Phonological Awareness and Effect of Reading in 5.5 and 6.5 Years Old Persian Children

Phonological awareness has important role in learning to read. Purpose of this research is detection of phonological awareness in post-reading and pre-reading. For studying phonological awareness three kinds of phonological awareness arc used, which consist of: syllable awareness, intra-syllabic units and phoneme awareness. These tasks are samples of North and parker (1993) and Brennan and Ireson (1997). Tasks of syllable awareness consist of: synthesis syllables and syllable segmentation tasks of intra-syllabic units consist of: alliteration and rhythm: tasks of phoneme awareness consists of naming and deletion of first sound, detection words share the same onset, naming and deletion of end sound, detection words share the same rhythm, deletion of middle sound, synthesis phoneme and phoneme segmentation. This study followed 90 subjects in three groups: 1)5.5 years old at the kindergarten 2) 6.5 years old at the kindergarten and 3) 6.5 years old at the first grade. Subjects lived in Tehran and were Persian language with normal intelligence, behavior, auditory and language development. Three groups acquired same results in task's syllable awareness and intra-syllabic units. But results of phoneme awareness tasks in children at the first grade were better than two other groups. Two groups in kindergarten didnt show good results at these tasks. Therefore phoneme awareness acquired after learning to read and syllable and intra-syllabic awareness exist in children before learning to read.