Before school, children with phonological awareness problems may have difficulty associating environmental sounds with appropriate objects and they generally do not play with sounds. For example, a child will not look at a fire engine and make a siren noise, or will not make a siren noise when playing "fireman."
Signs of phonological awareness problems
As the child begins school, sign of phonological awareness problems may include:
Kindergarten (four to six years):
- trouble recognizing when words rhyme
End of kindergarten (five to six years):
- trouble isolating the first sound in a word or matching words by the first sound;
- trouble clapping out the number of sounds in a word;
- trouble learning sound-letter associations
Grade One:
- trouble isolating sounds in words or blending sounds together to make words;
- trouble matching words by the final sound
Effects of phonological difficulties on learning in the classroom
When a child has difficulties with phonological awareness, they will have problems cracking the sound-to-symbol code for reading. This will slow the learning of early reading skills, in particular, the ability to sound out words in print. This is known as "decoding."
Difficulties with phonological awareness may also result in spelling problems. Spelling requires that a child have the ability to map the sounds of words to letters and clusters of letters that make sounds.