Phonemic Awareness

Dina Ocampo
UP College of Education
What is phonological awareness?

the childs awareness of his or her
language

the ability to identify the sounds within a
spoken word

the ability to reflect on sounds rather
than meaning of spoken words

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What are the levels of
phonological awareness?
There are found levels of phonological
awareness. These are:

awareness of a word

awareness of the syllable parts of a word

awareness that some words are similar in
terms of one or more phonological
components

awareness of the phonemes comprising a
word

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Word level
At the word level, phonological awareness
means that a person is able identify word
boundaries. For example:

silly willy The child can tell that there are

two words.

But that also implies that the child knows

what the words mean which is how they can
separate the sounds into two distinct words.

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Syllable level

A syllable is defined by a vowel.

Syllable level phonological awareness

indicates that the person can hear the
component parts of the word. Therefore, the
child can identify where the syllables are
within a spoken word. For example:

silly willy The child can tell that there are two
syllables in sil-ly and in wil-ly.

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Word family
(alias Onset and Rime) level
bat These words comprise a word family. The
cat family is defined by the word ending at.
fat What varies in this set is the onset, while
the rime is constant.
hat
mat It is hypothesized that children learn to
pat identify onsets-rimes simultaneously with
rat the identification of phonemes.
sat

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Phoneme Level

The phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in
a word.

Phoneme level phonological awareness
indicates that persons can identify the
smallest parts of a spoken word. For
example:

s-i-ll-y w-i-ll-y The child can tell that in each

word there are only 4 phonemes.

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What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness
refers to the ability to focus
on and manipulate
phonemes in spoken
words. It is based on how
well a child hears sounds in
speech.
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What are the tasks that examine
ability in phonemic awareness?

phoneme isolation

phoneme identity

phoneme categorization

phoneme blending

phoneme segmentation

phoneme deletion

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Phoneme isolation

Recognizing individual sounds in words

Involves hearing the word, then
understanding the instructions to isolate
a sound within the word.

For example:
What is the first sound in book? (/b/)
What is the last sound in rubber? (/r/)
What is the middle sound in chair? /ey/)

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Phoneme identity

Recognizing the common sound in
different words

For example:
Tell me the sound that is the same in bike,
boy and bell? (/b/)

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Phoneme categorization

Recognizing the word with the odd
sound in a series of 3-4words

For example:
Which word does not belong girl, gift, lips?
(lips)

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Phoneme blending

Requires listening to a sequence of
separately spoken sounds

Then, combining them to form a
recognizable word

For example:
What word is s-k-u-l? (school)

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Phoneme segmentation

Requires breaking a word into its sounds

Can be done by tapping out or counting the
sounds

Or can be shown by pronouncing the sounds
while moving an object/marker for each
sound

For example:
How many sounds are there in cat? (3: c-a-t)
Tap the phonemes you hear in shop.
(3: sh-o-p)

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Phoneme deletion

Requires being able to state the word
that remains when a specified phoneme
is removed

For example:
What is smile without the /s/? (mile)
If you take out the /l/ in flat, what word will
you make? (fat)

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Now lets make our own
examples.
Why is phonemic awareness
important in learning to read?

The two most important predictors of how well
children will learn to read are:
phonemic awareness
letter knowledge

This was found in children learning to read
in English because this language and
orthography is phoneme driven.

This is because English is an alphabetic

system.

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Why is phonemic awareness
important in learning to read?

Words have prescribed spellings that
have been evolved. Over time, users of a
language agree on how a word is to be
written.

These spellings are represented by
graphemes (letters and letter
combinations).

These graphemes symbolize phonemes
(sounds).

In English, this is a crucial process in
learning to decode and spell.
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Why is phonemic awareness
important in learning to read?

Children with superior phonemic
awareness are better readers of words
than those with poor phonemic
awareness.

Good beginning reading instruction
advances phonemic awareness ability.

The relationship is reciprocal.

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To decode new words,
beginners must

know how to blend phonemes

remember how to read individual words

segment words into phonemes that
match up to graphemes

compute connections between
graphemes and phonemes

store these connections in memory

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When is it best to teach
phonemic awareness?

In the pre-school

the effect of instruction on phonemic
awareness is greater when it is taught earlier

before being taught to decode words

then phonemic awareness should be
reinforced while being taught to decode

when the language to be read is an
alphabetic language that is phoneme driven.

(Filipino can be taught at the level of the
syllable because of its unique phonological
and structure.)
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