The Science of Reading Explained: Phonemic Awareness
In The Science of Reading Explained, we unpack the five pillars of foundational literacy. Here, we focus on phonemic awareness, exploring how students learn to work with individual sounds in spoken words, and how those skills support decoding, spelling, and reading development.
What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. It’s one of the five essential components of reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel, and an important foundation of early reading development.
Phonemic awareness is part of the broader area of phonological awareness, which includes working with words, rhymes, syllables, and onset and rime.
How Do Students Develop Phonemic Awareness?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can change a word’s meaning. For example, changing the first sound in map from /m/ to /t/ creates the word tap. As students work with phenomes in the sounds they hear, they become better able to:
- Identify sounds in spoken words
- Blend separate sounds to form words
- Segment words into individual sounds
- Manipulate sounds to create new words
Ultimately, these skills help them with reading and spelling. As they read, they’re blending sounds to decode words, and as they spell, they’re segmenting words before connecting sounds to letters and letter combinations.
What’s the Difference Between Phonological and Phonemic Awareness?
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe different levels of sound awareness.
- Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and work with the sound structures of spoken language: recognizing words, hearing rhymes, working with syllables, and identifying individual phonemes are all examples.
- Phonemic awareness sits within phonological, focusing specifically on individual sounds within words.
A student counting the words in a sentence is practicing phonological awareness; a student separating fish into /f/, /ĭ/, and /sh/ is practicing phonemic awareness.
Phonological awareness skills help students recognize that spoken language can be broken into smaller parts. Phonemic awareness brings that work to the individual sound level, and phonological awareness builds toward phonemic awareness.
- Sentence segmentation helps students hear that spoken sentences are made up of separate words.
- Rhyming and alliteration help them notice similarities and differences among spoken words.
- Working with syllables teaches students to hear and separate larger word parts.
Students also work with onset and rime. Onset is the initial consonant sound or consonant blend before the vowel, while rime is the vowel sound and any sounds that follow it. For example, in the word bone, /b/ is the onset and /ōn/ is the rime.
What Skills Are Included in Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness includes several skills that, together, help students understand how spoken words are built.
- Phoneme identification: Students identify individual sounds in words, including beginning, middle, and final sounds. They may identify /m/ as the first sound in map or /p/ as the final sound.
- Phoneme blending: Students combine separate sounds to form a word. For example, they might hear /m/, /ă/, and /p/ and blend them to make map. This same process supports decoding when students begin connecting sounds to letters.
- Phoneme segmentation: Students break a spoken word into its individual sounds. A student might segment fish into /f/, /ĭ/, and /sh/.
- Phoneme manipulation: Students add, remove, or substitute sounds to make new words. They might add /s/ to top to make stop, remove /s/ from smile to make mile, or change /m/ in map to /t/ to make tap.
What is the Role of Phonemic Awareness in Phonics?
Students can’t learn to read with phonemic awareness alone, but it works alongside phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension as part of a complete approach to literacy instruction.
Phonemic awareness activities don’t involve visual letters or words, but phonics helps students map those sounds to written letters and letter patterns. Once they understand that bag contains the sounds /b/, /ă/, and /g/, phonics instruction helps them connect those sounds to the letters b, a, and g.
How Exact Path Supports Phonemic Awareness
Exact Path provides diagnostic-driven personalized literacy instruction, grounded in the science of reading, to help students build the foundational skills and knowledge they need to become stronger readers. Students who use Exact Path develop phonemic awareness through targeted instruction that helps them hear, identify, blend, segment, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words.
- Explore: See how Exact Path accelerates student achievement
- Watch: Science of Reading webinar with Reading Is Fundamental
- Read more from this series: The Science of Reading Explained