Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes (sounds). Student have this awareness of sounds in order to move on to phonics, which is sounds and letters combined to form words. It is a foundational skill needed to be able to read. It involves hearing and speaking only.

A phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound in spoken language. A unit of sound is represented in print using slash marks (e.g., the phoneme or sound for the letter “m” is written /m/). There are four phonemes in the word ‘gate.’ /g/ /a/ /t/.

**Phoneme Isolation= recognizing individual sounds in a word

Teacher: What is the first sound in “tiger?” Students: /t/

**Phoneme Identification= recognizing the same sound in different words.
Teacher: What sound is the same in “can,” “car,” and “cap?” Students: The first sound, /c/, is the same.

***Phoneme Categorization=Recognizing the word in a set of three or four words that has the “odd” sound. Teacher shows a dod, a log, and a cat.

***Phoneme Blending= listening to a sequence of separately

spoken phonemes and combining them to form a word.

Teacher: What is the word /s/k/a/t/?

Students: skate.

***Phoneme Segmentation : Breaking a word into its separate sounds

and saying each sound as it is tapped out, counted, or signaled.
Teacher: How many sounds (phonemes) are in “park?” Students: /p/ ar/k/. Three sounds.