How to Assess Phonological Awareness – Episode 25

As SLPs, we’re responsible for assessing language and sounds. Back in Episode 20, we discussed narrative assessment, which is the language side of literacy. But in today’s episode, we’re going to focus on decoding, which has to do with sounds. More specifically, we’re going to discuss how to assess phonological awareness, why it needs to be assessed, and the benchmarks to look for. 

With phonological awareness, there’s a lot of confusion, so we provide an overview and define it as an individual’s awareness of their sound structure of a spoken word. Part of our role as a SLP is to facilitate a student’s literacy and language development, so we also highlight the various evaluations we do to assess phonological awareness. 

Topics Discussed:

• An overview of phonological awareness, what to look for in assessments, and how it fits in narrative and language assessments
• The age students start understanding sounds and the grade when their phonological awareness should be fully developed
• Research that links a deficit in phonological awareness to poor reading achievement
• A SLP’s role and the various evaluations they give for phonological assessments