Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Many studies show that early phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness, is one of the strongest predictors of later reading achievement. Most of the time when we think of the sounds of spoken language we think about words but phonological awareness includes parts of words such as syllables and the smallest unit of spoken language, the phoneme. In terms of language development, phonological awareness starts at larger units of speech such as sentences and moves toward smaller and smaller units of speech. Let’s take a closer look at the different size units of spoken language. 

Word Awareness

Most speech is organized into sentences. A sentence is a group of words spoken in a particular order to express a complete thought. In terms of phonological awareness, we start with helping students divide spoken sentences into individual words. One writing convention is to add spaces between words so the reader can more easily determine where one word ends and the next word begins. If we were to write just like we speak, it would look like this: Wedonotpausebetweenwordswhenwespeak.  HELP includes instructional activities that help students hear, identify, and manipulate words in sentences.  For example, in Count the Words students listen to spoken sentences and count the number of words they hear. 

Syllable Awareness

Words are made up of one or more syllables. For example, the word tapping features two syllables tap-ping while the word tap is a one syllable word. Syllables that have an initial consonant sound can be further divided into what is called an onset and a rime. For example, in the word tap you have the onset /t/ and the rime /ap/.  The formal definition of a syllable is a unit of spoken language that consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following the vowel sound.  That's a mouthful!  HELP includes instructional activities that help students hear, identify, and manipulate the sounds of syllables in words.  For example, in Sillyables, students use syllable cards to build real words and "silly" nonwords.

Onset and Rime Awareness

The onset is the initial consonant or consonant blend in a syllable such as /tr/ in the word trap. The rime includes the vowel and any following consonants /ap/ in the word trap. In the word trap, both the onset and the rime can be broken down further into phonemes /t/+/r/+/a/+/p/.  HELP includes instructional activities that help students hear, identify, and manipulate the onset-rime of syllables in words.  For example, in Rhyme Time students listen to pairs of spoken words and decide whether they rhyme. 

Phonemic Awareness 

The English language features 44 phonemes or speech sounds.  Every word is composed of a combination of phonemes.  For example, the word chat is made up of three phonemes /ch/+/a/+/t/ and the word cat is made up of three speech sounds /c/+/a/+/t/.  If we change one or more sounds in a word, we change the word!  HELP includes instructional activities that help students hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes in words.  For example, in Sound Counting students listen to a spoken word and count the number of sounds they hear in the word.