Phonological awareness vs phonics

Phonemic Awareness vs. Phonics | Heggerty

In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these two terms are often confused or used interchangeably. Both components are absolutely essential for reading, but it is important to understand that they are not the same thing.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, called phonemes. Phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, and the focus is on the sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonics, however, unlike phonics, phonemic awareness does not involve print or letter names. It is critical to understand the difference between the two, as reading is phonologically based, not visual as we often think it is.

Phonemic awareness instruction provides children with the understanding that the words they hear in oral language are not whole units but are co-articulated sounds that make up a word. Once children have this understanding, we can have them isolate, blend, segment and manipulate those sounds. These phonemic awareness skills are necessary to becoming a proficient, fluent reader.

The basic phonemic awareness skill of blending directly correlates to phonic decoding or sounding out a word. When we blend, we take the parts (sounds) and blend them together to make a whole word. For example, the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/ blended together make the word sun.

Segmenting is also a basic phonemic awareness skill. Segmenting mirrors blending and directly correlates to encoding or spelling. When we segment, we take the whole word and break it into parts. If I segment the word plan into all of the phonemes I hear, /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/, I will be able to spell that word once I have letter-sound knowledge (phonics).

Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?

In the past, many parents and educators have thought that teaching blending and segmenting was adequate phonemic awareness instruction. However, research shows that instruction in phoneme manipulation plays a critical role in creating proficient and fluent readers. As Louisa Moats states in her podcast Of Hard Words and Straw Men, “Perhaps the most critical and least-practiced component of effective early instruction is phoneme awareness. Awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words, facility at manipulating those sounds, and the links between speech and print must be mastered for students to be fluent readers and accurate spellers of an alphabetic writing system like ours.”

Phoneme manipulation includes adding, deleting and substituting sounds in words. When engaging in these phonemic awareness activities, students learn they can make more words by manipulating individual sounds. For example, I can add /m/ at the beginning of at to make the word mat. I can also delete phonemes to make new words – the word play without /l/ is pay. I could also substitute a sound to make a new word. In the same word play I can change the /l/ to a /r/ and the new word is pray/prey. If students are able to manipulate phonemes orally, they will be able to transfer these skills to reading and writing during phonics instruction.

Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds – they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

What is Phonics?

While phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, phonics instruction is both visual and auditory. The focus of phonics instruction is letter-sound relationships. During explicit phonics instruction students are taught the letter or letter combinations that represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language.

As students match letters or letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they apply the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes with the print that represents each sound. In this way, phonemic awareness is connected to phonics. When students know the sounds the letters they see in print make, they are able to blend or manipulate those sounds to read words. When spelling, students hear the whole word, segment the word into sounds and match the letter or letter combinations to the sound it makes.

Critics of explicit phonics instruction believe that the English language is too unpredictable, and students should learn to use context or visual cues to “read” words rather than sounding them out. While it is true that English is not always predictable, it is still an alphabetic language with many consistencies. In fact, 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Additionally, many of the irregular words are only often irregular by one phoneme only.

For example, in the word the, the initial sound /th/ is phonetically correct, and the letter e saying /u/ is not. Compare this to using context clues, in which only 25% of words can be predicted through context (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox). Many of those words are function words like the and an. As readers move on to more content-focused texts, only 10% of words can be predicted by context (Gough, et al., 1983).

Why Should We Teach Both?

To understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, we must first understand that reading is not natural. We do not learn to read the same way we learn to speak. In fact, reading is relatively new when we compare the amount of time humans have been communicating orally to when reading first came on the scene. As Barbara Foorman so clearly states, “Humans are biologically specialized to produce language and have done so for nearly 1 million years. Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate children in the world.”

It is essential to explicitly teach students how sounds in words work (phonemic awareness) and how those sounds connect to the letters they see in print (phonics). Phonemic Awareness instruction does not replace phonics instruction, but rather, both skills are necessary when teaching students to decode words accurately and automatically. As Wiley Blevins explains, “Phonemic awareness training provides the foundation on which phonics instruction is built. Thus, children need solid phonemic awareness training for phonics instruction to be effective.”

According to the research brief completed by the EAB, reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade should have a greater focus on word decoding until students become fluent readers. Much work has been done around Linnea Ehri’s phases of word reading to help us understand how phonemic awareness progresses into phonics, phonic decoding and eventually fluent and automatic reading.

In the partial alphabetic phase of reading, children begin to understand that words are made up of individual sounds and learn the letters that represent those sounds. As they move beyond the partial alphabetic stage, and into the full alphabetic stage children begin using the skills of blending and segmenting to decode and encode words.

The Literacy Gap

It has often been thought that if children could blend and segment they would be proficient readers. However, blending and segmenting are only enough to get children to the full and consolidated alphabetic phases, not the automatic phase of reading. This is the cause of the lack of proficient readers our nation produces. In 2019, NAEP scores revealed that only 35% of 4th graders and 34% of 8th were considered to be proficient readers. Many of our students are left at the basic or below basic level of reading.There are two main contributors to the struggle to create proficient readers:

Students are not explicitly taught phonemic awareness and phonics. Instead, they think of words as visual and memorize them as whole units. They tend to guess at words using picture clues or the beginning sounds in a word. As we shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” in 3rd grade and beyond, these students do not have any strategies to read unknown words.
Students may have received explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, but only to the basic levels of blending and segmenting. This allows students to sound out words, but does not give them the skills necessary to turn unknown words into automatic sight words. Sounding out words, or phonic decoding, does not allow students to focus on the content and comprehend what they are reading. Instead, they are laboring over the words they are reading and focusing on decoding.

All of Ehri’s phases of reading are important to the development of a reader. However, we don’t want students to get stuck in the full and consolidated alphabetic phases. We need to move beyond those stages and provide advanced phonemic awareness instruction with phoneme manipulation to allow students to reach the automatic phase. We can show students how the work we do through the air can transfer to print, allowing them to read and spell more words.

Bringing Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction Together

While phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same thing, they do enjoy a reciprocal relationship. We do not need to wait for phonemic awareness to be fully developed before beginning phonics instruction. Instead, educators should help students understand the connection between phonemic awareness and phonics. When planning reading instruction, phonemic awareness only needs to be about 10-12 minutes of the literacy block for the primary grades. This instruction should include early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills.

Within the same literacy block, instruction should teach students how to apply the phonemic awareness skills to print, focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We can explicitly show students how blending sounds through the air connects to reading words as we blend the sounds the letters represent to read a word. We can model spelling words by segmenting whole words into individual sounds. Once we hear the sounds in words, we use our phonics knowledge to use the appropriate grapheme(s) to represent the sounds we hear.

Heggerty’s new foundational skills curriculum, brings together explicit phonics instruction with phonemic awareness lessons for a comprehensive approach to early literacy instruction that’s easy to implement (and easy to love!) Learn more >

For older students, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can happen in tandem. We show students how we can manipulate phonemes in words by changing phonemes within print. Repeated practice allows students “to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory” (Ehri, 2014). These repeated exposures to grapheme-phoneme correspondences is necessary for orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping uses sound-to-letter relationships to anchor phonemes in a word’s pronunciation to the printed letter strings into long term memory for future retrieval.

It is important to note that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needs to be systematic, explicit and consistent. A sprinkling of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction here and there will not provide the repetition and practice needed to become automatic decoders of print. These skills are also a means to an end and at no point the only literacy instruction necessary to create fluent and proficient readers. However, these skills are not optional, and they lay the foundation on which additional reading components are built.

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Introduction

Learn the definitions of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness — and how these pre-reading listening skills relate to phonics.

Letter of completion

After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness: what’s the difference?

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes. The most sophisticated — and last to develop — is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and playing with the sounds in spoken words.

Phonological awareness (PA) involves a continuum of skills that develop over time and that are crucial for reading and spelling success, because they are central to learning to decode and spell printed words. Phonological awareness is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development — in pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade for typical readers.

Explicit teaching of phonological awareness in these early years can eliminate future reading problems for many students. However, struggling decoders of any age can work on phonological awareness, especially if they evidence problems in blending or segmenting phonemes.

How about phonological awareness and phonics?

Phonological awareness refers to a global awareness of sounds in spoken words, as well as the ability to manipulate those sounds.

Phonics refers to knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to apply that knowledge in decoding unfamiliar printed words.

So, phonological awareness refers to oral language and phonics refers to print. Both of these skills are very important and tend to interact in reading development, but they are distinct skills; children can have weaknesses in one of them but not the other.

For example, a child who knows letter sounds but cannot blend the sounds to form the whole word has a phonological awareness (specifically, a phonemic awareness) problem. Conversely, a child who can orally blend sounds with ease but mixes up vowel letter sounds, reading pit for pet and set for sit, has a phonics problem.

44 phonemes

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet that make up 44 speech sounds, or phonemes.

Letters vs. phonemes

Dr. Louisa Moats explains to a kindergarten teacher why it is critical to differentiate between the letters and sounds within a word when teaching children to read and write.

Next: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Pre-Test >

15 Learning Disorder Terms Parents Need to Know

If your child has a speech, reading, or learning or attention disorder, you may have come across these terms on social media, forums, or at professional appointments. .

Terms such as phonological awareness, auditory processing disorder, auditory accuracy, phonological memory…

Understanding these 15 terms will help you better organize the help you need for your child:

1. Phonetics

Phonetics - this term refers to the sound structure of the language: the relationship between a letter or a combination of letters (for example: chi, shu, cha, yes) and the speech sounds they represent.

Phonetics is the foundation of reading and writing skills. Thanks to phonetics, the child decodes written words in the process of reading.

2. Phonemes

A phoneme is the sound of speech. When we speak Russian, we make 42 different speech sounds. But there are only 33 letters in the Russian alphabet. This is one of the reasons why Russian is difficult to learn.

3. Phonemic perception

Phonemic perception is the ability to perceive individual speech sounds (phonemes) in words and work with them.

Learn how to develop phonemic awareness from an early age.

4. Phonological awareness

Phonological awareness is the awareness that words are made up of smaller parts (such as syllables and sounds).

The term includes a range of sound-related skills that a student needs to develop reading skills. As the child develops phonological awareness, he/she not only comes to understand that words are made up of small sound units (phonemes), but also learns that words can be broken down into larger sound "chunks" known as syllables. .

5. Phonological accuracy

Phonological accuracy refers to the ability to correctly distinguish between individual phonemes (e.g., in similar-sounding words that begin with the same sound) or other aspects of phonology (e.g., rhyming, number of syllables).

Phonological accuracy is key to listening and reading skills. This allows the student to make a clear distinction between similar-sounding words (e.g. "heron" and "saber" or "picture" and "basket"), including morphological differences that can drastically change the word's meaning and/or grammatical function (e.g. " known" and "unknown" or "inserted" and "exposed").

The ability to quickly and accurately identify speech sounds is critical to learning the rules of phonetics and matching spoken language to text correctly.

A child with well-developed phonological accuracy will more easily develop decoding skills, understand word and sentence structure, develop vocabulary, follow instructions, and participate more actively in class work.

Well developed phonological precision helps in:

Understanding and following verbal instructions
Listening skills
Development of reading skills
Learning the rules of phonetics

6.

Phonological fluency

Phonological fluency is the understanding that words are made up of different sounds and the ability to quickly and accurately identify and manipulate these sounds.

Phonological fluency is critical to learning to read. This allows the student to memorize sequences of sounds and manipulate them quickly and accurately. This makes it easier to both write words and decode them. The more effectively the reader is able to decode, the more of his cognitive resources (mental abilities) he can focus on understanding the text.

A student with good phonological fluency will also find it easier to learn new words while reading. When confronted with a new word, a student who can accurately pronounce the word is more likely to recognize and understand its meaning.

Well-developed phonological fluency helps in:

Learning the rules of phonetics
Development of reading skills
Development of writing skills

7.

Phonological memory

Phonological memory is the ability to retain speech sounds in memory. This is essential for spoken language and tasks such as comparing phonemes and making connections between phonemes and letters. It also helps with listening and reading understanding of sentences, as it allows you to remember the sequence of words in order.

Phonological memory plays a key role in the development of oral and written language skills. This allows the student to:

Memorize and manipulate sound sequences
Associate spoken words with written ones
Memorize new words by determining their meanings
Remember the beginning of a sentence by listening to it to the end.

The ability to remember speech sounds is important for the correct understanding of sentences when changing the order of words in a sentence changes its meaning (for example, "The monkey bites the boy" and "The boy bites the monkey").

Accurate memorization of word order also contributes to building accurate ideas about sentence structure and acquiring knowledge of syntax.

A student with a well-developed phonological memory develops phonemic perception and decoding skills more easily, knowledge of vocabulary and sentence structure is formed. Such a student follows instructions better and takes a more active part in class work with presentations, etc.

8. Auditory Processing / Auditory Perception

Auditory processing refers to what the brain does with the audio information it "hears". This includes various skills such as identifying and locating sounds, listening to background noise, and processing what is heard when the sound is fuzzy.

When a student manipulates the auditory information he has heard, but it doesn't sound right, this is called an auditory processing disorder (or auditory perception disorder).

This can happen if the child has difficulty understanding speech in background noise or has difficulty identifying where the sound is coming from. Or it could be a problem in distinguishing speech sounds that sound similar.

Find out 5 common hearing loss (HAI) myths!

9. Sequencing of audio information

Sequencing of audio information refers to the ability to identify and remember the order in which a series of sounds were presented. This is very important for matching sound sequences to letter sequences in decoding and writing.

Organizing audio information is critical to developing speaking and writing skills. The ability to identify and remember the order of sounds in words is important for recognizing subtle differences between words (such as "pot" and "top") and for developing phonemic perception and decoding skills.

A student who has a well-developed ordering of sound information understands and absorbs information better, develops better oral and written speech skills and concentrates attention. Such a student becomes an expert reader and a successful student.

See also: How do weak cognitive skills affect learning?

10. Listening word comprehension

Listening word comprehension refers to the ability to accurately identify words heard based on auditory cues alone, without the aid of visual or contextual cues.

Listening comprehension of words is critical to the development of spoken language and vocabulary, and therefore essential to the development of reading and writing. This skill allows the student to accurately and efficiently identify words in speech and helps him form a correct understanding of the information presented by ear.

A student with well developed listening comprehension will find it easier to follow instructions and participate in class discussions; it is easier to answer questions, complete tasks and remember information; and it's much easier to become a proficient reader.

He will also find it easier to carry on a conversation in a noisy environment or when there are distractions.

11. Hearing accuracy

Hearing accuracy is the ability to accurately identify differences between sounds and correctly identify sound sequences.

Accuracy in listening is the foundation of speech and reading skills. This skill allows the student to quickly and accurately identify and distinguish between rapidly changing sounds, which is very important for distinguishing between phonemes (the smallest units of speech that distinguish one word from another).

A student with well-developed listening comprehension will find it much easier to follow instructions and participate in class work; it is easier to remember questions, tasks and information; and it's much easier to become a proficient reader. He will also be able to:

Read and write fast
Focus on verbally presented information
Maintain a conversation in a noisy environment or when there are distractions.

12. Listening comprehension

Listening comprehension is the ability to understand consecutive sentences and extract meaning from what is heard.

Listening comprehension is one of the foundations of oral and written speech. To develop more complex speech skills, a child needs to develop good listening comprehension. Well developed listening comprehension allows the student to recognize the meanings formed by combinations of words and series of sentences.

A student with good listening comprehension will find it much easier to respond to assignments and class discussions; it will be easier to answer questions and remember information; and it is easier to become a proficient reader and a successful learner. He will also be able to do well:

Focus on oral information
Making sense of history
Correctly follow verbal instructions
Correctly understand and answer questions

Synthetic phonetics and learning to read essay example

This activity will describe and explain the teaching of phonetics as an approach to teaching reading. This will be done by identifying the research behind systematic synthetic phonetics and identifying legitimate expectations set by the government. It will also look at why phonetics is a priority in elementary schools.

Acoustics is a teaching method in which children are taught to read by teaching them the relationship between sounds and letters. Children need to know the alphabet code and mixing and segmentation skills in order to read. In phonetics, letters are synthesized, so children are taught to mix letters.

The National Curriculum provides that children “will be able to read fluently and confidently” by the end of primary school. The objectives of the National Curriculum are that children can "write clearly, accurately and coherently" and "read easily, fluently and with good understanding". This highlights the importance of teaching phonetics early on, as children are expected to be reading by the end of the first stage. The curriculum states that "spoken language is at the heart of the development of reading and writing", highlighting the importance of teaching phonetics in the early years. All reading requirements for one year include children using their phonetic knowledge as the curriculum states that children should be taught to "decode words" and "mix sounds". (DoE, 2013)

In elementary school, children are taught that phonemes are the sounds of letters and graphemes are individual sounds. Then they learn different types of phonemes. A digraph is two letters that make the same sound; e.g. /sh/, /th/, /ee/. A trigraph is three letters that make one sound; e.g. /igh/, /tch/. A square is four letters that make one sound; e.g. /ough/, /eighth/. Teaching correct terminology to children is valuable as it avoids confusion. Children should then notice phonemes in words that will help them develop their reading and writing skills.

Phonological awareness is a broad skill that involves recognizing and manipulating parts of the English language such as words, syllables, and onsets and images. Children with phonological awareness are able to recognize and speak rhymes, can identify the number of syllables in a word, and recognize words with the same initial sounds as "most" and "money". Phonemic awareness is the ability to focus on and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words. There are 44 phonemes in English that can be mixed together to form syllables and words. Phonemic awareness is important for children because it is the foundation for spelling and word recognition skills. Phonemic awareness can predict how well children will learn to read during the first two years of elementary school. Students who experience reading difficulties generally have lower levels of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness than their peers, with the exception of SEND and EAL. (ReadingRockets.org, 2018)

In phonetics, children are taught to mix learned phonemes in order to speak words. Mixing is when phonemes mix with each other through repetition and gradually speed up speaking phonemes until the word is spoken correctly. For example, a child pronouncing /c/ /a/ /t/ will eventually develop the ability to pronounce "cat" fluently and correctly. Children will also learn to break words into phonemes. Segmentation is when a word is broken down into individual phonemes. For example, the word "closed" would be segmented into /sh/ /u/ /t/. This skill demonstrates children's ability to recognize phonemes in words, which demonstrates deep phonemic awareness.

The Letters and Sounds program is designed to help teachers teach children how the alphabet works in reading and writing. This is done through systematic phonetics so that children can achieve the goal of reading. Letters and Sounds is designed as a short phonics program with the goal of providing children with fluent word recognition skills for reading by the end of Key Stage 1. Teachers should ensure that children understand the purpose of learning phonics and have many opportunities to apply their developing phonics skills in interesting and engaging learning activities. reading and writing. The program of letters and sounds has six phase structures. The first stage is focused on nursery and foster children aged. It is here that the learning activity is divided into seven functions: environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhythm, alliteration, voice sounds, blending and segmentation. The second phase is for older children and should last up to six weeks. In the second stage, children must learn the nineteen letters of the alphabet and the phonemes for each of those letters. Students will learn how to mix sounds together so that words break down into separate sounds. By the end of the second stage, children should begin to read simple sentences. The third phase is for the reception of children again and should last about twelve weeks. Children will learn the remaining 7 letters of the alphabet and the phoneme for each letter. They will then be taught common digraphs such as ch, oo and th which they will hear and use most often. The reading of signatures, sentences and questions will be presented to the students in the third stage. At the end of the third stage, most children will learn that there is one grapheme for every phoneme in English. The fourth phase is for older children and should take four to six weeks. At this stage, children should be taught to mix and break up longer words. The fifth phase should be within the entire first year. Children are taught digraphs and trigages. The sixth phase is to be taught for year two and older. In this step, children will practice spelling, prefixes and suffixes, double and silent letters

The founding phase at the beginning of the year emphasizes the importance of children building vocabulary and integrating ideas and experiences. The goal of early learning to read requires children to use phonetic knowledge to decipher words in order to read them correctly. Similarly, the purpose of writing requires children to use phonetic knowledge to write words that match spoken sounds and write legible sentences.

The National Curriculum states that "word reading" and "comprehension" are essential for learning to read. This is due to the components of a simple view of reading which suggest that the model is influential and vital in teaching reading.

The simple concept of reading consists of two text processes: word recognition and language comprehension. Word recognition is the ability to correctly and easily recognize written words without contextual help. Language comprehension is the ability to process words, phrases, and sentence grammar correctly. The simple representation formula is: word recognition x language comprehension = reading comprehension by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 shows that reading comprehension is not possible without the child having the ability of both text processes.

The simple concept of reading has contributed to the teaching and learning of phonetics as teachers can assess children using the model to help them understand where each child needs improvement.

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