Phonology And Phonemic Awareness

It is important to have an instructional focus for developing learners, especially those in their early years to learn and use the alphabetic principle and understand the systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. This principle helps the learner to build on their ability to read and pronounce words. This paper gives an insight to teaching phonics and both phonological and phonemic awareness to young learners who are at an early impressionable age, recognizing the challenges and complications with reading and pronunciation, along with identifying the methods of teaching young learners the fundamental backbone of a spoken language. For a learner to be successful at reading and writing, they must first

A learner needs to develop a range of receptive and expressive skills including an understanding of the phonology and vocabulary of the target language along with its morphology and grammar. It has been documented that some educators deem that one of the main problems and contributors to a learner’s lack of accuracy and fluency, regarding literacy skills in a target language, is owing to the lack of oral proficiency of the target language (Geva, 2006). The mainstay of any language is the sound structure. For a learner to have an understanding of the phonics and phonology of a target language and controlling it is the primary goal. Phonics can be classified as the relationship of sounds and letters that symbolize the sounds. A learner must be knowledgeable with the phonics system and structure, in the initial first steps of learning a foreign language (Lanpher,

Synthetic phonics teaches learners the relationships letters have and the 44 sounds of the English language. Synthetic phonics is an effective method for interpreting new words. Younger learners often have problems recognizing phonemes, simply because they are small units of sound. This is very logical considering the synthetic nature of phonemes themselves. For example, Phonemes such as /b/ are difficult to pronounce on their own without including the ‘uh’ sound. However, the capacity to control singular sounds and letter connections is a meaningful predictor of future reading performance. Analytic phonics utilizes word stems in words, that the brain already knows and recognizes, to help decrypt new words. Studies have shown that young learners develop this skill very early on, in reading acquisition. With analytic phonics, the brain draws on usual letter/sound connections found in word families. It scrutinizes the word patterns it has already absorbed. Analytic phonics is less challenging on the working memory, as the connection of sounds has already been formed. Synthetic phonics takes additional processing compared to analytic phonics. For example decoding ‘brush’ through the analytic method is /br/ /ush/ which is easier for a beginner learner to process compared to the synthetic phonic method, which would be /b//r//u//s//h/ (Milne,2005). Research has revealed, learners