Learning to Read and Phonological Awareness: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Early Reading Instruction

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to identify and describe the level of development ofphonological awareness in children who study the first year of Elementary Education, by means ofoddity tasks, synthesis and analysis of phonemes, sensibility to rhyme and knowledge of the letters of the alphabet. Also, it was described the level of reading achievement that the children attain in reading of words and it was evaluated the degree ofexistent association between the degree of development of phonological awareness, level of reading development, non verbal intelligence and the level of matemal education at the end of the first year of education. The central hypothesis of our investigation postulated that the children that have achieved a minimum development in phonological awareness, would have a superior performance in reading, at the end of the first year of general elementary education. The results of this investigation tend to make us think that the relationship between reading and phonological awareness is more complex of what some investigators assume and that it could not be simply like cause or consequence, but rather should be considered as an interactive process where both interact constantly.