03/26/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 03/26/2024 10:07
In the region, teachers face the challenge of teaching reading and writing. Knowledge, ideas, classroom practices, myths, prejudices, and tensions are woven around literacy instruction. One of these tensions is related to teaching two critical skills for learning to read fluently: phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle.
The "Let's All Learn to Read" (ATAL) program promoted a dialogue with the expert Milagros Tapia Montesinos, Ph.D. in Education from the University of Navarra, to gain an in-depth understanding of both concepts and strategies for their development.
Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic skill that allows children to identify and manipulate the sound units that make up oral speech. In other words, phonological awareness lets children realize that sounds represent letters.
The sounds of language comprise the word, the syllable, and the phoneme. Therefore, three stages of phonological awareness are identified:
Developing phonological awareness allows children to access the next step, mastering the alphabetic principle. This skill involves understanding a relationship between the letter and the sound, between the grapheme and the phoneme. In other words, children must discover which sound corresponds to each letter to learn to read in an alphabetic system like Spanish.
For Professor Milagros Tapias, this relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme is only the beginning of a long journey for students to become expert readers, as parallel work is required in other skills such as vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, calligraphy, spelling, and written composition.
By acquiring the alphabetic principle, children can decode words and, little by little, thanks to constant and intensive practice, they will automatically and accurately recognize the words they encounter in books, on the streets, and in their context.
Since Spanish is a transparent language, meaning there is a one-to-one relationship between phonemes and graphemes, it is enough for the child to know the relationship between the 27 letters and the digraphs (in Spanish: "ch", "qu", "gu", "ll", and "rr") to read any word, whether familiar or unknown. They can even read a pseudoword (an invented word).
These skills are reflected in the different versions of the Let's All Learn to Read materials, both in Spanish and Portuguese.
As Professor Tapia states, the first step on the path to literacy is understanding the alphabetic principle. For this, training students in phonological skills is essential, as these skills do not develop naturally and require explicit and systematic instruction.
From Let's All Learn to Read, we will continue to share resources, ideas, and strategies to learn in detail how to develop fundamental reading and writing skills.
We invite you to watch the Webinar | Phonological Awareness and Alphabetic Principle (in Spanish). To learn more about how to advance literacy and other educational challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean, visit our Enfoque Educación blog.