Application Assignment 1

So as a supplement to my lecture about the building blocks of phenology, I'm going to add this mini presentation of two slides to describe phonological awareness. Another aspect of phonological development that deserves our attention is the development of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is having a conscious awareness of the speech sounds. It's metalinguistic. Metalinguistic is a term we use to discuss the ability to think about and talk about language. Phonological awareness is metalinguistic because it enables a person to do things like detect, identify, isolate, and otherwise manipulate the sounds of language. Developing phonological awareness at an early age is critical. Phonological awareness is an early indicator of reading success later in life. Children who struggle with disability are more likely to have difficulty learning to decode, which is a fancy word for translating the written symbols of language into spoken words. So it's reading text, actually pulling the print off the page. But not necessarily the understanding or comprehending of text. Decoding is one of two critical ingredients needed to become a successful reader. One being to coding and the other being language comprehension. So because of this critical role, early phonological awareness abilities are seen as a predictor of later reading success in children. Around the age of four, children begin to demonstrate the ability to attend to and manipulate phonological units of speech. Phonological units, maybe word-level units, syllable level units, something we call onset and rhyme, or individual phonemes. At the word level, you may ask a child to listen to a sentence and clap for every word they hear. So an example of that would be listening to, I see a cat and clapping four times, I see a cat. That's an example of word-level phonological awareness. At the syllable level, you may ask a child to listen to a word and clap for each syllable. So, but or fly, butterfly. At the onset and rhyme level, a child may demonstrate the ability to isolate the first sound or the first sound cluster in a word, and then provide the rest of the word that follows the onset is that first sound or the first cluster of consonants in the word. And the rhyme is the first val, followed by everything else in that word. So onset in rhyme is another level of phonological awareness. Once we get to the phoneme level of phonological awareness, we call this phonemic awareness. At the phoneme level, a child may demonstrate their awareness in a variety of different tasks. They may be able to identify the first or last sound in a word. So if I said the word is cat, What's the first sound you hear in the word cat? They would be able to say. If I say the word is sun, What's the last word you hear in the word son? They would be able to say. They may be able to also listened to a word and segment the word into all of its sounds. So when you hear the word cat, what are all of the sounds in the word cat? App? They may also be able to listen to a series of sounds that I present to them and blend those sounds together to make a word. So if I say, so, what word does that make? Sun? These manipulation tasks at the phoneme level, the most important tasks for reading because they are actually used during that decoding process. When you encounter an unfamiliar word in print, you must use your phonological knowledge of the sounds and how they relate to print to help you decipher the word, you're phonological awareness abilities kick in to help you do this.