Foundations for Phonics: Phonological Awareness. What It Is and Why It Matters.

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is the awareness of the phonological or sound structure, of language. This skill relates to:

• Words

• Syllable structure

• Onset and Rime (onset being the initial phoneme and rime the following syllable – e.g. c_at or spr_ing)

• Rhyme

• Phonemes

Before phonological awareness, children learn to give attention to the sounds around them; environmental sounds, such as an ambulance siren or a dog barking and the spoken sounds they hear from the people around them.

They work out the difference between the two and begin to recognise where a word begins and ends in the sequence of sounds they hear when someone is speaking.

Phonological awareness builds on these listening skills. It is an explicit awareness of words and sounds that develops at different levels. For example:

• Word level - knowing a sentence like, ‘snow is cold’ has three words 

• Syllable level – knowing the word ‘apple’ has two syllables and the word ‘elephant’ has three

• Onset and Rime – being able to isolate the initial phoneme from the rest of the word m_at, a skill which is needed to identify rhyme, such as whether man and pan rhyme

• Phoneme level – recognising the word ‘snack’ has four phonemes s/n/a/ck

Why is phonological awareness important?

Phonological awareness is the foundational skill needed for matching sounds to letters and as such is a crucial skill for learning to read.

Explicit knowledge of the phonological structure of words allows a child to link what the word or phoneme sounds like to what it looks like when it is written down. [1]

It is impossible for a child to understand how a sound (phoneme) relates to a letter (grapheme) without having some awareness of phonemes. It sounds very obvious to say this, yet I regularly see children being taught phonics who have no phonemic knowledge. Obviously, it makes their learning of phonics extremely challenging.

There is a significant evidence base highlighting phonological awareness as a crucial skill, yet more and more we see some of these important foundational skills eroded from our practice and children starting phonics earlier without these skills in place.

It can be a useful tool for pre-empting reading difficulties with phonological awareness being an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability.

It is also important for speech sound development, underpinning the ways in which children use different speech sounds in words. Often as speech and language therapists we will prioritise working on phonological awareness for some children who have unclear speech, with good impact.

There is also evidence that phonological awareness links to vocabulary learning, with children who have better phonological awareness skills having better vocabulary skills and learning to read more easily.

How does phonological awareness develop?

Phonological awareness follows a predictable pattern of development, with skills developing in relation to the larger units before the smaller; children being aware of words before syllables, syllables before phonemes.

However, it is not just about awareness, children build more sophisticated skills in relation to the sounds of their language. The skills develop from simple awareness tasks of identifying or recognizing as explained earlier, through to more complex tasks:

• Generating – e.g. thinking of a word with three syllables, a word that rhymes with ‘hen’ or a word that begins or ends with /s/

• Blending – e.g. blending sounds into words –  f…o…ks.. what word can you hear, or cat…a…pil...a

• Segmenting – e.g. breaking words down into their syllables or phonemes – e.g. say the last sound in ‘catch’ what sound is in the middle of ‘happy’ what are the two syllables in ‘hedgehog’

• Manipulating – e.g. what is ‘speak’ without the /s/ what happens to ‘dog’ if we change d for l.

It is important we are aware of how the skills develop as it helps us to identify gaps and specifically target where we can intervene.

It is also useful to know that as children develop, the relationship between phonological awareness and reading becomes a two way street making it an important prerequisite for reading, and also a consequence of learning to read.

In practice

We know from the evidence that children who have difficulty acquiring phonological awareness skills will not just ‘pick up’ these skills incidentally. They need and can benefit enormously from having these skills taught directly – at any age.

There are a range of tools available to assess phonological awareness skills which enable us to accurately target areas of difficulty with positive outcomes for the children.

For children who are struggling to learn phonics, it is always worth checking out their phonological awareness skills. We can then target their specific areas of need, giving them the necessary foundations for building phonics skills.

We know this is not always easy. There is enormous pressure on schools to have children learn phonics early and to get them through the phonics check. For the majority of children this is fine, though we are seeing many children struggling to access phonics teaching, without the basic phonological awareness and language skills to make good use of the teaching. They are simply not ready and skills are being taught on sandy foundations.

We have first hand experience of this in our work with schools; a few years ago we were noticing growing numbers of children struggling with phonics. Their ages varied from children in reception and year 1, right through Key stage 2 and up to children in Key stage 3 who despite lots of synthetic phonics teaching were still struggling.

We used a simple screening tool to check which phonological awareness skills were difficult for the children.

When we tested their phonological awareness skills, we found significant gaps. Often this was in syllable knowledge, they struggled to identify onset and rime and often had very poor rhyming skills. Segmentation and manipulation across syllable and phonemic levels was also challenging for many.

Although they could often blend phonemes and had good letter knowledge, some of the fundamental phonological awareness skills were missing. This impacted on their ability to decode for reading and with spelling. Learning phonics was also very challenging for them.

As we were seeing so many children with difficulties, we developed a phonological awareness programme, ‘Sounds Right’ for our primary children. Our schools used the screening tool and targeted the areas of phonological awareness the children were struggling with.

Children were retested using a dynamic assessment model and supported until the skills were in place. We saw great improvement in the majority of children who used the intervention. They then went on to complete their phonics work and we saw improvement in their learning here too.

What the evidence tells us 

The scenario above is just an example of practice and our schools continue to use ‘Sounds Right’ to good effect. The evidence also points to intervention on phonological awareness as effective having positive impact on phonics and beyond. For example, a review of 52 controlled experimental studies[2] indicated that intensive phonological awareness instruction will have a significant effect on reading and spelling, with benefits for all children regardless of reading ability.

The evidence also tells us that children with poorly developed phonological awareness skills are at risk for literacy difficulties. As the two skills support each other, it becomes a vicious circle where children are impacted across both sets of skills. Poor phonological awareness is linked to poor reading and poor vocabulary development and vice versa.

The research tells us that if children don’t have good syllable level skills, they will struggle with phoneme level skills. Good syllable knowledge is an important foundation and we could argue these skills should be firmly established before any focus is made on phonics or other phoneme level work.

We would love to hear your experience of children struggling with phonics – could phonological awareness be the key to their challenges and ultimately if supported, their longer term progress?

For more information

Read Helen Stringer’s article here

Find out how to make reasonable adjustments to the phonics check for pupils with a range of SLCNs here

Newcastle University have developed and shared freely their phonological awareness assessment and intervention – check out the NIPA and NAPA here

[1] Gillon, G. T. (2004). Phonological Awareness. New York: Guildford Press.

[2] National Reading Panel 2000 report to US Congress cited in Phonological Awareness. Dr Helen Stringer, Newcastle University Speech & Language Sciences