The phonological awareness is the ability to hear something and manipulate the sound in spoken language. It is certainly true that strong readers always have strong phonological awareness of heard word of manipulating sounds into spoken language than the poor readers who have poor phonological awareness. The phonological awareness starts to develop in pre-school which improves reading and speaking skills too.

Importance of phonological awareness;

        The phonological awareness skills are the building blocks of future reading and writing success. It also helps us how to read and pronounce the heard words. Most of the time phonological awareness gets developed by TV and Radios where the role players are very bound the omit out the words with most appropriate sounds which causes listeners increase phonological awareness which makes listeners better reader and a speaker too.

Five stages of phonological awareness:

1. Listening and speaking skills:

        LSS (listening and speaking skills) are the beneficial Skills for which help us to listen something carefully and when we have ability of listening then the ability of speaking automatically comes out to convey message or information.

2. Rhyme Awareness:

        These are the words which has same ending or similar ending sounds. This awareness makes us able to differentiate between all those words which have same ending sounds. When we get this ability our phonological awareness starts improving in better ways.

3. Syllable awareness:

         In syllable awareness students gain the ability to hear. After it the students understand that the sentences are made of words and words are from different length. For example, if a sentence is carrying a noun, a verb and an adverb, then students would be aware that by removing verb from the sentences which is a syllable the sentences will be wrong and meaningless.

4. Onset/ Rime:

        They are two different things which have different characteristics. Onset is one of the phonological awareness skills and it can be called phonological unit of a word. For example, in the word ''Cat” ‘c' is the onset and 'at' is the rime. In simple words the first alphabet of a word is onset and remaining are the rime but the rime must carry a vowel or vowels.

5. Phonemic awareness

         This is the last and advanced phonological awareness which is one of the subset of phonological awareness. It makes the listeners abler to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes into syllables, syllables into sentences and sentences into topics etc.

 

By: Sania Tariq

The writer is a student at Zanth Academy Jusak

Turbat Kech Balochistan