PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AS A FOUNDATION FOR DEVELOPING EARLY LITERACY SKILLS

Abstract

When they start the first grade of primary school, children are tested mostly for the purpose of establishing whether they are cognitively and emotionally ready for this next stage of education. Most tasks testing cognitive abilities are focused on testing the graphomotor skills and phonological awareness. Those are the tasks that children are prepared for in the preparatory period, during the year before starting school, which is called preschool and is organised in kindergarten groups, or separately for children who do not attend kindergarten. Kindergarten teachers have an important role in this period, since they prepare children for the next level of their education and train them through various activities, directly and indirectly, to take the test and enrol successfully in the first grade of primary school. The foundation for developing prereading, and later reading, skills is the process of sound analysis and synthesis, and this process should therefore be improved systematically. The best way to do this is to implement phonological games in which sound  analysis and synthesis, as well as creating rhymes, are encouraged, because, when playing, children are relaxed since it is an activity that comes naturally to them. This is why the goal of this research is to examine how often kindergarten teachers implement activities and games that develop phonological awareness, and also, to check how successful preschool children are in tasks that require sound analysis and synthesis. The results of the research have revealed that most kindergarten teachers implement activities that develop phonological awareness, but not until the preschool period. On the other hand, preschool children were relatively successful at tasks of sound analysis and synthesis, whereby it was established that the results were influenced by their gender, their mother’s education, birth order in the family and whether they attend a preschool programme for learning English. The obtained results imply  that it is necessary to raise the awareness of kindergarten teachers about the importance of frequently implementing games that develop children’s phonological awareness in order to lay a solid foundation for their prereading and prewriting skills, i.e., their early literacy.