Successful phonological awareness instruction with preschool children
B. M. Phillips, J. Clancy-Menchetti, C. J. Lonigan
Phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills to conventional literacy that
develop during the preschool period. Significant amounts of research support the causal and
predictive relation between phonological awareness and children’s ease of learning to
decode and spell. Despite concerted efforts, many early childhood educators are lacking in a
sophisticated understanding of phonological awareness and of how to appropriately promote
its development in young children. As a result, opportunities are missed for supporting the
emergent literacy development of many children, particularly those from backgrounds that
make them at risk for reading difficulties. This article summarizes what is known from high-
quality research about the development of phonological awareness and about how this
informs effective pedagogical strategies for its instruction.
What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure of words
independent of their meaning. It is an increasingly sophisticated capability that is highly
predictive of, and causally related to, children’s later ability to read. Findings from several
decades of research converge on the idea that most children who have difficulties learning to
read have a core deficit in phonological awareness and related processing skills.
Phonological awareness and phonics are terms describing two related constructs that often
are confused. Whereas phonological awareness is a measurable capability that each child
can possess in smaller or greater amounts, phonics is a method of reading instruction that
focuses on the associations of letter sounds with printed letters or groups of letters. Having
strong phonological awareness skills likely aids children in benefiting from phonics
instruction.
Another important distinction to be made is between phonological awareness and phonemic
awareness. In this case, one is a subtype of the other. Phonological awareness represents a
range of manipulation and detection skills across different sizes of sound pieces. Phonemic
awareness, however, specifically refers to the ability to manipulate and detect the smallest
sound pieces in words, the phonemes.
Why phonological awareness is important for later reading
Children’s understanding that words are made up of smaller sounds such as syllables and
phonemes helps them to ‘’break the code’’ of written language and acquire the alphabetic
principle. When teachers and parents tell a child who is trying to write or read to ‘’sound it
out’’, this suggestion will only make sense if the child grasps the concept that the word can
be broken down into these smaller components. Phonological awareness, letter name
knowledge, and letter sound knowledge come together in young children to forge this
conceptual understanding and to facilitate reading and writing development.
Phonological awareness, as with other decoding skills, is not an intuitive or naturally
developing ability. The greater challenge in learning is, in part, because phonemes do not
naturally exist in spoken language. When both children and adults speak, they do not
distinctly pronounce each isolated phoneme. Instead, human speech includes what is called
‘’coarticulation’’ of the speech sounds, with each phoneme affected by the ones preceding it,
subsequent to it, or both. This suggests that a key early focus of phonological awareness
instruction for many children is to prompt them to learn to attend to the sounds structure of
words, in addition to what the words mean.
The developmental continuum of phonological awareness
A growing amount of research with young children demonstrates that the normative
, developmental progression of phonological awareness skill is from larger to successively
smaller units of sound. The continuum of skill development moves from the capacity to
manipulate words, such as words in phrases and words within compounds (rain + bow =
rainbow), to the syllable level (sister – /sis/ = /ter/), to onset-rime (/b/ + ird = bird), and finally
to phonemes (/m/+/o/+/p/ = mop). The growth of phonological awareness is best
represented as a continuum. It is not a sequential-stage model in which children must
demonstrate full mastery of a skill at one level before beginning to develop skill in the next
level; rather, children’s skills in multiple levels of the continuum may develop at the same
time.
What the continuum suggests for instructional practice
One pragmatic implication of this continuum of phonological awareness along levels of
linguistic complexity and cognitive operation is that at any given point in time, a classroom of
preschool children will include children at numerous points along the continuum. Therefore,
a teacher’s initial task is to use formal or informal assessment to identify where each child is
showing mastery. It is likely that preschool teachers will be confronted with substantial
diversity of knowledge in each new group of children. It is recommended that teachers
become proficient in teaching at multiple levels of the phonological awareness continuum
and in understanding what tasks are more or less challenging than others, because early
childhood pedagogical research supports the concept of teaching within the near range of
children’s abilities. The findings from an initial assessment of children should lead to
grouping children into homogeneous subgroups, and then instruction should focus on the
appropriate level of the continuum for each group.
The issue of rhyme
The assumption that rhyming falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness abilities
has led any educators either to assume that the rhyming activities already present within
their curriculum were sufficient for building skills or to expect that rhyming is among the
easiest of the phonological awareness capabilities and that it should be a central focus of
early literacy activities. Although rhyming is indeed part of the phonological awareness
construct, evidence shows that rhyming is not necessarily the most evidence based of the
pedagogical choices or the simplest phonological awareness skill to master. All of the rhyme
tasks rely on the basic fact that words rhyme because they share a common rime, or ending
sound, and thus, these tasks represent assessment or instruction of skills near the middle of
the developmental continuum of phonological awareness.
The instructional implications from the developmental and efficacy research are several.
First, it is likely that teachers who mistakenly consider rhyme manipulations or productions to
be entry-level skills that children can master readily may find themselves frustrated and
bewildered by the confusion and poor performance demonstrated by their students. Second,
studies suggest that if teachers are to include a focus on rhyming in their instructional plans,
then the expectation likely needs to be that children will benefit from repeated exposure,
explicit teaching of what it means to rhyme, and a high degree of scaffolding. Third, and
perhaps most important, the findings suggest that teachers looking for an efficient and
effective linguistic focus may be better served by teaching children phonological awareness
via word, syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme-level manipulations rather than exclusively or
predominantly through more traditional rhyming activities.
Pedagogical strategies for young children
Systematic and explicit instruction
A teacher whose goals include providing every child with the opportunity to make substantial
