What is the primary focus of phonological awareness?

The primary focus of phonological awareness is indeed on breaking speech into smaller units of sound. This concept involves a child's ability to recognize and manipulate sounds as they relate to spoken language. Phonological awareness encompasses a range of skills, including the ability to hear and identify individual sounds (phonemes), syllables, and larger phonological units like rhymes or onsets and rimes.

This foundational skill is crucial for literacy development, as it helps children understand that words are made up of discrete sounds. It enables them to engage in activities such as blending sounds to form words, segmenting words into their constituent sounds, and manipulating sounds to create new words. By focusing on the auditory aspects of language rather than visual representations, phonological awareness lays the groundwork for effective reading and writing skills.

In this context, understanding sound-symbol relationships, recognizing letters and spelling patterns, and performing written tasks are important as well, but they are more accurately classified under the broader literacy skills that develop after a strong foundation in phonological awareness is established.