What’s Phonemic Awareness?

With more districts placing an increased emphasis on research-based reading instruction, phonemic awareness (PA) has taken on a new emphasis. In this post I’ll talk about PA and why it’s important to instruction.

In our book, Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading (Routledge), we integrate the importance of understanding some of the science of how text is converted to speech and the instruction that facilitates it in children, with the art of teaching, or teacher craft. For those who might be interested, my colleagues and I made a technical argument to researchers of why the art of teaching must be considered when conducting research (I’ve posted the article on this website). In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into phonemic awareness.

What’s a Phoneme?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language. While across humanity there are about 800 phonemes, only about 43 are used in English (maybe 44 depending on the linguist you subscribe to). While phonemes are part of what gives one a regional accent when they speak, they are irrelevant when learning to speak as children learn to pronounce whole words. However, reading English is an entirely different matter.

Learning Phonemes is Important

English is an alphabetic language which means that the squiggles we call letters represent phonemes. While children are often taught their ABC’s, they are not what’s important to learning to read and spell. I ask, if a child can recite the ABC song, does this mean they can read words from a page that have not been rehearsed? Of course not, which is why a popular program from a few years ago called the Phonics Dance is NOT equivalent to teaching students phonic decoding. It is learning the phonemes represented by each letter, either along or in combination with others, that is absolutely essential to becoming a good reader. Which brings us to two issues: 1) acquisition of letter feature knowledge and 2) phonemic awareness.

Phonological Awareness

Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness, a construct often represented as an umbrella. A construct is an idea made of several parts and can often be somewhat abstract. Under the umbrella sits three parts of language which includes syllables, onset & rime (not rhyme), and phonemes. While teaching children how words can be broken into syllables and learning to separate the initial sound in a syllable from its remainder is helpful in learning the fundamentals of language, research has found that it is phonemic awareness that is causal to reading success (Clayton et al., 2020; Foorman, 2003; Hulme et al., 2012; Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012; Muter et al., 2004; National Reading Panel, 2000). Notice that I inserted six citations supporting this finding as it is THAT important.

Early Reading Instruction

I often say that perhaps the most important objective of early elementary instruction is to teach children to become automatic word readers. Why is this? Because children who can easily read words have the cognitive attention to think about what they mean, without focusing on how to say the words. Of the three components of phonological awareness, researchers have found that the first two components are not predictive of learning to read. I’m sure you would be surprised to know that segmenting and blending does not predict automatic word reading. It is only phonemic awareness that predicts word reading, along with letter feature knowledge (how letters are combined to represent phonemes). So where does that take us?

Indicating Phonemic Awareness

I mentioned earlier that a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language. Phonemic awareness is indicated by the child’s ability to manipulate (or substitute) sounds in a word to make a new word. Notice that I said “indicated.” This is because phonemic awareness is a cognitive activity and we can’t see inside one’s brain. However, we have devised instructional activities and assessments that indicate a child’s facility with phonemes. But why in the world would this have anything to do with becoming an automatic word reader? Stay tuned, I’ll address it in the next blog.

References

Clayton, F. J., West, G., Sears, C., Hulme, C., & Lervåg, A. (2020). A longitudinal study of early reading development: Letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN, but not letter-sound integration, predict variations in reading development. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(2), 91-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1622546

Foorman, B. R., Schatschneider, C., Eakin, M. N., Fletcher, J. M., Moats, L. C., & Francis, D. J. (2006). The impact of instructional practices in grades one and two on reading and spelling achievement in high poverty schools. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 31, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2004.11.003

Hulme, C., Bowyer-Crane, C., Carroll, J. M., Duff, F. J., & Snowling, M. J. (2012). The causal role of phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge in learning to read: Combining intervention studies with mediation analysis. Psychological Science, 23(6), 572-577. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611435921

Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S. A. H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: a meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 138(2), 322-352. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0026744 

Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M. J., & Stevenson, J. (2004). Phonemes, Rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations of early reading development: Evidence from a longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 40(5), 665–681. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.40.5.665

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Washington, D. C.