At a very young age, children begin to develop an understanding of the spoken language used in their environment. Once in kindergarten, the journey of learning what makes up the spoken language begins. In English, language is divided into three different components that make up the understanding and learning ability of the alphabetic writing system. The three components, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics skills are crucial factors in the student’s ability to read and write.
Phonological awareness is a broad term, of how language is divided into key components needed for reading and writing. To understand the process of learning the spoken and written language, you can look at the components in a symbolic way. Phonological
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In the development of this component, students begin to understand that the smallest unit of sounds blend together to form words. Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill of recognizing the sound structure of language. For example, phonemic awareness is realizing that the word dog is made up with the sounds /d/ /o/ /g/. For most students, it can be very hard to hear each individual sound in a word because when we speak, effortlessly we blend together sounds to form and hear the overall word. A way teachers can help their students practice phonemic awareness skills, is by isolating the sounds in words. To practice this strategy, a teacher can ask his or her students to say a word such as bat. Next, the teacher would ask the students to tell him or her what the initial sound is in the word bat, followed by asking them what the middle or final sounds are as well. Having students practice with this strategy is helping them isolate phonemes which is a basic way of teaching phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness can be practiced anywhere at any time. While waiting in line for the lunch or to leave the classroom, the teacher can ask questions such as what word doesn’t have the same onset sound out of these three words, dig, dug, cat. Not have the words visible for students to see in this alliteration practice, can help students develop the skill of listening for the onset