What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness, the ability to differentiate and understand the sounds in spoken words and sentences. Phonemes are the smallest units of spoken sounds, such as the sound of an individual letter like /m/. Phonemic awareness, then, is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes in words. For example, someone with good phonemic awareness would be able to hear and identify the individual sounds in the word window; /w/ /i/ /n/ /d/ /ow/. Someone with excellent phonemic awareness would then be able to tell you that if you take the /ow/ sound out of the word "window", you get "wind".
Phonemic awareness is an important pre-reading and pre-writing skill. In fact, research has found that good phonemic awareness is a strong predictor of reading success throughout the school years. Phonemic awareness allows students to understand how to decode (sound out) words more easily, because they already understand that words are made up of smaller sounds.
Phonemic awareness skills include;
- being able to identify words that rhyme (such as knowing that dog and log rhyme, but pop does not)
- being able to identify the beginning, middle and ending sounds in words (such as knowing that /b/ is the ending sound in grab)
- being able to generate words that rhyme (such as saying cat when asked for words that rhyme with hat)
- being able to generate words that have the same beginning, middle or ending sounds as another (such as suggesting sit when told to find a word that has /i/ as a middle sound)
- being able to delete sounds from words (such as knowing that fit without the /f/ is it)
- being able to substitute sounds in words (such as knowing that if you substitute /o/ for /a/ in cat, you get cot)
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