Reading 101 for Parents: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Phonological and phonemic awarenessThe ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. is about the sounds in spoken words and a child’s understanding that spoken words are made up of sounds. While phonicsReading instruction that focuses on the alphabetic principle — the systematic, predictable relationship between spoken sounds (phonemes) and written letters (graphemes) — to allow readers to identify or “decode” words. focuses on teaching sound-spelling relationships and is associated with print, phonological awarenessA group of skills related to the ability to recognize the parts of spoken words. tasks are oral.

Phonological awareness

Phonological awareness is made up of a group of skills. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, counting the number of syllables in a name, recognizing alliterationThe repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words in connected text. , segmentingSeparating a word into smaller units, such as syllables, onset-rimes, or individual phonemes. a sentence into words, and identifying the syllables in a word. The most sophisticated — and last to develop — is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemesThe smallest parts of spoken language that combine to form words. ) in spoken words. Manipulating the sounds in words includes blendingTo combine the units of sound (syllables, onsets and rimes, phonemes) to form a word. , stretching, or otherwise changing words. Children can demonstrate phonemic awareness in several ways, including:

• Recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound.

  (“Bell, bike, and boy all have /b/ at the beginning.”)

• Identifying and saying the first or last sound in a word.

  (“The beginning sound of dog is /d/.” “The ending sound of sit is /t/.”)

• Combining (blending) the separate sounds in a word to say the whole word.

  (“/m/, /a/, /p/ – map.”)

• Breaking (segmenting) a word into its separate sounds.

  (“up – /u/, /p/.”)

• Changing a sound to make a new word

  (“Change the /t/ for /m/ – top becomes mop”)

Children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words.