Phonological Awareness:
Phonological Awareness,
Phonemic Awareness & Phonics
Phonological Awareness involves oral language. It is a general term that refers to all sound features in spoken language. It includes the ability to separate spoken sentences into individual words and to separate spoken words into syllables. It is the ability to hear and distinguish the sound structure of language, ranging from the identification and manipulation of words, syllables, onsets, and rimes, to rhyming and spelling. Phonological awareness consists of skills that typically develop gradually through the late preschool and early elementary period. They are developed with direct training and exposure.
Phonological Awareness develops on a continuum and consists of the following skills organized in developmental sequence which begins with listening:
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Listening
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Rhyme
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Alliteration
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Sentences
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Syllables
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Onsests and Rimes
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Phonemes
Phonemic Awareness:
Phonemic Awareness also involves oral language. It is focused specifically on phonemes, which are the basic units of meaningful speech sounds. Phonemic Awareness is part of the larger umbrella of phonological awareness. This is where learning to read starts. Phonemic awareness means that children become aware that speech is made up of individual sounds. It is a critical part of "reading readiness," so it is often a focus of early learning programs. However, since writing isn't speech, phonemic awareness isn't enough to allow children to learn to read; however, it is one of the strongest indicators of future success in reading!! In order to learn how to read, children must be able to recognize that the marks on a page represent the sounds of a language. Those marks, of course, are letters.
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of smaller parts and these parts can be separated into individual sounds. It is the ability to hear, isolate and manipulate those sounds. For children to have a solid understanding of Phonemic Awareness, they must be able to:
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Isolate Phonemes (which means identifying the first, medial, and last sounds in words,)
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Blend Phonemes together to make a word
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Segment Phonemes
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Manipulate Phonemes by deleting, adding and substituting phonemes
Phonics:
Phonics involves written symbols. Phonological and phonemic awareness involve oral language; phonics involves print. Both are obviously related, since printed letters represent spoken sounds, but children can recognize sounds in words without knowing the letter(s) that represent these sounds.
Finding success with phonemic awareness then progresses to success with the next step in learning to read, which is… phonics. Once a child has developed a solid understanding of phonemic awareness, she is ready to connect letters to those sounds (phonemes) and blend them together to read words. She is also ready to break apart sounds in a word and connect these sounds to letters to write words. Phonics is an instructional method that involves matching letters to their sounds to decode words. Often if a child is struggling with Phonics, it is most likely she has not developed phonemic awareness. When applying phonics strategies, a child must first look at the word and identify the letters in that word. Then she connects the sounds to those letters. All the while, she has to hold in her memory the previous sound. After matching the letters to their sounds, she is ready to blend the word together. But what happens if she still isn’t able to blend the sounds in order to read the word? Remember, just because a child may have letter recognition down pat, and also know the sounds of those letters perfectly…it does not automatically mean she can blend sounds and read words. She needs BOTH letter/sound knowledge AND well developed phonemic awareness in order to find success with PHONICS. Once those pieces of the puzzle are put together, the child is ready to decode and read.
One more Term...
Alphabetic Principle:
The term alphabetic principle is an interchangeable term with phonics. A child's success in learning to read is dependent on her understanding of the alphabetic principle, which is the recognition and understanding that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of our spoken language. Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows a learner to apply these relationships to both familiar and unfamiliar words, and to begin to read with fluency.
For more information on Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, view this brief video.
Additionally, please click on the link below to be connected to a great webpage that provides more details on the topic as well as additional videos and links. *
*Go to back to the previous page, and you will find links to Activities to build Phonemic Awareness, Phonological Awareness and Phonics