Don’t Skip Phonemic Awareness

Jennifer Partrick
Jul 20, 2009

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, play, produce, recognize, match, and manipulate sounds. In order to become a reader, students must be able to do these things. Too often, though, phonemic awareness is overlooked or bypassed in order to move to phonics. For students who easily master phonemic awareness tasks, phonics can be taught simultaneously. However, if students are unable to hear sounds, moving to phonics will prove very difficult for them. Phonics will be difficult because the foundation of phonics is sound.

How do we teach phonemic awareness? A good place to begin is with rhymes and poetry but there are several phonemic awareness tasks students should master and typically the easiest one is rhyming. Begin with identifying rhymes before asking students to produce them which is much more difficult. To bridge the divide between identifying rhymes and producing rhymes have students complete the following activity. Students match pictures that rhyme and then add other words/pictures to the initial rhyme they identified using pictures. For example, give students a picture of a pear, bear and house. Their job is to recognize that pear and bear rhyme. Once they do that, they then add another picture (chair) that rhymes with pear and bear. After that they could add pictures that rhyme with house. Students will rely on this skill when they move to reading and writing. If students hear the rhyme they will be able to spell many words once they have the initial word. For example, if students can spell late and they want to write hate, they should be able to change the onset but keep the rime.

Another task is identifying sounds and their place within words. Begin with alliteration and tongue twisters. The repeated sound at the beginning of words is easy for students to identify in addition to trying to say the tongue twister. Once students have mastered this, give them a sound and have them create their own tongue twister. Keep their tongue twisters as the students can add the appropriate letters when they begin to learn symbols.  Next, have students identify sounds at different places within words. Have students identify the sounds at the beginning, the end, and in the middle of different words. Choose words that have distinguishing sounds throughout. For example, the word tame; the sounds are /t/a/m/. The e is silent and the focus is on sounds not letters. Students will rely on this skill as they begin to read and write. As they learn to write students write what they hear. Thus the ability to hear sounds is critical. When reading, students match letters with sounds to decode unknown words.

Another task is to have students add and delete sounds in words to produce other words or identify the part of the word that is left after a sound is deleted. For example, we ask students to tell us the part of the word that is left is we take /t/ from tell. Or we ask them to change the initial sound in tell and replace it with /b/. What would the new word be? The new word would be bell.

Students must be able to interact with sounds they hear in words as they rely on this important skill to help them learn to read and write. Phonemic awareness is the foundation on which phonics and reading lies.

See the Learning-Focused Literacy Collection for more information about our reading resources.