Reading Is Good

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language.

Phonemic awareness activities deal only with speaking and listening. There is no print component — no talk of letter names nor written words — in phonemic awareness.

Educators often say that you can recognize a phonemic awareness activity because it can be completed in a pitch black room (although doing so would probably be weird). There is nothing to see while exercising one’s phonemic awareness.

The (Very Important) Role of Phonemic Awareness

To understand the important role phonemic awareness plays, we have to understand a little about what is going on when a child reads.

Reading and writing are really nothing more than the codification of spoken language. When we write, we take spoken language, break it into small sound units ó called phonemes ó then turn those phonemes into the correct written symbols. When we read, we do just the opposite: we take written symbols and convert them into phonemes, which we then piece back together into comprehensible language.

Phonemic awareness represents the skills we use to do the piecing back together. Without it, a reader might be able to decipher the intended sounds, but would be unable to build understandable words and sentences with them.

Phonemic awareness VS Phonics

Phonics has a page all its own, but it’s worth bringing up now because the difference between it and phonemic awareness is important.

As mentioned above, phonemic awareness deals with a child’s ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Phonics, on the other hand, deals with the relationship between sound units and graphic units in written language. More simply, phonics is where a sound is tied to a letter, while phonemic awareness is the sound all by itself.

Both phonemic awareness and phonics are necessary and critical skills. Without both, reading cannot occur.

In fact, research shows that phonemic awareness in kindergarten aged children is the number one predictor of future reading success. In other words ó and my own experience working with struggling readers plays this out ó kids with high phonemic awareness become successful readers, while kids with low phonemic awareness don’t.

And So … ?

That’s it for the basic definition, but it’s a far cry from all there is to say.

Continue on to 4 Key Phonemic Awareness Skills and read about the particular skills and activities that make phonemic awareness such a critical part of early literacy. See you there!