Abstract
Abstract It is common knowledge that child starts with learning to read and to write at the beginning of the first year of schooling. Nevertheless the literacy acquisition process has already begun at the preschool age.
Before the start of the formal schooling the key cognitive skills and abilities, which are necessary for the reading and spelling development, are develo-ped. One of these key skills is the phoneme awareness (hereafter also PA).
The purpose of this article is making the reader more familiar with the concept of PA in the context of the contemporary international literature. This article put stress on the presentation of the con-temporary knowledge of the PA importance for the literacy acquisition in the alphabetical languages.
This article can be divided into two parts (theoretical and practical). In the theoretical part the psycholinguistic approach to the literacy, where the concept of the PA has a central position, is introduced.