| Summary: | This paper is an attempt to investigate the significance of the phonological component for the successful reading process at the elementary stage of learning a foreign language. Phonological awareness, the ability to segment language into smaller components and consciously manipulate them, together with the phonemic awareness, i.e. the ability to discriminate the individual phonemes within words, have been extensively studied since the 1980’s. Their causal role in reading acquisition is considered to be the single most powerful advance in the science and pedagogy of reading this century. However, this phonological component of reading skills formation has not yet been extensively examined in Lithuanian schools, while a number of scholars have proved the inter-relationship of the above mentioned skills by different experiments, conducted in foreign countries.
The paper comprises three parts. In the first part Reading as a Cognitive Process the views about the cognitive process of reading of such scholars as G. V. Rogova, J. Harmer, F. Davies and many others are discussed. The second part of the paper, The Taxonomy of Phonological Awareness, deals with the phonological as well as phonemic awareness and their role in reading acquisition. The scholars K. Hempenstall, P.E. Bryant, R. Sensenbaugh, and some others are analysed here. In The Experimental Part of the paper, the hypothesis, that the presence of phonological awareness stimulates reading skills and vice versa, the... [to full text]
|
|---|
