Question

What is the importance of students developing their phonological awareness? Describe two strategies to encourage students to pay attention to the sounds of spoken language.

Answer 1

Phonological awareness is the ability to understand and comprehend sounds of words in a spoken language. This ability is important for developing reading skills. The students who lack phonological awareness finds difficulty in differentiating the sounds of different words, they find difficulty in understanding the concept of rhyming words, and thus they are poor in their reading abilities and lag to develop this ability.

The two ways to encourage students to pay attention to the sounds of spoken language and develop phonological awareness are:

• Reading out stories in in kindergarten classes and exposing them to richness of sounds of spoken language in their classes.
• Reading nursery rhymes and rhyming stories in the classes of kindergarten. So that they can develop the ability to differentiate between the various similar sounding words. Helping them to think out their own rhyming words.