What is Phonemic Awareness?

(And other common words and expressions used by teachers.)

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear phonemes in words which are spoken. Phonemes are individual sounds in words. For example the word ‘cat’ has 3 phonemes c-a-t, sometimes written as /c/ (or /k/), /a/ and /t/.  The word ‘short’ also has 3: sh-or-t. Some phonemes are written using just one letter and others need more (for example the ‘sh’ and ‘or’ in ‘short’, or ‘augh’ in ‘taught’. The letter or combination of letters used to write any one  phoneme is called a grapheme. So, phonemic awareness means that you can hear and separate each sound in any word, and blend individual sounds together to make a word. If you ask a child what sounds they hear in ‘cat’, they should be able to tell you  c-a-t. If you tell them the sounds d-o-g, they should be able to tell you that the word they are ‘guessing’ is ‘dog’.

Alongside this goes the ability to separate and identify the initial sound in a word and match words which begin with the same first sound (b-at and b-all); to take away the initial sound in a word and identify rhyming words (b-at and c-at) and also to take individual sounds out of a word to make a new one (car-t and car). When you include these last three abilities people sometimes use the wider term phonological awareness, but for ease I will use the term phonemic awareness to mean all of the above. So phonemic or phonological awareness is basically the understanding that words we hear are made up of different sounds and the ability to separate and play around with them! Phonemic awareness has nothing to do with the written word, either the reading or writing of it. However I’m sure you can see that knowing how to blend the individual sounds together will be useful in reading when you see letters written together, and how knowing how to separate the sounds in a word will help you to decide which letters to put down when writing it!

Phonics is a system used to teach reading and writing whereby the student is taught to connect each sound of a spoken word to a letter or group of letters in order to write it, and how to blend letters or groups of letters orally in a written word in order to read it. There are different types of phonics teaching and the most commonly talked about ones are explained in the next blog post tomorrow.