Article written by Melissa Smith, Lifelong Learners.

Tutoring services for English (all year levels) offered in Victoria Park, Perth by a qualified teacher with a MEd who has in-depth experience as a tutor.

Phonological awareness and phonics are intimately intertwined, but they are not the same. Phonological awareness involves the auditory and oral manipulation of sounds. Phonics is the association of letters and sounds to sound out written symbols; it is a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations. If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words.

So that sounds all nice and fancy but what does it mean? Basically it is confirming what most parents already know – before students can learn to read and write they need to develop “the basics” and have a firm grasp of what it is they are hearing in words.

The basics include:

– Onset riming which is a specific term that refers to the sound at the start of a word and how it can be altered and change the meaning of a word e.g. L-E-G and B-E-G.

– Syllables and how words can be divided into segments. Students should also be able to identify that each segment contains a vowel sound and this is what provides the “burst” of sound.

– Traditional rhyming where students can identify that whole words can sound similar to other words e.g. black and whack, red and dead and so on. This is not a spelling based exercise but focuses on identifying what SOUNDS the same.

Once the basics are laid out, the teacher or tutor can focus on developing the grapheme relationships (what sounds go with what letters?) and reading will significantly improve.