teacher by day

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is an understanding that spoken language can be broken up into parts: sentences, words, and syllables. It involves recognizing and manipulating larger “chunks” of language, like words, syllables, and onset-rimes.

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness, a subset or refined version of phonological awareness, is the ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds within words, including segmenting, blending, deleting, and moving the smallest units of speech.

Both phonological and phonemic awareness deal with sounds only – no letters. (Some refer to it as phonics in the dark). There are 44 speech sounds in English: 25 consonants and 19 vowels (Moats, 2020). Students need to be able to hear and say them all.

According to David Kilpatrick (2015), children who struggle with word-level reading almost always have weaknesses in phonemic awareness. Our brains store words by sound – not letter sequences – so it is important that we are able to hear and think about sounds in words. When we match the spelling of a word to its sound in our head, it’s called orthographic mapping (Kilpatrick, 2015). This skill is critical for reading success.

Activities for teaching phonological & phonemic awareness in order

Words

  • Identify words in a sentence

Syllables

  • Identify syllables
  • Segment syllables
  • Identify first, middle, or last syllables
  • Blend syllables
  • Add syllables
  • Delete syllables
  • Substitute syllables

Onset-Rime

Complete tasks in this category in the following order: continuant and nasal consonants, short vowels, stop consonants, long vowels, r-controlled vowels, then other vowel sounds. This is likely the same time period that you would start introducing letters and letter sounds, but children do not need the letters to do phonemic awareness activities.

  • Say sounds in isolation
  • Identify sounds in the onset (first spot) and coda (last spot) of words
    • Start with CV patterns, then VC, then CVC
  • Blend onset-rime or body-coda
  • Complete onset-rime or body-coda
  • Identify rhyming words
  • Generate rhyming words

Phonemes

  • Identify first, last, then middle sounds in words
  • Blend individual sounds to form a one-syllable word
  • Segment individual sounds in a one-syllable word
  • Manipulate sounds (add, substitute, then delete)
  • The final step is doing all the “sound work” mentally without any tactile or visual cues and only saying the final answer out loud
  • For an extra challenge, teach Pig Latin!
  • On to fluency!

References:

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Wiley.

Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers (Third edition). Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Reutzel, D. R., & Cooter, R. B. (2018). Teaching children to read: The teacher makes the difference (Eighth edition). Pearson.

WETA. (2014, April 24). Phonological and phonemic awareness: In depth. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness/in-depth