deficits in perception of acoustic cues for speech and non-speech. No
Phonological processing is the integrating principle that unifies all research on language-related correlates or reading skill: No
Conclusion: The general message from the studies in this section is that receptive language (accurate perception of speech sounds) and articulation (accurate production of speech sounds) are the most buffered biologically of all language functions.
Writing, however, is a human invention. Children need to understand that the writing system is based on phonemes. They need to learn the correspondences between the 40 phonemes of English and the most common way to write them.