Reading Is Good

Reading specialists say that phonemic awareness is an ability to “hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language.” Okay, sure. But for most people this is a pretty cryptic definition. What does one do while “hearing and manipulating” phonemes? What, exactly, does that entail?

Below is a list of what many researchers agree are the 4 most important phonemic awareness skills. A child who can do each of these is well on his or her way to becoming an effective reader.

Rhyme Awareness

Phonemically aware children are able to recognize rhyming words when they hear them. They understand that two words rhyme when they sound the same at the end. They are able to both recognize rhyming words and to produce rhyming words of their own.

If you rattle off the following words — cat, dog, hat, chair — a phonemically aware child should be able to tell you which ones rhyme. Additionally, if you say ‘cat,’ the child should be able to produce other words — like ‘hat,’ ‘mat’ and ’sat’ — to rhyme. Here you can see the two ideas mentioned in our definition, hearing and manipulating, at work. A child recognizes rhyme when they hear it, and manipulates rhyme by producing their own.

Note that rhyme awareness is not limited to words that actually exist in the English language, as Dr. Seuss well proved in his prolific career. If you say “cat” and the child shoots back with “glazooglerat,” they’re still very much good-to-go (and very possibly ready for publication).

Phoneme Isolation

Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound from which language is built. In the English language, many phonemes are matched to a single letter. When we say that the letter b makes a “buh” sound (education writers represent it like this: /b/) that “buh” sound is a phoneme. While many of our phonemes map directly to a single letter, there are others that match to sets of letters. Digraphs, for instance, represent two letters together that make a single sound (sh, ch, th, wh).

A child with good phonemic awareness will be able to listen to a word and pick out the specific phonemes found within it. The easiest phoneme isolation task is to identify the first sound in a word. Phonemically aware children will be able to listen to a list of words and identify those that have the same first sound. As they progress in skill, students should also be able to recognize when two words have the same ending and/or middle sounds. Children should also be able to produce their own words that begin or end with the same sound. If you say “mouse,” your child should be able to produce other /m/ words, like “moon,” “man” and “motorcycle.”

Note that hearing the ending phoneme in a word is different from hearing a rhyme. When children listen for rhymes, they listen to the entire ending section of the word. It is the /og/ in “dog” and “log” that identify them as rhyming words. Two words can have the same ending phoneme, however, and not rhyme. The ending phoneme in “dog” is /g/. So “dog” and “bag” and “pig” all have the same ending phoneme, but do not rhyme.

Phoneme isolation is an important skill because it forms the basis for Blending and Segmenting (see below).

Phoneme Substitution

Phoneme substitution is the ability to make “phoneme level” changes to a word. While phoneme isolation is a passive task — the child listens and identifies — phoneme substitution is active. Phoneme substitution involves listening for a given phoneme and then swapping it out for another. Remember that this is all done orally. It isn’t a question of changing the letter in the word, just the sound.

For instance, a phonemically aware child would be able to fix intentionally bungled words. If you pointed to your dog and said, “muppy,” your child should be able to hear that you used the wrong initial phoneme and would be able to substitite in the correct one — /p/ — to fix the word.

Another common substitution task is to pick a phoneme and substitute it into the beginning of all the words in a rhyme or song. The Name Game song (banana-fana-fo-fana, me-mi-mo-mana, etc.) is a prime example of phoneme substitution. Raffi’s classic Willaby-Wallaby song — “Willaby wallaby wusan, an elephant sat on Susan” — is another. In both songs, children take a given phoneme in a word and trade it out for another phoneme.

This is an important skill because many words in the English language can be derived by making slight changes to other words. If a child is able to make phoneme level substitutions, for instance, they can easily understand the relationship between “cat,” “mat,” “sat,” “hat,” “rat” and “that.” When faced with one of these words while reading, a phonemically aware child who knows the word “cat” can easily read the others, as well.

Blending and Segmenting

Earlier, I mentioned that phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in spoken language. There are about forty of them. All other sounds in our language are constructed by combining these basic phonemes and then blending their sounds together.

A phonemically aware child is able to listen to a string of separate phonemes and squish them together into the right word. If you made the sounds /c/ - /a/ - /t/, with about a one second pause between each one, your child should be able to smooth them together into the word “cat.” This is blending.

Segmenting is blending’s opposite. Segmenting activities present a child with a complete word and challenge them to break it down into its constituent phonemes. If you tell your child to “stretch out” the word “cat,” they should be able to break it up into /c/ - /a/ - /t/. This is segmenting.

Blending is a critical reading skill. Once a child has started to learn some phonics (the association between written letters and their matching sounds), an ability to blend phonemes literally becomes reading. If they see the word DOG, they are able to translate the letters into the right sounds (d => /d/, o => /o/, g => /g/). With those sounds in mind, the child then falls back on blending skills to smooth them together and say “dog.” Phonics plus phonemic awareness equals reading.

In the same way, segmenting is a critical writing skill. The child starts with an oral word and seeks to turn it into a written one. Before they can start using their phonics mastery to convert sounds into letters, they must be able to say what each of those sounds are. They do this by taking the oral word and segmenting it into its phonemes … “dog” becomes /d/ - /o/ - /g/, which is then translated into letters and written DOG.

Some Other Stuff, Too

These four skills represent, in my opinion, the most important phonemic awareness skills children need to master, but they are not all that phonemic awareness includes. Other phonemic awareness skills include syllable awareness, onset and rime awareness, phoneme subtraction, and a few others.

While these skills are important, they’ve always seemed to me to be sub-skills to the four discussed above. Onset and rime awareness, for instance, is really a mixture of rhyme awareness and phoneme isolation.

Generally speaking, kids who have control over the basic four will have all the phonemic awareness they need to become skilled and successful readers.