The nature of the relationship between oral language development
and reading has interested researchers and educators for some time. Despite
the ease with which most children learn to communicate orally, substantial
numbers of these children experience difficulty learning to read.
One explanation for the discrepancy between the ease with which children
acquire oral language skills and the difficulty many children have in
acquiring reading skills has focused on linguistic awareness (Mattingly
1972). Linguistic awareness, or metalinguistic ability (as it is more often
referred to today), is the ability to reflect deliberately on language in and
of itself, as opposed to the automatic use of language to convey meaning
(Cazden 1972). One category of metalinguistic development which continues
to attract attention as an important component of early reading
skills is phoneme awareness. Phoneme awareness (sometimes called
phonological awareness, phonemic analysis, or phoneme segmentation)
is the ability to recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of
sounds.