Abstract: In this research, 20 children from each of 3, 4, 5 grades served as subjects,according to the teachers ' recommendation, each group of children subjects weredivided into good and poor readers. Several tasks were designed to study the featureand development of childres' syllable awareness, onset--rime awareness, and phonemicawareness. The results of this research indicated that: Chinese phonological awarenessof children developed with the increasing of grade, syllable awareness and onset--rimeawareness developed earlier than phonemic awareness. The Poor readers fall behindgood readers in their phonological awareness, the differences between good and poorreeders are analogous to those between older and younger children, and performanceof the older poor readers tends to resemble that of younger good readers, good andpoor readers tend to differ in the rate at which they develop phonological awareness.

Key words: Phonological awareness, syllable, onset-rime, phoneme