Phonemic Awareness: The Underestimated Powerhouse
Being able to identify and manipulate the smallest units of sounds in words is one of the most important predictors of reading success in school. These small units of sounds are called phonemes and this skill of identifying and manipulating them is called phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is one set of skills included in phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness is the ability to hear, isolate, and manipulate larger units of sound in spoken language. This includes rhyming, alliteration, and sentence segmentation. Phonoligcal awareness and its cousin, phonemic awareness, are oft overlooked components of the early childhood curriculum.
Why is that? Early childhood teachers are busy! We are often consumed by classroom behaviors teaching letters, numbers, and other concepts; supporting families, preparing our classrooms, and following district and school mandates. Directly teaching phonemic awareness skills seems a ridiculous thing to focus on. Teaching the beginning sounds in words and how to blend two words together into a compound word, is not at the top of our list of priorities.
But, it should be. It really should be.
With only 33% of our nations' 4th graders reading at grade-level (according to our National Assessment of Educational Progress), we have a literacy crisis on our hands. And early childhood teachers have unique advantages for teaching these skills. First, young children love sound games. They genuinely find them entertaining and fulfilling! There's nothing like seeing the joy in a child's face when they realize two words begin with the same sound.
Second, young children are at a prime age for developing the pathways in their brains that facilitate learning the sounds of language. Consider how much more easily young children pick up a second language than adults.
Third, at this age young age of three to six years old, children are beginning to learn letter sounds. The process of attaching sounds (phonemes) to the written letters (graphmes) goes hand-in-hand with phonemic and phonological awareness. This process is called orthographic mapping-something I'll discuss in anothe post (so stay tuned!). Phonemic awareness is a critical part of this process. We can't learn letter sounds without being able to distinguish phonemes.
Phonemic awareness is necessary for learning letter sounds, blending them together into words, and eventually decoding text. It is at the heart of reading and writing. If we miss this important step, children will struggle to read and to read well. They will grow up feeling as if they are not capable of learning and will live with feelings of inadequacy and failure unnecessarily.
Kids who struggle to learn to read almost always have difficulty with phonological or phonemic awareness. When assessing my students who struggle, the first area I look at is phonemic awareness. Almost 100% of the time, the student who comes to me for intervention is missing phonemic awareness skills.
You may be interested to learn that there are many different levels of phonemic awareness skills, and many children require direct teaching in order to learn them effectively.
Syllable level
Onset-rime level
Basic phoneme level
Advanced phoneme level
Syllable Level (Prek-early Kindergarten)
This level of phonemic awareness deals with the awareness of and ability to manipulate syllables. At this level, a teacher might have children delete syllables from words, add syllables, blend syllables together, or segment them apart.
These are a few syllable level activities:
Syllable deletion | Teacher says: Say, "table", now say table without saying "ta-" What is left? "ble!" |
Syllable addition | Teacher says: Say "snow-" now say "snow" and add "ball." What's the new word? "Snowball!" |
Syllable blending | Teacher says: I'm going to give you the chunks of a word. You get to try to figure out what my mystery word is: un-der-stand.What's the word? Understand! |
Syllable segmenting | Teacher says: I'm going to say a word. Then we're going to chop it apart. Computer: com-pu-ter. |
Onset-Rime (Mid-Kindergarten)
While the syllable level focuses on the syllables within words, the onset-rime level goes a step deeper to address the sounds within syllables. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable contains an onset and a rime. The onset of a single-syllable word or one syllable of a multisyllabic word is the initial sound. For example, onset sound in the word "bat" is /b/. The onset of the second syllable in the word "catnap" is /n/.
The rime of a single-syllable word is the chunk of the word after the onset, including the vowel. The rime in the word "bat" is -at. The rime in the second syllable of the word "catnap" is -ap.
These are a few activties that develop this level of phonemic awarness:
Onset deletion | Teacher says: Say 'bat.' Now say 'bat,' but don't say /b/. You get -at! |
Rime deletion | Teacher says: Say 'bat.' Now say 'bat,' but don't say -at. You get /b/! |
Onset-Rime blending | Teacher says: /b/, -at, what is the mystery word? Bat! |
Onset-manipulation | Teacher says: Say 'bat.' Now say 'bat,' but change /b/ to /s/. What's the new word? Sat! |
Basic to Advanced Phoneme Level (Late Kindergarten to 1st Grade)
Remember, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that impacts the word's meaning. For example, the phonemes in the word "fish" has three phonemes: /f/, /i/, /sh/. Phoneme level awareness includes the ability to identify, isolate, delete, blend, segment, and manipulate phonemes in words. Basic to Advanced Phoneme levels can be practiced by isolating, segmenting, blending, deleting or manipulating phonemes in a word.
These activities support phoneme level awareness:
Phoneme isolation | Teacher says: Let's listen for the last sound in the word, 'fish.' I hear /sh/. |
Phoneme segmenting | Teacher says: We are going to break words apart into their sounds. What sounds are in the word, 'fish?' /f/, /i/, /sh/. |
Phonme blending | Teacher says: What's the mystery word? /f/, /i/, /sh/. Fish! |
Phoneme manipulation | Teacher says: Say 'fish.' Now, say 'fish,' but say /d/ instead of /f/. What's the new word? Dish! |
If early childhood and elementary educators and parents intentionally teach these skills, reading will come much more easily to our children. They will effortlessly learn and blend letter sounds together to read words. They will have the foundation required to decode words and step into reading. Teachers, parents, and caregivers can all be a part of teaching children to read!
Sources used in this post:
Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Wiley.
Heggerty, M., & VanHekken, A. (2020). Phonemic Awareness: (kindergarten version): 35-Weeks of daily explicit and systematic phonological and phonemic awareness lessons. Literacy Resources, Inc.
Kilpatrick, D. (2022). In Equipped for reading success: A comprehensive, step-by-step program for developing phoneme awareness and fluent word recognition. Casey & Kirsch Publishers.
Assessments - reading: NAEP. Assessments - Reading | NAEP. (n.d.). https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/
Phonological and phonemic awareness: Introduction. Reading Rockets. (2022, October 3). Retrieved April 12, 2023, from https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness-introduction
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