Phonological Awareness

A variety of phonological awareness activities can be implemented in the classroom to help children distinguish between sounds and take a step towards independent reading. Phonological awareness skills can be taught through poems, games, songs, and nursery rhymes. Children must practice rhyming, syllable division, and sound segmentation to build phonological awareness.

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Rhyming is the first step in teaching children phonological awareness. After introducing rhymes, teachers should ask students to practice rhymes by manipulating and adding sounds to words.

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The next step in learning phonological awareness skills is to break apart syllables. Clap out words like Oc-to-ber and Su-per-man to help children count syllables in words.

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The final step in teaching children phonological awareness is to help them practice sound segmentation, which is pulling words apart into different sounds. You can give the example of “Hat” and tell them that the dish consists of three sounds – h-a-t.?

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Example: To increase phonological awareness among children, teachers can help with songs, poetry, and traditional rhymes. After reciting rhyming songs or chants, the teacher can ask students to count the number of syllables in a word.

Differences Between Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness

Usually, phonological and phonemic awareness refers to phonological awareness. The terms are interchangeably used, but have different meanings. To understand the differences between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, we first have to understand phonemic awareness.

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, manipulate, identify, and work with individual sounds in spoken language. The primary difference between phonological and phonemic awareness is that phonological awareness is the ability to recognize words made up of different sounds. In contrast, phonemic awareness is the ability to understand how sound functions in words.

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Phonological awareness includes identifying rhyme words, sentence segmentation, identifying syllables in words, and onsets and rimes. On the other hand, phonemic awareness includes blending sounds into words, sound segmentation, and manipulating a phoneme to form a new word.