Phonology

Goal: Attend to sounds within words

Phonology is the sound system of a language. Phonological awareness is a sensitivity to the individual sounds that combine to make language. 

Phonological awareness is a prerequisite for understanding the alphabetic principle, that letters represent sounds. An understanding that language can be divided into sounds must happen before those sounds can be matched to letters. 

Phonological awareness practice is done orally - it’s listening and mentally manipulating parts of speech. The goal of instruction is “progressive differentiation of internal details of spoken words for deep, accurate representation in memory” (Moats, 2020). Phonemes are “parking spots” that letters and letter groups will match.