Phonological awareness is the conscious thinking about abstract ideas of speech. Its development is gradual and hierarchical, and is most intensive in the preschool years. It includes awareness of larger phonological units such as words, syllables, word beginnings and rhymes, as well as phonemic awareness and phoneme manipulation. Phonological awareness plays a key role in literacy development and is a strong predictor of early reading development and deficits in this area. The family environment is an important factor in the development of phonological awareness, speech and early literacy. The activities that take place within the family prior to formal literacy and that prepare for learning to read and write are referred to as family literacy.
In the theoretical part, I define phonological awareness, phonological processing and metalinguistic awareness. I describe the development and stages of phonological awareness and present different models describing the development of phonological awareness and the age at which children acquire a particular phonological awareness skill. I highlight the importance of phonological awareness for reading and writing and introduce linear phonology and the factors that influence the development of phonological awareness. I focus on family literacy. I give different definitions of literacy, presenting early and emergent literacy. I describe the different aspects of family literacy and the importance of family literacy for pre-school children.
In the research I carried out, I wanted to find out whether the different aspects of family literacy contribute to better phonological awareness in 5- and 6-year-olds. The sample included 50 5- and 6-year-olds attending the Ciciban kindergarten in Ljubljana. I individually administered the Phonological Awareness Test to each child to check the state of their phonological awareness. A questionnaire distributed to the parents of the tested children was used to obtain information on how often different family literacy activities take place in their family.
I found that 6-year-olds scored statistically significantly better than 5-year-olds on the Phonological Awareness Test. Parental education, frequency of reading, frequency of symbolic play and number of children's literature did not prove to be a statistically significant factor in the Phonological Awareness Test score. Children performed best on Task 3 (Combining syllables into words), Task 4 (Finding rhymes) and Task 5 (Identifying rhymes). The lowest scores were achieved in Task 12 (Extracting a sound from a word) and Task 13 (Extracting a syllable from a word).
|