Re. phonological awareness
Phoneme awareness (PA: to be consciously aware that words are composed of discrete sounds that are comparable and manipulable) is the subject of much controversy and confusion. Poor PA is said to be the hallmark of dyslexia and those children who start school with poor or absent PA, or who fail to 'develop' PA alongside conventional literacy teaching, are deemed to have constitutional, phonological difficulties. Many 'experts' advocate PA training for all children prior to any teaching of reading in order to help overcome this brain 'glitch' that appears to be present in so many. This erroneous thinking has resulted in the insertion of a 'sounds only' stage (Phase One) in the new DfES programme Letters and Sounds.
Part and parcel of the 'phonological glitch' theory is the idea that all children are biologically programmed to recognise words as unanalysed wholes at first (termed the logographic stage) and then, as part of normal, biological development, begin to be able to break words into smaller and smaller units: whole words ->syllables ->onset and rime ->individual letters, therefore children need to receive reading instruction in this order too. Research in Germany (Wimmer/ Hummer) has shown that children do not go through a logographic stage when they are taught with the synthetic phonics method from the very start of reading instruction (RRF 45. p6) 'Students tend to perceive words in the way they are taught to perceive them. This appears to be the case whether or not they are taught in a transparent orthography' (Cardoso-Martens 2001) (Rice/Brooks p34) see- Chew www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=104
Phoneme awareness training is not a necessary prerequisite to learning to read and spell. Research (Wimmer et al. in Austria and Johnston and Watson in Scotland) has shown that when European children first enter school they rarely have any phonemic awareness unless they've had pre-school teaching of the alphabet (unusual in Europe but common in English-speaking countries). Phoneme sensitivity is innate as babies need it to acquire spoken language, but they are not consciously aware of this ability. 'In fact, no one needs to be explicitly aware of phonemes unless they have to learn an alphabetic writing system' (McGuinness LDLR p36) . People who have learnt to read using nonalphabetic scripts also lack phonological awareness.
The ease with which a child can be taught to listen and unravel the phonemic level of speech in order to link each phoneme with its written symbol, appears to be heritable 'Good/bad phoneme-awareness runs in families, just as musical talent does' (McGuinness WCCR p151) This unravelling is necessary because speech consists of co-articulated sounds blended into a rapidly produced sound stream.
PA is exhibited once again as a direct result of the teaching methods found in synthetic phonic programmes; it is the process of learning the letter-sound correspondences, translating the letters into sounds in words and vice-versa, that makes the phonemes explicit. '...the ability to manipulate speech sounds is a taught skill, not an outcome of cognitive maturation or exposure to language (Rice/Brooks p54) '(A)s their literacy improves it should again become an automatic process for literacy purposes and drop below consciousness unless it is actually needed to deal with an unfamiliar written word.'(Philpot RRF 3/12/05) For those children who lack any natural aptitude (due to normal genetic variation, NOT a brain defect) for untangling the phoneme level of speech, really good direct teaching of the alphabet code done first and fast on school entry, with plenty of revision, will enable them to learn the skills necessary to become good readers.
www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=33 Jennifer Chew discusses teaching phonemic awareness with letters