Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual
sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of
how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech
sounds, or phonemes.
Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in
the word's meaning. For example, changing the first phoneme in the word hat from /h/ to
/p/ changes the word from hat to pat, and so changes the meaning. (A letter between slash
marks shows the phoneme, or sound, that the letter represents, and not the name of the
letter. For example, the letter h represents the sound /h/.)
Children can show us that they have 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.");
• isolating 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, or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word ("/m/, /a/, /p/--
map.");
• breaking, or segmenting a word into its separate sounds ("up--/u/, /p/.").
Children who have phonemic awareness skills are likely to have an easier time learning
to read and spell than children who have few or none of these skills.
The reason is obvious: children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of
spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to the
graphemes when they see them in written words.
Children can show us that they have phonological awareness in several ways, including: