What Is Phonological Awareness? A Teacher’s Complete Guide
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and work with the sound structures in spoken language, including words, syllables, rhyme, and individual sounds. It is entirely oral, develops along a continuum from larger sound units to smaller ones, and matters for reading because every decoding skill a student will ever use is built on top of it. A child who cannot hear the sounds inside a word cannot reliably map those sounds to letters.