phonological awareness: definition and types

Re: Phonological Awareness
Fr: http://www.riverpub.com/products/wjIIIAchievement/details.html (underscore mine)

Phonological awareness is one of the best predictors of early reading acquisition—better than IQ, vocabulary, or listening comprehension; as such, it is an important predictor of educational achievement. Deficits in this area are a major cause of severe reading problems.

Phonological awareness is the ability to focus on the sound structure of language apart from its meaning. To learn to read and spell, we must attend to the relationship between the sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) of language. This knowledge of phoneme-grapheme, or sound-symbol, relationships is a key to decoding and encoding written language.

There are several types of phonological awareness, including
-- word awareness,
-- syllable awareness,
-- rhyme awareness, and
-- phonemic awareness.

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The WJ III NU contains five tests that measure different aspects of phonological awareness. In fact, the WJ III NU Tests of Cognitive Abilities is the only major intelligence test that measures auditory processing and phonemic awareness. The cognitive battery contains Sound Blending, which requires a subject to synthesize speech sounds to form a word, and Incomplete Words, which requires a subject to analyze a word with missing phonemes and identify the complete word.

In the WJ III NU Tests of Achievement, three tests measure aspects of phonological awareness. Examiners can use Word Attack and Spelling of Sounds to assess a subject's phoneme/grapheme knowledge and determine if the subject can apply both phonological and orthographical knowledge to identify and spell words. And if further analysis is needed, examiners can use Sound Awareness to measure a subject's ability to rhyme words and manipulate phonemes.