A Word about Word Awareness

Research ■ Pronounce sounds clearly, particularly those that are not in a child’s native language . ■ Provide support, share as many examples as needed, and make use of visuals, such as objects and picture cards . ■ Be positive and encouraging . Establish a psychologically safe environment so children feel comfortable taking risks . A Word about Word Awareness Some researchers and educators include word awareness in their discussions of phonological awareness (Lonigan 2006; Phillips et al . 2008) . Word awareness is the ability to attend to and manipulate individual words in spoken sentences, phrases, or compounds . For example, a child with word awareness knows that the following sentence consists of individual words: I have a friendly dog . The child can segment the phrase the purple cow into its three words— the, purple, and cow—and can substitute one word with another, changing purple to brown to make the brown cow . The child knows that deleting the second word from the compound word firefighter results in the word fire . Words are units of language, and the same types of manipulations that can be done with syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes can be done with words . However, word awareness is not a phonological understanding (Moats and Tolman 2008) . Words are meaning-based, not sound-based, units of language . Nouns (car, telephone), adjectives (blue, new), verbs (jump, run), and adverbs (slowly, yesterday) obviously convey meaning; function words (the, an) convey meaning in a less obvious way . Phonological awareness is, as we noted throughout this chapter, an awareness of the sound structure of language . Nevertheless, word awareness is an important skill to foster . It helps children understand how print is laid out on a page, and children begin to understand what the spaces surrounding groups of symbols signify . More relevant to our discussion, however, is the fact that, like phonological awareness, word awareness is a metalinguistic skill; that is, it demands that children think about language itself . Language, then, becomes more than the medium by which we communicate with one another; it becomes an object of attention . This same type of shift of attention is required for phonological awareness . Teaching Phonological Awareness to English Language Learners (cont.) Phonological Awareness Development (cont.) sample