The Importance of Phonemic Awareness
I think the most commonly overlooked factor when teaching a child to read is phonemic awareness. It is an essential skill for your child to master before they can connect the sounds of language to our written letters in reading and writing.
Exactly What Are Phonemic and Phonological Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to
hear and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken language. For
example, if I were to say out loud the word cat, most fluent speakers
of English would be able to identify three distinct sounds: /k/, /ă/,
and /t/. Phonemic awareness is a more general ability to
understand the sound structure of words. If I asked a fluent speaker
to produce a rhyming word they would be able to swap out the first
sound for a different one (such as /v/) to make a new word (like
vat). That would be an example of phonological awareness.
Phonemic and phonological awareness
have nothing to do with written language. Knowing that the word
“cat” begins with the letter C or that letter C makes the /k/
sound are both in the domain of phonics, not phonemic awareness.
However phonics skills are built upon the foundations created by
phonological awareness. If you want to read more on hierarchical knowledge structures read our article on, How to Learn Anything.
Tasks That Require Phonological Awareness
Some skills that you might want to
consider helping your child to master include:
- identifying the initial, medial, or final phoneme in a word,
- creating lists of words that share an initial phoneme,
- naming words that rhyme,
- identifying a phoneme that a group of words all share (such as knowing that doll, duck, and Dan all begin with the /d/ sound)
- substituting one phoneme for another to make a new word
- segmenting a word into it's component sounds
- blending sounds into a word
- deleting a sound from a word (for example deleting the /b/ sound from ball gives you all)
It's probably not a good idea to
introduce all of these skills at once. One or two skills at a time
would probably be best until your child becomes comfortable.
Why Are Phonemic and Phonological Awareness Important?
What then, is the value of
phonemic/phonological awareness? Why should you consider making it a
part of your child's education? Having a firm understanding of
spoken language and the sounds (or phonemes) that make up all of our
speech creates a strong foundation for being able to connect that
speech to written symbols later. In other words having a strong
sense of the spoken language gives children the skills they need in
order to learn phonics easily. In fact, the National Reading Panel
has found that strong phonemic awareness improves a child's word
reading, reading comprehension, and
spelling.
This makes perfect sense because a child will not be able to
correlate the letters of the alphabet to their sounds unless they are
first well acquainted with those sounds and how they work.
It might seem strange that children
have to learn how to manipulate the sounds in spoken language given
how easily and intuitively they learn to speak, however speaking is a
distinct skill from hearing distinctly and isolating all of the individual sounds in speech.
Preschool is a great opportunity to
work on phonemic and phonological awareness with your child because
they are not yet reading and they are naturally drawn to speech.
Even toddlers can do many of the following activities to prepare for
future reading (and have fun too!).
Fun Ways To Help Your Child Build Phonemic and Phonological Awareness
There are many strategies for helping
your child create a sense of phonemic awareness. Most of them take
very little time at all. Throughout your day, offers these
activities, even for only a couple of minutes at a time. When
choosing stories to read your child, include some that use
alliteration (using several words that begin with the same phoneme)
or rhyme. When reading, draw your child's attention to these
features inviting them to guess what comes next using sound as a
clue.
A fun exercise to do with phonemes is
to do a sound bucket. Fill a dishpan (or similarly sized container)
with objects that are familiar to the child that all begin with the
same sound (such as a rocket toy, raccoon stuffed animal, radish,
rake from their beach toys, etc. for the /r/ sound). Invite the
child to investigate the objects, say the words for the objects out
loud, etc. Draw their attention to the initial phoneme sound. Ask
them if they can find other objects around the house that begin with
the same sound (or have them choose another sound to “hunt” for).
You can also do a very similar activity where you “hunt” for
pairs of rhyming words around the house (for example a toy mouse and
a toy house).
The car is an excellent place to
practice phonemic awareness, because you and your child can really
only interact using your voices anyway. A fun game to play is to
take turns saying words. Each person has to choose a word that
begins with the same sound that the last word ended in. For example,
if my daughter chooses the word dog, I could choose the word goat
(because dog ends in a hard g and goat begins with a hard g). Last
time we were driving home from the beach, this game was a life saver.
When this game becomes too easy, you could try narrowing the choice
of words to a single category such as “animals” or “places.”
One activity that Little M. thinks is
hilarious is to take a word and then substitute another sound for
it's initial phoneme. Usually this creates a nonsense word. For
example, you could show your child a picture of a fox. Ask them to
identify it. Then ask them to substitute the beginning sound with
other sounds: /b/ becomes box, /d/ becomes dox, /l/ becomes lox, /n/
becomes nox! She usually ends up in a fit of laughter by the end
because it can get quite silly.
Thank you for taking the time to stop
by A Dash of Learning and read our take on phonemic awareness. If
you found this article helpful or interesting, please consider
sharing it with your friends on social media and/or leaving a comment
below. We'd love to hear from you! Do you spend much time in your
day teaching your child phonemic awareness? What strategies have
helped you the most? Let us know.
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