What Is Phonological/Phoneme Awareness?

Sometimes teachers tell parents, "Your child does not have phonemic awareness." What does that mean and what can we do to improve phonemic awareness?

Stanovich (1993) defines "phonological awareness" as the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable. He also notes that researchers "argue intensely" about the meaning of the term and about the nature of the tasks used to measure it.

Phonological awareness sometimes refers to an awareness that words consist of syllables and phonemes (segments of words or groupings of sound).

A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and move individual sounds (manipulate) - phonemes - in spoken words.

Adams (1990) describes 5 levels of phonemic awareness in terms of abilities:

* to hear rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes

* to do oddity tasks (comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration)

* to blend and split syllables

* to perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of phonemes in a word)

* to perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding, deleting a particular phoneme and regenerating a word from the remainder).

What can you do to enhance phonemic awareness and consequently reading skills?

Phonemic awareness can be developed through a number of activities, including asking children beginning in preschool (age 3) to:

1. Have fun with your child teaching him rhymes.
2. Clap the rhythm of syllables.
3. Identify and categorize sounds.
4. Blend sounds to form words.
5. Delete or add sounds to form new words.
6. Substitute sounds to make new words.

Read with your child. Practice phonics with your child. Enjoy playing with sounds through music, clapping and movement.

Visit www.hookedonphonics.com to learn more.