Phonological Awareness

The process of learning to read and write is complex and involves the culmination of a range of skills and experiences. Children need to know about text, how it is read, where it may be found and that it imparts information. This is why reading with children, encouraging their participation and fostering their ability to tell a story or gain meaning from text themselves (‘dialogic reading’*) is so important. A good vocabulary and facility with spoken language are important too. Children need to be able to produce speech sounds before they can attempt to commit these sounds to paper. Children who possess the ability to play easily with the sounds in words tend to become good at reading and writing. The awareness of the various sound elements of words - is termed ‘phonological awareness’. Phonological awareness (PA) is an auditory skill.

Research informs us that phonological awareness is of great importance on the journey to literacy competence. Words may be segmented at three main levels: syllable (rhythm), rhyme (syllable ending) and phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in a word).

The three main levels of word segmentation can be explained as follows:

1 Syllables – the ‘chunks’ of sounds within a word eg croc-o-dile (3 syllables). To help to identify the number of syllables in a word, place a hand under the chin whilst speaking the word aloud; the mouth will open each time a syllable is enunciated.

Any activities which help children to move and speak/sing/chant together whilst emphasising the syllables in words will help them to embody the correct syllabic units. Care must be taken to emphasise the sounds used in spelling. In this way children’s attention will be drawn to the correct spellings. For example, although the word ‘chocolate’ may be spoken as ‘choc-late’, it is important to know that there is another vowel in the middle - ‘choc-o-late’. This can be easily accomplished through song where syllables can be emphasised more strongly than in everyday speech.

2 Onset and rime - Each syllable can be broken down into its onset and rime. In the syllable ‘croc’ – ‘cr’ is the onset (the initial sound unit in a syllable) and ‘oc’ is the rime (the part of the syllable which consists of the vowel and subsequent consonants). Note the spelling here of ‘rime’. Not all words have onsets, for example the word ‘at’.

Learning rhymes is important to children as it helps them to recognise, match and generate sound patterns. When singing and reciting rhymes it is important to emphasise the sound patterns of words which match and to help children to generate their own matching words. Using a technique named ‘cloze’ can be useful for this purpose. Cloze exercises are those where a word is omitted and the learner chooses a word to complete the sentence.

3 Phonemes – A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound within a syllable. For example, in the syllable ‘croc’ there are 4 individual phonemes, - 4 sounds ‘c’, ‘r’, ‘o’ and ‘c’. There are 44 phonemes in the English language. Children need to learn how these sounds are represented through the written symbols of the alphabet.

Helping children to listen to differences in musical sounds can help their ability to listen for the differences in spoken sounds. Some children do not automatically attune to the different levels of language sounds.

Children generally learn the initial letter sounds of words before they put letter sounds together to make words. Teaching reading by correlating sounds with symbols is termed ‘phonics’. Putting sounds together to read a word is termed ‘blending’. The method of teaching reading this way is known as ‘synthetic phonics’ in the UK and ‘blended phonics’ in the USA.

Moving in time with music may improve temporal (related to time) processing. Moving to music also helps co-ordination through rhythmic entrainment (synchronisation to a beat). Music is motoric and it stimulates both sides of the brain. The undertaking of musical activities also assists memory retention and recall and improves focus and attention. When an activity is undertaken regularly the brain is stimulated to remember and recall it.

Music offers opportunity for regular practice and pleasurable repetition. Musical activities can therefore offer a perfect medium for the promotion of the skills required for phonological awareness for children with and without dyslexia.

*The term ‘dialogic reading’ is one developed by G. J. Whitehurst (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998) from research by himself and others in the 1990s. It refers to the way in which pre-schoolers are read to. It involves giving children the opportunity to become active participants in the reading experience through answering questions and being encouraged to tell a story along with an adult, rather than simply being read to.

Why Use Music to Develop Phonological Awareness?

The undertaking of musical activities may confer a plethora of benefits to children, each of which may contribute to the ease of literacy learning and in particular in helping children to pay attention to variations in sound. The many benefits include:

• Stimulation of the brain (Schlaug et al., 2005)

• Musicians have faster neural responses to music and speech sounds (Strait et al., 2009, 2012, 2014)

• Benefits to speech processing (Patel, 2014)

• Increase in attention (Dewi et al., 2015; Putkinen et al., 2013)

• Assistance with memory recall (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009)

• Music is motoric (Toyka and Freund, 2007)

• Movement in turn stimulates the brain (Eliot, 2000)

• Enhanced detection of ‘speech-in-noise’ (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009)

• Assistance with memory recall (Janata, 2009)

• Music can entrain movement to a beat, thereby helping co-ordination (Corriveau and Goswami, 2009; Slater et al., 2013)

• Improving movement to time may improve temporal processing (Goswami, 2013)

• Music is engaging, thereby attention-grabbing (Tierney and Kraus, 2013a)

• Listening to and engaging in musical activities helps to reinforce children’s awareness of speech segmentation (François et al., 2013)

• A possible increase in literacy scores in school (Slater et al., 2013)

• Improving auditory skills (Putkinen et al., 2013)

• Increasing ability to detect sound in noise (Slater et al., 2015)

• Promoting imagination (Welch et al., 2011)

• Helping to engender a sense of achievement (Salimpoor et al., 2013)

• Helping to build children’s confidence (Ofsted, 2012)

• Enjoyment (Salimpoor et al., 2013)

• Production of chemicals (dopamines) in the brain which induce happy feelings (Salimpoor et al., 2013)

• Creating a positive environment (Fisher, 2001)

• Encouraging social skills (Gerry et al., 2012)

• Inducing a relaxed and therefore suitable learning state (Thoma, 2013)

Tierney and Kraus (2013a) aver that ‘one of the reasons musical training can be such a powerful educational tool is that music is inherently rewarding, emotion-inducing and attention grabbing’ (Menon and Levitin, 2005; Patel, 2011 and 2013 in Tierney and Kraus, 2013a)