Świadomość fonologiczna jako predyktor postępów w nauce czytania i pisania

Abstract

Phonological awareness has been considered for almost 30 years as one of the several metalinguistic abilities nccessary for beginning readers to make progress in reading an alpha- betic orthography. Phonological awareness allows children to focus on the constituent sounds or the phonemic structure of a word as divorced from its meaning. Phonological awareness refers to the whole spectrum of awareness from primitive awareness of the sounds and intention of speech to rhyme awareness and sound similarities through syllable and phoneme awareness. Phonemic awareness refers morę specifically to the awareness of sound structure at the phoneme level. The relationship between phonemic awareness and acquisition of reading and writing skills is considered from three points of view: it has been treated as a result of leaming these skills, or as their predictor, or as the skill that is in mutual relationship with reading and writing. The last view-point is most common. Methods of diagnosis and phonological awareness treatment are presented in the paper. Efficient decoding lets the reader concentrate on comprehension. The goal is to let the decoding take place with minimum time and effort, and the minimum of error. Efficient decoding is often termed ‘automatic’. According to the automaticity deficit hypothesis, dyslcxia is caused by a deficit of automaticity of various tasks involved in reading and writing. At first glance, this would secm to be an explanation difTerent from the many attempts at cxplaining dyslexia as a deficit in phonological awareness in generał or phonemic awareness in parlicu- lar. Concept of ‘skill’ seems to be useful for ‘uniting’ automaticity and awareness because in skills, leaming and performance are often closcly related. Dysle\ia seems to be not only leaming difficulties but performing difficultics as well. Proficient reading seems then to be best characterized as a flexible combination of awareness and automaticity.