ABSTRACT
Children’s early awareness of the phonemic principle of alphabetic writing ‘plays a central role in becoming a skilled reader of English and other alphabetic systems’ (Shankweiler and Fowler, 2004: 483). Sensitivity to larger phonological units including words, rhymes and syllables occurs at an early age and before awareness of individual phonemes. In all languages so far studied,
The English language has 26 main graphemes ☞ which are used to represent
children develop syllable and onset-rime awareness prior to literacy whilst phoneme awareness develops as literacy is taught (Goswami, 1995).
