The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is "the ability to identify the phonemes in words and manipulate them in various ways, such as adding a phoneme, deleting a phoneme, or substituting one phoneme for another" (Freeman & Freeman, 2004, p. 76). 

There are 5 levels of phonemic awareness:

1) “hear rhymes and alliteration in nursery rhymes”

2) “do oddity tasks (picking out a word that starts with a different phoneme from others in a series)”

3) “blend or spit syllables”

4) “perform phonemic segmentation (count the number of phonemes in a word like cat)”

5) “perform phoneme manipulation tasks (adding, deleting, substituting a phoneme)”

These skills are all characteristics that good readers possess; "those who lacked phonemic awareness struggled with reading" (p. 76). Research shows that children with greater phonemic awareness at a younger age were better readers by third or fourth grade. A document called, Put Reading First, says that phonemic awareness can be taught and learned (p.77). 

The following are specific activities for teachers and students:

·Phoneme isolation (What is the first sound in van?)

·Phoneme identity (What sound is the same in fix, fall, and fun?)

·Phoneme categorization (Which word doesn’t belong- bus, bur, or rug)?

·Phoneme blending (Combine individual phonemes to form a word.

·Phoneme segmentation (Divide a word into its phonemes and say each one.)

 

 Reference

Freeman, D. E. and Freeman, Y. S. (2004). Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, grammar. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.