Phonological Awareness

Recognize the sounds of language with phonological awareness resources that focus on awareness of words, rhyme and alliteration, syllables, onset and rime, and phonemes. Skills build from simple to more complex and provide strategic, purposeful phonological awareness instruction.

Why build students' phonological awareness skills?
  • Advance early literacy and language development: Foster foundational reading and communication skills in young learners.
  • Enable students to map out letters and their sounds to blend and segment words: Guide students in understanding the relationship between letters and sounds to form and break down words.
  • Develop skills to decode and encode: Equip students with the ability to read (decode) and write (encode) words effectively.

Students do not need to "master" phonological awareness before learning phonemic awareness and phonics or to read and write. Phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, has a reciprocal relationship with reading.

How can phonological awareness resources supplement your instruction?
  • Target and practice phonological awareness skills: Build from word to phoneme level, providing explicit and systematic instruction.
  • Explicitly teach selected phonological awareness skills: Follow the gradual release of responsibility model.
  • Incorporate a variety of multimodal activities: Maintain engagement with listening, songs, sound workmats, and image cards.
  • Use the resources flexibly: Determine the best way to supplement your phonological awareness instruction in small-group or whole-group settings:
    • Follow the lessons in sequential order to move from simple to more complex skills.
      OR
    • Choose lessons and resources that match your core program's scope and sequence.
Important Terms
  • Word awareness: The knowledge that words have meaning. Students with word awareness can discriminate between individual words in a passage read to them. Beginning readers must acquire this skill before they can extract meaning from what they read.
  • Rhyme awareness: The understanding that certain word endings sound alike and therefore contain the same sounds.
  • Alliteration awareness: The ability to recognize the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in words that are close to one another.
  • Onset and rime awareness: The ability to segment the initial consonant sound in a one-syllable word (the onset) from the remaining sounds in the word (the rime).
  • Syllable awareness: The understanding that words are divided into parts, with each part containing a separate vowel sound.
  • Phoneme awareness: The awareness of the smallest units of sound in a word. It is important that students learn to segment, blend, and manipulate phonemes in the English language.

Students deepen their understanding of phonological awareness when responsibility for learning is gradually released.

  • I Do: Introduce and model the specific skill(s) with explicit instruction.
  • We Do: Apply the new skill(s) with guided practice while supporting students.
  • You Do: Practice and check for understanding of new skill(s).

Phonological Awareness