Phonological awareness refers to sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken language, i.e. the awareness of different-sized sound units and their composition,regardless of meaning. It develops gradually and hierarchically, depending on the age and cognitive development of the child. Children first perceive larger, more concrete linguistic units, such as words and syllables,and then smaller, more abstract units, such as sounds. The highest level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness, i.e. the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds. Phonological awareness is extremely important for the reading and writing process.Preschool children’s performance on phonological awareness tasks is a reliable predictor of their early reading performance. Preschool teachers play an important role in the development of this skill, as they must enable preschool children to make optimal progress in this area through carefully and appropriately planned phonological awareness activities. Although there are not many Slovenian studies on the promotion of phonological awareness in children by educators, they all point to insufficient or inappropriate promotion of this area and, consequently, to poorly developed phonological awareness in preschool children.
In the theoretical section, I described the connection between phonological awareness and the process of literacy, or more precisely, the beginning of literacy. I have defined phonological awareness, its stages and its expected development in detail. I emphasized the role of the preschool years and preschool teachers as two key factors in the optimal development of children's phonological awareness. I also referred to Curriculum for kindergartens and wrote about the co-operation between preschool teachers and other professionals and parents. I listed different methods and the expected timeframe or time that preschool teachers should spend on promoting phonological awareness.
In the empirical part, I used a questionnaire to investigate how and in what way preschool teachers promote phonological awareness in 5- and 6-year-olds. I was also interested in how much time they spend on developing this skill and how often they promote this area. The sample comprised 31 preschool teachers of groups with children aged 5 and 6 years from four kindergartens in central Slovenia. They differed in terms of gender and years of professional experience.
I have found that preschool teachers' practises for promoting phonological awareness in 5- and 6-year-olds are quite varied. In general, most of them promote phonological awareness by talking about syllables, and the most commonly used type of manipulation is segmentation. Preschool teachers usually promote phonological awareness as a separate activity, different from the other daily kindergarten activities. Although they focus on individualisation rather than differentiation, both principles are underused. In addition to language, they often also promote phonological awareness in the areas of movement and art. About half of them promote phonological awareness frequently enough (daily or at least once or twice a week), but mainly with simpler activities such as rhyming and alliteration, syllable segmentation and blending,and word length recognition.
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