Phonetic and Phonemic Awareness
Lately I have been thinking about a potential reason some people struggle with listening comprehension. It has to do with phonemic and phonological awareness. I feel that, possibly, a percentage of those who struggle with listening comprehension may do so because of poor phonemic and/or phonological awareness.
What Does Phonetic and Phonemic Awareness Mean? What’s the Connection with Listening Comprehension?
In case you haven't heard of these terms (I only learned about them about 2 months ago myself), phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate units of sounds in spoken language whereas phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the SMALLEST unit of sound (i.e., phonemes) in spoken language. Here is a blog post by Lauren the Teachable Teacher that explains both terms in more depth as I realize they are complex.
In my experience, it seems that most of the time people refer to phonemic and phonological awareness when discussing foundational reading skills for young children. This is because both phonemic and phonological awareness are important when learning to read alphabet-based languages. However, I think they may also be important for listening comprehension.
An Example of Low Phonemic and Phonetic Awareness and its Effect on Listening Comprehension
I have noticed that many of my French and Spanish private students have difficulty sounding words out and cannot spell unfamiliar words unless I tell them how they are written. These students have lower phonemic (and in most cases phonological) awareness. Therefore, even if a word sounds very similar to English they are unable to figure out what it means without either being told explicitly or seeing it written and noticing that the spelling is similar to English. I have also noticed these same students also struggle to rhyme, count syllables in words, and determine where one word ends and the next word starts in a sentence. The latter is particularly important for listening comprehension.
Conclusion
In short, my hypothesis is that low phonemic and phonological awareness would have a negative impact on listening comprehension skills due to the learner's inability to hear and manipulate sounds in their mind upon hearing them. The reverse would also be true; higher phonemic and phonological awareness would improve listening comprehension skills. I am not 100% sure if I am right and would love to hear any perspectives you have on this topic to help me clarify my own thoughts!
Interesting article because I think I definitely fit in with this group. Ever since I was a child, I struggled with spelling and sounding out English words. After I started learning German and Korean, my listening comprehension skills have been a struggle to develop in these languages. It feels like most of the time when I'm listening the words, they go over my head. If I hear a word I'm familiar with but can't comprehend it at that moment, my brain focuses it's attention on that one word and I don't comprehend the rest of the sentence. I noticed that I often have to visualize the word if I can't comprehend the word right away as when I try to manipulate the sound in my head, it's meaningless. I'm trying to find a way around this but I notice the best way for me to learn listening comprehension skills is to find a patient teacher to listen to and slowly breakdown and comprehend the sentence.