California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
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phonemic awareness) should also be
distinguished from phonics. “Phonics”
is a method of instruction that focuses
on teaching the relationships between
sounds and the letters that represent
them, whereas phonological awareness
is an oral language skill that does not
involve print.
The development of phonological
awareness typically moves along a
continuum in which children progress
from a sensitivity to larger concrete
units of sound to a sensitivity
to smaller abstract units of sound
(Adams 1990; Anthony and others
2002; Fox and Routh 1975; Goswami
and Bryant 1990; Liberman and others
1974; Lonigan 2006; Lonigan and
others 1998; Lonigan, Burgess, and
Anthony 2000; MacLean, Bryant, and
Bradley 1987; Treiman 1992). Typically,
children’s first achievements in
phonological awareness are to detect
and manipulate words and syllables
within words and to then progress to
awareness of onsets and rimes. The
onset of a syllable is the first consonant
or consonant cluster (e.g., the
m- in the word map, the dr- in the word
drum), whereas the rime of a syllable is
its vowel and any ending consonants
(e.g., -ap in the word map, -um in the
word drum). Finally, children develop
awareness of the smallest abstract
units of sound, the phonemes. Phonemes
can be represented by single
letters, such as with the phonemes
c—a—t in the word cat, or with two
letters, such as in the ch- in the word
cheese; but not all letters in a word
represent a phoneme, such as the
silent-e in the word store. The foundations
reflect these gradations in the
achievement of phonological awareness
as children become gradually more
sensitive to smaller units of spoken
language.
In addition to development involving
the linguistic complexity of sound
units, children demonstrate their phonological
awareness through three
types of operations—detection, synthesis,
and analysis (Anthony, Lonigan,
and Burgess 2003). “Detection”
is the ability to match similar sounds.
“Synthesis” is the ability to combine
smaller segments into syllables and
words. “Analysis” is the ability to segment
words or syllables into smaller
units. At the level of segmenting words
into syllables and segmenting syllables
into onset and rime, children’s phonological
awareness performance usually
progresses from detection, to synthesis,
to analysis. This development
does not occur in discrete stages but
instead represents overlapping abilities
(Anthony, Lonigan, and Burgess 2003).
That is, children do not have to completely
master the earlier skill before
they begin to acquire the next skill in
the sequence. The foundations concurrently
address the developmental levels
of phonological awareness within the
various performance areas, so that
a progression can be seen from the
ability to detect and blend words to
the ability to segment at the onsetrime
level.
The position of a phoneme in a word
or syllable and the context in which
the phoneme occurs also influence
the level of difficulty of a phonological
awareness task. Children are able
to detect or manipulate the initial
phonemes in words before they can
detect or manipulate final phonemes.
Additionally, children have more difficulty
in identifying or manipulating
a phoneme that is a part of a cluster
Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1 • California Department of Education