Phonological Awareness

What is phonological awareness?

Sub-skills involved

• Syllable segmentation, as well as syllable deletion
• Rhyme Awareness
• Alliteration awareness (First sound or onset). This may be assessed using an 'odd one out' word list where all the items have the same initial sound except for one.
• Identification of phones (WHICH SOUND is at the start/end of this word?, e.g., /t-/ or /k-/). This is also known as Phoneme Isolation, and involves the skills of onset-rime and identification of the initial phoneme.
• Phoneme segmentation - splitting words into its constituent SOUNDS (not letters)
• Letter knowledge - matching sounds to graphemes. Note that English is not a transparent language and words such as 'elephant' do not have one-to-one correspondence to the phones in the word as a digraph 'ph' is used for the phone /f/.

Listening skills

• Identification - matching a heard sound in isolation or in the context of a word to a symbol for that sound. This might be a sound scheme picture such as Bigmouth, Jolly Phonics or Nuffield sound pictures. Typically, speech and language therapists choose to contrast the initial phoneme where a child has a phonological process causing homophony, such as fronting velar plosives. The child is asked to sort words starting with /t-/ and /k-/, often minimal pairs, and sort or post these words to a postbox with a sound picture representing /t/ and /k/ such as a dripping tap [t] and a camera clicking [k].
• Discrimination (SAME or DIFFERENT?. e.g. [t]-[t], same or different?, 'table'-'cable', same or different?) discrimination tasks must include the 'same or different' question, and these tasks are often step-down tasks for children who cannot yet complete an identification task.

Is phonological awareness a key aspect of speech and language therapy?

The Evidence Base