How to Build Phonological Awareness Skills in Your School

Learn about phonological awareness, the ability to hear and manipulate units of sound within words. Then, discover strategies to share with teachers as they help students in your schools develop phonological awareness skills—with ten free rhyming books for read-aloud experiences at school and at home!

What Is Phonological Awareness and Why Is It Important?

Phonological awareness skills help students break the reading code. To decode words, students must be able to hear and manipulate sounds within words so they can connect those sounds with the letters that represent them. Students need explicit, systematic phonological awareness instruction.

“Because oral language is experienced as a continuous stream of speech,” explains Julie Christensen in a recent Waterford webinar on phonological awareness, “breaking it into smaller units of sound is not intuitive—these skills must be taught explicitly.” Scarborough’s Reading Rope identifies phonological awareness as an essential subskill that contributes to proficient word recognition skills and reading success.

The opposite is also true. A lack of phonological awareness skills can lead to reading difficulties. Many older students who struggle with reading do not have foundational phonological awareness skills.

Phonological awareness skills, in combination with phonic skills, help students break the reading code to decode words. With plenty of practice decoding words by linking letters and sounds, students build a large bank of words that they recognize automatically. This large bank of sight words makes fluent reading possible. And in turn, fluent reading supports comprehension by allowing students to focus their attention on the meaning of what they read rather than using their cognitive energy to decode many of the words. These are the puzzle pieces of reading, and phonological awareness is key.

Phonological Awareness Activity Ideas for Elementary Students

But what does phonological awareness instruction look like? Here are some lessons you might see in the classroom.

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