What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a crucial foundation for learning to read and spell. It falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness and is its most complex activity.

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up spoken language. Phonemic awareness is the awareness of and the ability to manipulate the phonemes in spoken words. There are 6 skills that make up phonemic awareness:

1. Phoneme Isolation: the ability to hear and isolate individual sounds in spoken words.
2. What is the last sound in the word 'can?' The last sound is /n/.
3. Blending: combining sounds: listening to and pulling together isolated phonemes to create words.
4. What word is /b/ /a/ /g/? It is bag.
5. Segmentation: the ability to divide a spoken word into its individual sounds.
6. How many sounds are in 'most?' /m/ /o/ /s/ /t/. 4 sounds.
7. Addition: adding phonemes to a word to produce a new word.
8. Add /b/ at the beginning of 'eat.' Beat
9. Deletion: deleting phonemes form a word to produce a new word.
10. Take away /s/ from 'start.' What word do you have? Tart
11. Substitution: involves segmenting, isolation, deleting, and adding the phones in a word. The most complex skill.
12. Say 'bag.' Now replace /g/ with /t/. Bat.

Why are these skills important?

Although phonemic awareness is an auditory skill, it is needed for literacy. This is due to the fact that the ability to identify the sounds in a word and the manipulation of these sound translates to reading and writing.

1. It requires readers to notice how letters represent sounds.
2. It gives readers a way to approach sounding out and reading new words.
3. It helps readers understand the alphabetic principle: that letters represent sound.

Phonemic awareness skills are a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

Phonemic Awareness Activities

Here are a few activities to stimulate phonemic awareness skills.

Phoneme I-Spy

Choose a sound and ask students to find objects around the room that start with that sound.

Sound counting

Using small manipulatives (legos, counting bears, etc.), say a word and have the student line up the number of objects to match the number of sounds in the word.

Guessing Game

Choose a turn taking game. Segment a word and have the child guess what it is. Once they guess correctly, they can take a turn in the game.

Utilizing phonemic awareness activities and taking the time to improve these skills will help to improve spelling and reading abilities in early readers.

Emily Miner, M.S., CF-SLP

References:

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., & Osborn, J. (2006). Put Reading First (Kindergarden Through Grade 3). LINCS. https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/PRFbooklet.pdf

Bottari, M. (2022, October 28). Phonemic Awareness vs. Phonics. Heggerty. https://heggerty.org/resources/blog-post/phonemic-awareness-vs-phonics/