Phonological Awareness in Chinese EFL : Age‐Related Development and Phoneme‐Specific Challenges

ABSTRACT The necessity of phonological awareness (PA) instruction has consistently been emphasized in EFL and ESL contexts. However, many EFL/ESL settings follow highly structured, exam‐oriented curricula that leave little room for such instruction. This imbalance between research emphasis and classroom reality highlights the need to investigate whether PA instruction is necessary, that is, do learners' PA skills develop spontaneously with age? Another unsolved issue in EFL/ESL contexts concerns which specific phoneme contrasts are most challenging to differentiate, as systematic research on this question remains limited. This study investigates whether learners' grade level relates to their PA and identifies which specific phoneme contrasts pose the greatest difficulty. A total of 995 fourth‐ to sixth‐grade students completed a paper‐and‐pencil PA test. Results revealed that PA performance significantly improved with grade level, with the largest effect size in rhyme detection. Consonant contrasts (e.g., /v/—/ð/, /s/—/z/) revealed greater difficulty than vowel contrasts. Findings suggest that although some PA skills may develop naturally with age, grade‐appropriate PA instruction is crucial for cultivating skills that might be hard to spontaneously acquire, such as rhyme detection. The results also underscore the importance of assessing and considering learners' linguistic background, including the influence of Chinese dialects, to target specific phoneme difficulties. Because of the diversity of Chinese dialects, the findings might primarily generalize to speakers of a specific dialect. Nevertheless, undertaken in a Chinese context, this study also offers insights for EFL/ESL educators on optimizing PA development within structured curricula and contributes to theoretical understandings of cross‐linguistic speech perception.