Phonemic Awareness

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Welcome to Session 2!

In this workshop I will define the term "phonemic awareness," focus on the importance of phonemic awareness, and discuss the activities that foster its development in the context of reading and writing. Whenever I begin to read any current educational journal, I almost assuredly come across the term "phonemic awareness." It is perhaps the buzzword of the last decade! What is "phonemic awareness" and what does it have to do with literacy?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes. For example, the word cat has three sounds /c/a/t/. Children who are phonemically aware understand the structure of the spoken language and are able to hear the individual sounds in a word in the context of the other sounds within that word.

Many studies consistently link phonemic awareness to success in reading, especially success with decoding or word recognition. Phonemic awareness helps children understand the alphabetic principle that the speech sounds they hear are represented by a letter or combination of letters. If children can hear the sounds in words, they can begin to learn the letter symbol attached to each sound. This is important when they read and write.

Children naturally enjoy playing with language. Using nursery rhymes, poems, songs, and stories helps students learn how language works and develops phonemic awareness. Through word play students can begin to notice the Individual sounds of words (phonemes), and to identify and manipulate these individual sounds.

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