The development of phonological awareness is an important indicator for the possible later
emergence of studying problems related to reading and writing. Phonological awareness
represents different skills, which are connected to understanding the phonological part of the
language. It includes the skills of auditory perception of word lengths, word quantity, blending
and segmenting syllables, identifying and searching for rhymes and phonemic awareness. It is
reasonable to encourage phonological awareness already in pre-school. Phonological
awareness affects the success of emerging literacy. Developed reading and functional literacy
shapes an individual, strengthens his self-esteem and has a remarkable effect on individual's
communication and society integration process.
The theoretical part consists of definitions and development of phonological awareness and
skills in the preschool period, as well as activities through which we can strengthen the
phonological awareness of children. Speech and language pathologist's role in preventing,
recognizing and eliminating problems connected to phonological awareness is highlighted.
Reading development, strategies which children use for learning to read and factors for
successful reading development are presented.
The purpose of this research is to find out to what extent phonological awareness is developed,
develop a programme to encourage phonological awareness and to recognize children with
problems in this area and offer them adequate help. For this purpose, we developed a 20-hour
programme to encourage phonological awareness in pre-school children and present the results
in this paper.
The programme was based on some already established practices and adapted accordingly to
children's age. That means that we presented the activities in a fun and playful way. At the
start, there were 44 children included in the research, divided into 4 groups according to their
age. The programme was concluded, but due to extraordinary circumstances (COVID-19), only
16 children were tested and we used only them (N=16) to interpret the result. Testing was
executed three times a week, 30–45 minutes per session and lasted for a month and a half. The
goal was to show that we can use this phonological awareness programme to strengthen the
phonological skills of children and to recognize children, who are weak in this area and need
additional help and support. The results showed us that the phonological awareness programme
positively affects development of several skills as all of the children made progress (N=16).
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