Phonological Awareness and the Alphabet Principle – Essential for Literacy Development

In the region, teachers face the challenge of teaching reading and writing. Knowledge, ideas, classroom practices, myths, prejudices, and tensions are woven around literacy instruction. One of these tensions is related to teaching two critical skills for learning to read fluently: phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle.

The "Let's All Learn to Read" (ATAL) program promoted a dialogue with the expert Milagros Tapia Montesinos, Ph.D. in Education from the University of Navarra, to gain an in-depth understanding of both concepts and strategies for their development.

What Is Phonological Awareness and How Is It Related to Teaching Reading and Writing?

Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic skill that allows children to identify and manipulate the sound units that make up oral speech. In other words, phonological awareness lets children realize that sounds represent letters.

The sounds of language comprise the word, the syllable, and the phoneme. Therefore, three stages of phonological awareness are identified:

1. Lexical awareness: the child identifies the words that make up a sentence. This level is less complex, and explicit instruction can begin between three and four years old.
2. Syllabic awareness: the child identifies the syllables that make up a word. This awareness can be developed in early childhood education at ages four and five.
3. Intrasyllabic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the onset and rhyme of words. This skill can be worked on at home and in schools through rhymes, songs, and poetry.
4. Phonemic awareness: is the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest sound units of the language, i.e., the phonemes that make up a syllable. This awareness develops between ages five and six and is the most complex level, but it significantly impacts learning to read and write.

What Is The Alphabetic Principle, and Why is Its Teaching Important?

Developing phonological awareness allows children to access the next step, mastering the alphabetic principle. This skill involves understanding a relationship between the letter and the sound, between the grapheme and the phoneme. In other words, children must discover which sound corresponds to each letter to learn to read in an alphabetic system like Spanish.
For Professor Milagros Tapias, this relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme is only the beginning of a long journey for students to become expert readers, as parallel work is required in other skills such as vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, calligraphy, spelling, and written composition.
By acquiring the alphabetic principle, children can decode words and, little by little, thanks to constant and intensive practice, they will automatically and accurately recognize the words they encounter in books, on the streets, and in their context.
Since Spanish is a transparent language, meaning there is a one-to-one relationship between phonemes and graphemes, it is enough for the child to know the relationship between the 27 letters and the digraphs (in Spanish: "ch", "qu", "gu", "ll", and "rr") to read any word, whether familiar or unknown. They can even read a pseudoword (an invented word).
These skills are reflected in the different versions of the Let's All Learn to Read materials, both in Spanish and Portuguese.

The Link Between The Alphabetic Principle and The Path to Literacy

As Professor Tapia states, the first step on the path to literacy is understanding the alphabetic principle. For this, training students in phonological skills is essential, as these skills do not develop naturally and require explicit and systematic instruction.
From Let's All Learn to Read, we will continue to share resources, ideas, and strategies to learn in detail how to develop fundamental reading and writing skills.
We invite you to watch the Webinar | Phonological Awareness and Alphabetic Principle (in Spanish). To learn more about how to advance literacy and other educational challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean, visit our Enfoque Educación blog.

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