Phonological awareness and emerging reading skills of two- to five-year-old children

ABSTRACT

This study, conducted in Finnish private and Montessori child care centres, aimed at investigating the development of the phonological awareness (PA) of two- to five-year-old preschool children within a six-month period in relation to emerging letter knowledge and reading skills. The children (N = 72) performed five phonological tasks and a vocabulary test, a letter knowledge test and a reading skills test twice; in the beginning, when knowing no letters, and at the end of the study. The results show that the children's performance in the different phonological tasks improved over a six-month period. Detecting word structure or blending phonemes were easier than producing rhymes or twisting. The children who had learned to recognize letters performed better in phonological tasks than the children who had not learned any letters, but children able to read precociously exceeded all. Our results appear to indicate that learning letters does not require previous PA ability but affects PA.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonological awareness
• letter knowledge
• reading skills
• preschool
• precocious readers
• rhyme

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Outi Suortti is preparing a doctoral thesis at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki. Her research work is directed to preschool children’s literacy, especially to early reading abilities.

Lasse Lipponen is a professor of education, with special reference to early childhood education, at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki. His research work is directed to playful learning; children’s agency; understanding children’s experiences in their life-world with digital documentation and participatory research methods; and teacher education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation.