The rise of phonological awareness in Spanish early childhood education students

Abstract

Acquiring phonological awareness involves becoming aware of language as a tool for communication and aspects, such as the sound structure of words and their correspondence with the written language. Researchers place the onset of these cognitive and metalinguistic abilities between the ages of two and a half and four years, coinciding with the Early Childhood Education stage. Therefore, the objective of this study is to conduct a mixed study divided into five stages to verify the results of the application of Jolly Phonics in a 5-year-old classroom, with children learning English as a foreign language. Our motivation was mainly to include activities that encouraged the development of listening comprehension skills in Early Childhood Education. The findings of the research showed some inconsistencies in the learning of foreign language phonemes. Despite some pronunciation errors, the students increased the number of hits once the Jolly Phonics method was applied. The main implication of this study is that difficulties in learning the correct pronunciation can be solved using synthetic methodologies with a variety of resources.