Abstract
Skilled reading is needed in order to be successful both during and after formal education. It enables skills to be increased, knowledge to be developed and meaning to be built from written language. Education institutions recognize the importance of reading for the lives of pupils as an investment that can satisfy children’s needs for adventure and knowledge (Cramer, 2004). Gow (2006) even described reading as the basis for other skills that are essential for students to succeed in their academic activities. To improve the performance of learner reading, different preconditions should be put in place. Many studies support the idea that phonological awareness is a precursor to reading. This means that children are more likely to be good readers if they have sound phonological knowledge. Likewise, children with poor phonological awareness may be poor readers. Gillon (2004) and McBride-Chang (2004) reported that young children demonstrated phonological awareness when they began to develop awareness of different sound speech units separately from their relevance. Phonological sensitivity is often described as a continuum of skills ranging from basic skills such as rhyming and alliteration to more complex skills such as phonemes, which are single-word sound units, to identification and manipulation (Heroman & Jones, 2004; Snow et al., 1998). It also refers to the ability to hear and manipulate sound in spoken words and to understand different ways of separating and manipulating oral language into smaller components (Wagner, Torgesen and Rashotte, 1997). Phonological awareness of early and future reading success has been shown to be significant and cause-effective (Gillon, 2004). Children with difficulties in understanding the phonology of their language, for example, often show deficiencies in word recognition and spelling later and longer (Ball & Blachman, 1991).
