Republic of the Philippines

Cebu Normal University

Osmeña Blvd.,Cebu City, 6000 Philippines
COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION
Center of Excellence (COE)
Level IV Accredited (AACCUP)
ECE 4006 Reading Readiness and Language Development

Kimberly Mae B. Barangan MA.Ed – ECE Saturday (12:00noon-3:00pm)

Phonological Awareness
(Reaction Paper)

Big things come from small beginnings. Before you become an expert, you need
to be a novice first. Before you become a tree, you need to be a seed first. All big things
started as small ones. It’s similar with reading. Before we read poems, excerpts, novels, and
stories with long paragraphs and sentences, we started with letter sound also known as
phonics or phonetics. It is the next step right after recognizing or identifying letters. This step is
very important specially for beginning readers specifically in the lower grades. The child
should be a letter sound reader before becoming a syllabic reader until he/she will become
a fast reader.

Phonetics has a vital role for a child to learn how to read. It can help the child in
classifying and knowing speech sound. As the child learn this until he/she can read words, it
is important that the child must have phonological awareness. Phonological awareness does
not only focuses on the letter sound. It also includes tasks that require the student to isolate or
segment one or more of the phonemes of a spoken word , to blend or combine a sequence
of separate phonemes into a word or to manipulate the phonemes within a word. (Snow, et
al., 1998) Mostly, children over the preschool years develop this awareness of the
phonological structure of speech. This is also the year of appreciating rhymes and
alliteration. This is the reason why many books geared toward this age group appropriately
include rhyming and alliterative texts for this may be one avenue for children’s attention to
be drawn to the sounds of speech.(Bryant et al., 1990)This is also the reason why songs for
children are usually contained with rhyming words. Aside from being appreciated by
children because rhyming words sound good, it can also help them to develop
phonological awareness. One of the most interesting findings from research on the
development of phonological awareness is that its relationship to learning to read appears
to be bidirectional, involving reciprocal causation.(Ehri and Wilce, 1980,1986; Perfetti et al.,
1987). The first one is that some basic appreciation of the phonological structure of spoken
words appears to be necessary for the child to discover the alphabetic principle that text
represents sounds of the language. The teacher must give explicit instruction to direct the
direction of the child to phonological structure of the word to develop phonological
awareness. On the other hand, alphabetic literacy appears to be facilitate further growth in
phonological awareness. This is the reason why individuals from nonliterate societies and
students who learn to read nonalphabetic languages exhibit much weaker levels of
phonological awareness than readers of alphabetic languages. (Morais et.al., 1986; Read et.
al., 1986)

In order to achieve phonological awareness, the teacher must give activities or

differentiated instructions that can help in developing this skill. The teacher must provide
opportunities for the child to not only decode texts or words but also equipping them to
have a self-teaching-mechanism that is useful for learning to read words that are new to
them.