DEVELOPMENT OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN CHILDREN OF PRE-SCHOOL AND EARLY SCHOOL AGE

The notion of phonemic awareness has been in the professional special-pedagogical and psychological literature since the 1980’s. Phonemic awareness is now considered primarily as a phenomenon that has a key position between skills and processes that are important for the development of reading and writing. In the Czech literature, the concept of phonemic awareness (hereinafter as PA) appears quite rarely or not clearly. In Czech written professional literature the most commonly used concept is phon. hearing, especially in publications targeted at speech therapy practice. PA can be defined as the conscious ability to recognise and manipulate with larger phonol. units than individual phonemes, such as syllables and rhymes while PA concerns only the smallest units, i.e. phonemes. The distinction between phonemic concept and PA reflects the specific development of phonol. skills. Abroad (unlike Czech Republic) there is a number of tests to estimate the level of phonol. skills that are focused on the perception of sounds, and also include tasks designed to detect differences and matching phonemes, they are focused on composing phonemes into words, require the handling of phonemes and then vice versa monitor a child's ability to segment words into phonemes. The issue of PA in pre-school and early school age, among others, also closely corresponds with the incidence of impaired communication abilities of children in this age group. The identification of individuals with deficits in PA, as well as follow-up special educational (speech therapy) support children with weakened PA, act favourably in relation to the elimination of already existing communication problems and also pre-emptively with regard to the occurrence of the risk of learning disabilities in children of pre-school and early school age. The paper presents the results of the pilot survey (100 children) aimed at verifying the quality of PA in pre-school and early school age and the prevention of learning difficulties after starting school. From a methodological point of view, in order to verify the quality of PA in pre-school and young school aged children, we used certain test methods, namely sub-tests of the Heidelberg speech development test (H. S. E. T) and a Battery of Tests for Phonological Skills (BTPS). Partially, we also used sub-tests translated from English and adapted for the Czech environment, i.e. CTOPP (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing) and TOLD (Test of Language Development). The obtained data was processed quantitatively. As part of the research survey, the ability of verbal auditory memory, vocabulary, as well as the ability of pre-school and young school age to differentiate the individual phonemes, compose phonemes into words, to manipulate phonemes and segment words into phonemes, were monitored in the target group. The results of the pilot research survey conducted on randomly selected kindergartens and primary schools in the Czech Republic specify the level of phonological skills in the target group (i.e. pre-school and young school aged children). Furthermore, on the basis of comparison with the developmental norms of phonemic awareness, as well as in relation to the occurrence of a deficit in the phonol. area they define statistically significant difference/association in relation to the existence of speech communication developmental disorders in the target group.