Phonemic Awareness

Introduction

Reading is a complex cognitive process, which requires decoding of written symbols in order to understand its meaning. Reading is extremely beneficial in the process of development and maturation of children. In recent years, it has been noticed that the interest of parents regarding the reading capabilities of their children has grown, perhaps because they know the relationship between reading and academic performance. (Kaminski, and Good, pp. 215-227) This paper will present the learning potential of reading which goes beyond success in school. Reading provides knowledge about culture and develops an aesthetic sense on the formation of personality, which is a source of recreation and enjoyment. Reading is a vehicle for learning which helps in the development of intelligence and above all it helps in the acquisition of culture and education of the will. Reading does not only provide information or instruction of how to read words or symbols, but it is education which creates habit of reflection, analysis, effort and concentration. This study would focus on the phonemic awareness which in imperative for the purpose of reading. In this connection, this paper would initially describe the child's first five years of reading and development of phonemic awareness skills.

Child's First Five Years of Reading

A child begins to learn to read at school mostly at the age of three when the brain of any child is able to retain a certain amount of information. At the first year, a child learns to read by individually analyzing different alphabets. The second year a child learns to read small combination of words which make help a child to understand how alphabets can be used to form words. The first two years are crucial in the learning process of reading as this in the following years helps a child to read more complex combination ...