Phonological awareness programme for preschool children (aged 4–6)

The development of phonological awareness is an important indicator for the possible later emergence of studying problems related to reading and writing. Phonological awareness represents different skills, which are connected to understanding the phonological part of the language. It includes the skills of auditory perception of word lengths, word quantity, blending and segmenting syllables, identifying and searching for rhymes and phonemic awareness. It is reasonable to encourage phonological awareness already in pre-school. Phonological awareness affects the success of emerging literacy. Developed reading and functional literacy shapes an individual, strengthens his self-esteem and has a remarkable effect on individual's communication and society integration process. The theoretical part consists of definitions and development of phonological awareness and skills in the preschool period, as well as activities through which we can strengthen the phonological awareness of children. Speech and language pathologist's role in preventing, recognizing and eliminating problems connected to phonological awareness is highlighted. Reading development, strategies which children use for learning to read and factors for successful reading development are presented. The purpose of this research is to find out to what extent phonological awareness is developed, develop a programme to encourage phonological awareness and to recognize children with problems in this area and offer them adequate help. For this purpose, we developed a 20-hour programme to encourage phonological awareness in pre-school children and present the results in this paper. The programme was based on some already established practices and adapted accordingly to children's age. That means that we presented the activities in a fun and playful way. At the start, there were 44 children included in the research, divided into 4 groups according to their age. The programme was concluded, but due to extraordinary circumstances (COVID-19), only 16 children were tested and we used only them (N=16) to interpret the result. Testing was executed three times a week, 30–45 minutes per session and lasted for a month and a half. The goal was to show that we can use this phonological awareness programme to strengthen the phonological skills of children and to recognize children, who are weak in this area and need additional help and support. The results showed us that the phonological awareness programme positively affects development of several skills as all of the children made progress (N=16)