Phonemic Awareness

There are many components to building a student’s reading skill set. One skill that is introduced in preschool and developed through the primary grades is phonemic awareness. The term phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes – individual sounds. The child becomes aware of how sounds are connected to words prior to reading. This awareness creates the understanding of how phonemes explains how the smallest part of sound creates a difference in sound to the meaning of a word. Therefore, the ability to dismantle words, and reassemble them, and then to alter the word into something different explains the concept behind phonemic awareness. It is the primary foundation in which other reading skill sets are according based.

Phonics and phonemic awareness may seem like similar concepts, but this is not the case. Phonemic awareness involves sounds in oral language and phonics involves the association between printed symbols and sounds. Therefore, phonics instruction emphasizes teaching sound-spelling associations and is connected with print. Generally, phonemic awareness tasks are oral (Blevins, 2016). Even though these two components focal points differ, both phonemic instruction and phonics instruction are connected.

Phonological awareness is when children learn to associate sounds with symbols and create links to word recognition and decoding skills. It consists of skills that develop through the preschool period. Phonological awareness is an important part of learning to read and write, children who have a broad range of phonics are able to identify and make oral rhymes, are able to clap out the syllables in a word and can recognise words with the same initial sounds. Phonological awareness is a good indicator whether your student will have a potential reading difficulty and with the many activities and resources available to us you can develop a child’s awareness early on in a child’s education.

The typical attainment level in literacy are low in children with hearing loss in comparison with their typically hearing counterparts (Harris & Beech, 1998; Kuntz, Golos, & Enns, 2014; Golos & Moses, 2013; Leybaert, 1998; Salmon, 2014). Specific to the foundation of literacy skills, phonological awareness is the understanding that words are broken up into syllables (a beat of sound), that are broken up into further individual sounds; it is the understanding that these sounds are noticed, thought about, and can be manipulated, and is general awareness of phonemes (Kamhi & Catts, 2012). A typically hearing child associates sound with meaning and within various contexts, and a child with hearing loss only associates visually what letters and

According to the article, Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom, educators are displaying difficulties defining the word phonemic awareness. At times, educators would confuse the word phonemic awareness with phonetics, phonics or auditory discrimination. “Phonemic awareness is the awareness that the speech stream consists of a sequence of sounds—specifically phonemes, the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in communication.” A slight change of a phoneme in a word can change the thought and meaning behind the sentence. To gain a better understanding of the term phonemic awareness, the articles break it up into two superordinate constructs: phonological awareness and meta linguistics. Phonemic awareness is a sub skill of the word phonological awareness, which refers to the ability to control each phoneme. Meta linguistic refers to the thinking of one's language and “phonological awareness refers to a sensitivity to any size unit of sound.” Examples of phonological awareness are the ability to recognize rhyming words, identify each phoneme in a word, count syllables, and separate the beginning of a word from its ending. Overall, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness and meta linguistic awareness are all connected to one another.

When students are in the beginning level of phonic awareness, the most effective method of helping students to remember letter sounds or syllables is to attach a song or rhyme. The method of using songs or rhymes is helpful for students, but the teacher needs to take into consideration the academic component of the lesson. Yopp & Yopp (2000) emphasize on the methods that lessons on phonic awareness should be on, appropriate for the child, must have a purpose, and should be broad to other educational lessons (132). Seeing phonic awareness activity are always engaging for students, because they are thought useful rhymes or song that help them remember the sound of a vowel or consonant. I agree with the statement the authors make regarding teaching

Phonic awareness helps to build a strong reading foundation for students because it is the child’s ability to understand that words are created with different sounds such as can. The word can is the blended sounds of /c/, /a/, and /n/. There are many strategies available that teachers can use to teach phonemic awareness to students which include the following:

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in words (Phonemic Awareness, 2015). Often phonemic awareness is said to be the same thing as phonics, however they are completely different. Phonics is the understanding that there is a relationship between letters and sounds through written language; but phonemic awareness is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words (Phonemic Awareness, 2015). Phonemic Awareness plays a part in the broader spectrum of phonological awareness; and just like phonics, phonological awareness can be mistaken for phonemic awareness as well. However, they are not the same because phonemic awareness is a smaller component to the much broader

Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) believe that the amount of time devoted to phonemic awareness in the classroom is not important but rather the quality and responsiveness of instruction are. Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) believe rich linguistic environments that have a rich vocabulary, syntactic complexity, and decontextualized language can be implemented in a variety of ways which include, but not limited to, literature sharing, music, and movement experiences. According to Hallie Yopp and Helen Yopp (2000) phonemic awareness activities should be playful, deliberate in focusing on the sound structure of spoken language, and readily included in a comprehensive reading program.

The booklet, Put Reading First was informative and helpful because of the way it broke each reading component down. It helped me understand the difference between a few gray areas that were confusing or that I previously misinterpret. Therefore, the booklet improved my perception of the true meaning of phonemic awareness, phonics, automatic, and fluency. The fourth paragraph of phonemic awareness provided a simple breakdown as well as explained that I was not the only person misinterpreting the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics. However, my impression of phonemic awareness was the understanding of phonics instead of the individual sounds of spoken words. With this new understanding of phonemic awareness, I believe that phonemic

1.Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners can hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words. The English writing system is alphabetic. It consists of 26 letters that are used singly and in combination to represent about 41 different sounds, or phonemes. In relation to reading, breaking the code entails figuring out how graphemes represent phonemes. There were several reasons why phonemic awareness instruction was selected for review and analysis by the National Reading Panel. In particular, correlational studies have identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge

A definition of phonological awareness from Yopp and Yopp (2000, p. 13) states that: ‘Phonological awareness is the ability to attend to and manipulate units of sound in speech independent of meaning’. Phonological awareness has two scopes and progresses from holistic and simple forms of awareness to more complex forms. (Treiman & Zukowski 1991; Cisero & Royer 1995; Anthony et al. 2003). The first scope is the size of a sound unit being attended to and manipulated. The second scope is the type of manipulation of the sound of units and the child’s ability not just to recognise the manipulation but to also perform it. For example, adding or removing sounds from words, blending them together to make words. The use of syllable awareness arises

“Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension” –Kelly L. Briggs. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonemic awareness instruction is a crucial building block of the reading process. It is most effective when students master phonemic awareness skills by the first grade so that as the student move into higher grade levels, they will be able to learn new things at a more efficient rate. Many first-grade students at JH Hines Elementary School do not know or understand the concept of phonemics, causing them to fail when learning new sight words. These students are being tested on words and books that they cannot comprehend because they have not been taught phonics correctly. This affects the community surrounding the school because if the school’s scores do not increase soon, the school will have to shut down because it will no longer be funded by the state. Future tutors and teachers at JH Hines Elementary need to be aware of this problem and help fix the problem by teaching the students phonemic awareness, which will then help their reading comprehension increase significantly.

Phonemic awareness instruction is generally taught from preschool to the first grade (Armbruster, 2009). By the fifth grade most students are expected to be fluent readers. The problem lies in that some students struggle with fluency and may have missed key components of phonemic awareness instruction at the primary school age. There are also an increased number of English Language Learners (ELL) who did not receive phonemic awareness instruction. While phonemic awareness instruction is not necessary for all students in the fifth grade, it should be a small part of the instruction for students who are struggling with fluency. A study by Ashby, Dix, Bonrager, Dey and Archer (2013) supports the teaching of phonemic awareness at higher grade levels to help increase fluency levels among struggling students. “…interventions that attempt to circumvent the development of phonological coding by sight word memorization are likely to produce inferior ling-term results for struggling readers” (p. 168). Phonemic awareness lessons would be done in a small group setting with

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, isolate, identify, and manipulate the discrete sounds of language, this only involves the sounds of speech and not the letters or words.