What does "phonological awareness" involve?

Phonological awareness is fundamentally about recognizing and manipulating sounds in spoken words. This skill encompasses several specific abilities, including identifying and generating rhymes, recognizing syllables, and segmenting words into individual phonemes. It is a crucial component of early literacy development, as it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between sounds and the letters that represent them in written language.

While writing correctly, reading comprehension, and speaking different dialects are important language skills, they do not encapsulate the essence of phonological awareness. Writing involves translating sounds into written symbols, which is predicated on the presence of phonological awareness but is a separate skill. Reading comprehension pertains to understanding text and is reliant on a variety of language skills including vocabulary and prior knowledge, rather than just the manipulation of sounds. Speaking different dialects involves social and cultural linguistic aspects, which are also not related to the foundational auditory skills defined by phonological awareness. Therefore, recognizing and manipulating sounds in spoken words is the clearest definition of phonological awareness.