What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. It is comprised of word awareness, syllable awareness, onset and rime awareness, rhyme awareness and finally phonemic awareness. Word awareness is the understanding that sentences are made up of individual words and rhyme awareness is the ability to hear, recognize and play with rhyming words. Syllable awareness is understanding that words can be divided into chunks of sound and onset and rime awareness is understanding that words can be broken down into smaller sections of sound. Phonemic awareness is a critical subset to phonological awareness.
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness refers to the specific ability to focus on and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes-the smallest units comprising spoken language). A learner who is phonemically aware is able to isolate and manipulate, blend and segment sounds into spoken or written words. The main focus is on phonemes or sounds is strictly on oral language. Students work with manipulating the sounds in words and the skills can be broken down into 8 categories (according to Heggerty): rhyming, onset fluency, blending, isolating final and medial phonemes, segmenting, adding, deleting and substituting. These awareness skills lead into the early literacy skills like alphabet knowledge and language awareness.
Why is phonological awareness important?
Phonological awareness is critical for learning to read any alphabetic writing system. Phonological awareness is foundational to attending to unfamiliar words and comparing them to known words, repeating and pronouncing words correctly, remembering words accurately so they can be retrieved and used and differentiating words that sound familiar and determining meaning. It is the strongest predictor of reading progress.
Why phonemic awareness is important?
Phonemic awareness is essential for the progression of reading that children are able to hear sounds and patterns used to make up words. It is central to learning to read and spell and to be proficient at reading has a foundation in being able to identify, remember and sequence phonemes. It primes our readers for text and requires them to notice how letters represent sound. Explicit instruction has produced positive effects on both word reading and psuedoword reading that will help our learners decode words and remember how to read familiar words.
What can phonological and phonemic instruction look like?
Phonological and phonemic awareness starts with our learners picking up on sounds, syllables and rhymes in the words they hear. Read aloud to your child and choose books that rhyme or repeat the same sound or draw attention to rhymes: “Fox, socks, box! Those words all rhyme. Do you hear how they almost sound the same?” Ask your students to find and recognize alliteration and identify the syllables in a word. We can make syllables easier to understand by clapping to the "beats" as they listen to the words. Segment by drawing out the word sounds and breaking them up. The opposite strategy is to blend where the sounds are getting closer and closer together. As we construct and deconstruct, our learners begin to recognize sounds, letters and the words. Try to incorporate movement. A physical relationship between sounds, letters and movements helps separate the sounds and words. Ask your learners to point to the letters as they blend sounds. Rhyming puzzles and word play games help with the connections between sounds, letters and words. Students can guess, identify through pictures using visual cues, or use manipulatives to make the abstract more concrete.
Useful Videos
Please watch the videos below. They will provide some examples on how you could approach phonemic or phonological awareness in your classroom.