Guest Author - Jeanne Rutgers

During the last 15 years Phonemic Awareness has become the new catch phrase in reading education. Poor phonemic awareness is linked with difficulty in reading and spelling. It is considered one of the key components in dyslexia remediation. But what exactly is phonemic awareness, and how do I teach it?

Let’s start from the beginning. A phoneme is a unit of sound in a word. It is not the same as a letter. For example cat has three phonemes, but so does peach. Although peach has five letters, it only has three sounds.

Simply stated phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize the different sounds in words. Why is this important? Hearing the different sounds in words is essential to good spelling. It allows a child to build on the spelling patterns he knows instead of memorizing words for a test. For example if the spelling word is lap, a child with strong phonemic awareness would be able to spell clap as well. He would recognize that just one sound was added to a word he already knows.

Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Almost all phonemic awareness activities are done orally and can and should be taught to students who do not yet know how to read. Begin with activities that focus on the first sound in a word. Say four words such as ball, bed, desk, boy and ask your students which one does not belong. Begin with words that have just one letter before the vowel. Move on to blends later. Use words like tap, tip and fed before you use trap, trip and fled. Remember that chill, circus and car all begin with the same letter, but have different first phonemes. After students are able to recognize first sounds proceed to working on medial and ending sounds.

The next phonemic awareness skill is rhyme. This is simple to teach have students listen for rhymes or create their own. Nonsense words are acceptable for these activities since we are focusing on sounds, not meaning.

After students are comfortable with rhyming, they practice counting syllables and sounds in words. This is the time when you can start to work on phoneme and syllable addition and deletion. For syllable deletion, start with compound words. Have your students say “cowboy,” then have them say it again with out the “cow.” After splitting compound words is easy, you can do the same activity with any other two syllable word. Say “window” say it again without the “win.” Similar activities can be done with phoneme deletion. Say “trap.” Say it again with out the /r/. Remember in your directions to use sounds and not letters.

Assessing Phonemic Awareness
My favorite and the easiest test to give for phonemic awareness is The Test of Auditory Analysis Skills by Jerome Rosner. The Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA) and The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) are very good as well.

If you are interested in phonics games click here to read my review of some of my favorites.