ABSTRACT
About 25 years ago, some of my colleagues posed the question that was, in their view, basic to an understanding of the reading process and the ills that so frequently attend it: What must would-be readers know that mastery of speech will not have taught them? Drawing on a combination of common sense, old knowledge about language, and new knowledge about speech, they arrived at the hypothesis that a missing and necessary condition was what has come to be called phonological awareness—that is, a conscious understanding that words come apart into consonants and vowels. Research then demonstrated that such awareness is not normally present in preliterate children or illiterate adults; that measures of awareness provide, perhaps, the best single predictor of reading achievement; and that training designed to develop awareness has generally beneficial effects on learning to read.
