What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of literacy skills within phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a term that describes the ability to recognize, think about, and manipulate the sounds in our spoken language. It is recognized by researchers as a crucial set of skills for early literacy development because it helps children understand the relationship between sounds and letters, a key component of the alphabetic principle (Moats, 2010).
Experts in literacy remind us that students with good phonological awareness are more likely to become good readers, while students with poor phonological awareness skills will likely struggle in reading (Kilpatrick, 2016). In short, phonological awareness skills lay the foundation for children to become fluent readers.
The Five Levels of Phonological Awareness
Word Awareness: The child has an understanding that sentences and phrases can be broken down into smaller parts called words. Activities allow children to practice counting words in a sentence or a phrase.
Rhyme awareness: The child can recognize rhyming pairs and produce rhymes.
Syllable awareness: Children break words into smaller parts called syllables. Activities provide opportunities to practice counting syllables in a word and manipulating syllables.
Onset and rime awareness: The child can identify words that begin (onset) or end (rime) with the same sound.
Phonemic awareness: Phonemic awareness skills are the more advanced set of skills under the phonological awareness umbrella and focus on the sounds. Phonemic awareness activities focus subskills to teach children to understand that words are made up of phonemes that are represented with letters (graphemes). Learning these skills will help them to read, spell, and write.
Understanding Phonemic Awareness
Many experts agree that phonemic awareness proficiency in the primary years can serve as the best predictor of later reading difficulties (Gillon, 2018, Moats, 2020). Therefore, phonemic awareness is the most essential skillset under the phonological awareness umbrella. Phonemic awareness skills are indeed the more advanced set of skills under the phonological awareness umbrella.
Phonemic awareness focuses on what we can hear and see. These skills are practiced with auditory and oral activities. Phonemic awareness activities can begin with oral or auditory practice to provide children with opportunities to hear and understand how sounds are used in spoken language even before they have learned all of the letters in the alphabet. As they learn new letters during phonics instruction, these can be added to phonemic awareness activities to promote a child’s understanding of how phonemes (sounds) are mapped to graphemes (letters) to form words.
Why Phonemic Awareness Matters?
Phonemic awareness skills build the foundation for children to understand how the sounds of the English language work and have a profound effect on early literacy skills. In fact, phonemic awareness performance can predict literacy performance more accurately than variables such as intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, and socio-economic status (Gillon, 2004). The good news is that early instruction in phonological awareness skills can have a significant impact on a child’s future reading, spelling, and writing. Proficiency in these skills is necessary for success in all subject areas throughout K-12 education, making phonological awareness instruction a worthwhile investment. Opportunities for frequent practice allow children to engage with the parts that make up the whole word and support their understanding of the alphabetic principle, the building blocks of early literacy. While the skills are primarily connected to kindergarten instruction, the National Reading Panel has concluded that “Phonological awareness instruction is effective under a variety of conditions with a variety of learners” (2022).
Phonemic Awareness Subskills
- Isolation: Students are able to identify the specific phonemes within spoken words because they understand that words are made up of a sequence of sounds. This skill paves the way for students to engage in more phonemic awareness activities involving phoneme manipulation.
- Phoneme Blending: To demonstrate this skill, students can combine sounds to form syllables or words. This skill is essential to literacy development and involves listening to the sounds of oral language, identifying the sounds, and then putting the sounds together to create a word.
- Phoneme Segmentation: Proficiency with this skill allows students to break oral language into individual phonemes. As they state the sounds or a word, they can identify them with a marker (counting or tapping with fingers or using tokens).
- Manipulation: This more advanced set of phonemic awareness skills requires students to hold information about phonemes in their working memory long enough to manipulate them by adding, deleting, or replacing a phoneme in a word. David Kilpatrick suggests that these skills are the most closely related to reading and are, therefore, the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency (2015).
- Addition: The student can add a phoneme to a word to create a new word.
- Deletion: A phoneme is removed from a word to create a new word.
- Substitution: One phoneme is replaced with another phoneme to create a new word.
Studies have shown that phonemic awareness activities do not need to take up a lot of time to advance reading skills. Educators can incorporate mini-lessons into regular classroom activities throughout the day.
Activities that target phoneme awareness skills should be fun and engaging, incorporating silly songs, word play, and rhyme time. Educators should provide students with ample opportunities to see, hear, and feel the parts of words with opportunities to think about how we can add phonemes to build words (blending) and how the words can be taken apart into the phonemes segmenting).
Blending phonemes helps children develop the phonemic awareness necessary for reading words, while segmenting phonemes strengthens their ability to spell words. As soon as students have learned the first few consonants and vowels in early phonics instruction, they can spell and write various single-syllable words and pseudowords. Providing students with letters during phonemic activities allows them to see the phoneme-grapheme relationships in action.
Ways to Enhance Phonemic Awareness
- Provide explicit, systematic, and consistent instruction to target important skills.
- Try to keep activities brief and engaging for targeted practice.
- Individual skills do not need to be taught in isolation. Two skills can be taught in the same week.
- Provide modeling and immediate, corrective feedback.
- Incorporate manipulatives, pictures, or hand cues to enhance multisensory learning, helping students to see, hear, and feel the sounds as they manipulate them in a phonological task. These individualized supports are beneficial for early learners, struggling readers, and students learning English as a second language. Supports can be reduced over time as students master skills.
Activities to Improve Phonemic Awareness in the Classroom
Silly Sentences (Phoneme Isolation-Identification of Beginning Sound)
Prepare a picture or drawing of an animal for each child’s turn. Demonstrate how to play by showing a picture of an animal and creating an alliterative sentence for the beginning sound of that animal. Sammy Seal sings in the salty sea on Sundays or Dennis the Dog digs in the dirt all day.
Vowel Sound Switch-Up (Phoneme Isolation-Medial Sound)
Give students a vowel card (placed on yarn for a necklace or make a headband). Dictate a CVC word /p/ /a/ /t/ and ask the student representing the vowel sound to come forward. Dictate the new word with a vowel change /p/ /e/ /t/ and have the student with the /e/ switch places with the /a/. Continue playing the game, concentrating on changing only the vowel sound in each round.
Sound Sort (Phoneme Isolation-Identification of Beginning Sound)
Place small, everyday objects in a grab bag. Lay picture cards on the floor. Each card will represent a beginning sound (mitten is /m/). Children will take turns selecting one item from the bag, naming it, and placing it with the picture card that has the same beginning sound.
Sound Stretch (Phoneme Segmentation)
Model for the child how to stretch a word sound by sound, using a slinky or pop tube to visually represent the stretch. Start with a simple CVC word like /m/ /a/ /p/. As you state each sound, have the child stretch the slinky a bit for each individual sound. State the whole word as you push the slinky back together. Use an imaginary slinky if you do not have one. Move from CVC words (hop, pet, can) to CCVC (stick, plan, frog) and CVCC words (cast, hand, lift).
Elkonin Boxes (Phoneme Blending)
The teacher will provide students with tokens (cubes, chips, stickers) and an Elkonin box template. The child will listen to a spoken word and move a token into a box to represent each sound. For example, if the teacher dictates the word “step”, the student will move four tokens, one for each individual phoneme /s/-/t/-/e/-/p/.
Add a Sound (Phoneme Manipulation: Addition)
This word game shows how adding one new sound can make a new word. Students will have a card representing an individual sound. The leader will state a word like ‘op’. Students will take turns adding their sound to the word to make and state new words. For example, /h/ added to /op/ makes ‘hop’, add /t/ and it is ‘top’, add m/ and it is now ‘mop’.
Take Aways (Phoneme Manipulation: Deletion)
The teacher will lead the class in a series of phoneme manipulation tasks to apply the skill of phoneme deletion by removing individual sounds. (Kilpatrick)
Say pin. Now say pin again without saying /p/. Student: in
Say smile. Now say smile without saying /s/. Student: mile
Say club. Now say club without saying /l/. Student: cub
Presto-Change-o! (Phoneme Manipulation: Substitution)
The teacher will lead the class in a series of phoneme manipulation tasks to apply the skill of phoneme substitution by changing an individual sound with the word. (Kilpatrick)
- Initial phoneme: In the word bat, change the /b/ to a /k/ and you have the word cat.
- Final phoneme: In the word pig, change the /g/ to a /k/ to make the word pick.
- Medial phoneme: In the word cub, change the /u/ to an /a/ and you have the word cab.
Increase Phonemic Awareness with IMSE
IMSE recognizes the importance of phonemic awareness development and advocates for this critical skillset to begin early in literacy learning. Instructional steps and activities to integrate phoneme awareness are at the foundation of IMSE’s learning materials. Word chaining activities are integrated in weekly concept lessons to allow students to engage with manipulation of individual phonemes.
IMSE’s Word-Building Kit incorporates magnetic letters and moveable alphabets to support younger learners or struggling readers with phoneme awareness. This gives students confidence to apply segmenting strategies and enhances awareness of the alphabetic principle. IMSE has support for educators including classroom activities and materials, professional development training programs for educators, and professional coaching and consultation for schools and districts.
Products for classroom: https://imse.com/products/
Training programs for educators: https://imse.com/training-descriptions/
Schoolwide or classroom online training options: https://imse.com/private-district-trainings/
Frequently Asked Questions
How should I teach phonemic awareness?
Begin early by reading to children and start with phonological awareness activities such as rhyming. Help young students develop an ability to listen for, identify, and manipulate speech sounds so they can learn to recognize and manipulate phonemes to create new words. It is important for teachers to introduce beginning readers to the relationship between the parts (phonemes) and the whole (words) by providing auditory and visual examples of how words are made up of sounds.
At what age should phonemic awareness skills be taught?
Phonemic awareness is typically taught in kindergarten and first grade.
What are the most important phonemic awareness skills?
According to experts, the two most important phonemic awareness skills are phoneme blending and segmentation. These skills are crucial for both reading and writing.
What is the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is recognized as an auditory and oral ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. It is the basic understanding that sounds make up words. Phonics describes the visual and auditory ability to recognize the sounds and associate them with the letters that represent them. This is called the alphabetic principle. Both phonemic awareness and phonics skills are necessary to develop strong reading skills.
Gillon, G. T. (2004). Phonological awareness: From research to practice. The Guilford Press.
Gillon, G.T. (2018). Phonological awareness: From research to practice. The Guilford Press.
Kilpatrick, D. A (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Wiley.
Moats, L.C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing).
National Reading Panel Report, 2024
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