The emergence of explicit phonological awareness skills is an important developmental stage because it permits the child to...

• A. Map letters to sounds in words in order to learn to read.
• B. Learn new and more complex words to acquire a large vocabulary.
• C. Perceive the difference between minimal pair words.
• D. Learn a second language in order to become a sequential bilingual.

Answer: (A)

Explicit phonological awareness enables decoding by connecting spoken sounds to written symbols. When a child can hear and manipulate individual sounds and map those sounds to letters, they can blend sounds to form words and break down unfamiliar words into phonemes + graphemes. This is the foundation of learning to read—using the alphabetic principle to translate sounds into written form and vice versa. Without this skill, reading relies more on memorizing whole words rather than decoding, which makes literacy growth slower and less flexible.

Among the other ideas, recognizing differences between minimal pairs is a phonological skill, but it doesn’t directly explain how reading is learned. Vocabulary growth and second-language learning are important language development outcomes, yet they are not the mechanism by which decoding and reading acquisition occur.