Phonemic Awareness

In the research on beginning reading, we generally target five different pieces: phonological awareness, vocabulary, phonics, fluency and comprehension. Phonological awareness basically deals with the sound system independent of any text. The idea is that the sound system is predictive of how we read in text. So, I mean, that’s a peculiar thing in itself.

The real key to learning to read is becoming what is known in the field as phonologically aware. Phonological awareness means knowledge – the awareness that words can actually be broken down into smaller parts and those parts are called phonemes or speech sounds. And the phonemes build words both for oral language and for written language. 

And it turns out that children who have difficulty with written language as a group, not all of them but the large majority of them, have difficulty in becoming phonologically aware and playing little word games. Being able to know that the word plate without the /p/ is late. Now, people who have coded the whole word who can say the word plate perfectly well – unless they’re phonologically aware that they can get inside the word, they have very great difficulty in knowing that plate without the /p/ would make the word late. Or plate without the /t/ would make the word plae.

Dr. Reid Lyon: Well, when we say question number one, what does it take to be able to learn to read? We know that it initially takes a clear understanding that the language we hear is composed of smaller sounds. These are called phonemes, the smallest units of sound. And people say sure, you know, cat has three sounds /c/ /a/ /t/. And I can ask people all the time how many sounds they hear in big or cat and they say three. But they don’t. You don’t hear three sounds in cat, I don’t hear three sounds in cat, and our kids never get any practice with the sounds in cat because nature has given us an oral language that allows us to communicate rapidly so that when I say cat I don’t say /c/ /a/ /t/. What the hell is a /c/ /a/ /t/? What I say is cat and the minute I start to say cat that /a/ and the /t/ sound co-articulate or bundle together and come by the ear as one pulse of sound. Phoneme awareness is much more difficult because you don’t hear the sounds. The brain has to pull from that one burble or acoustic bundle the three sounds because the ear won’t. The ear never hears the individual sounds unless we spell them out.

Phonics without the letters is the most frequent description I hear from teachers, which is not right at all. At the basic level, a better summary of phonemic awareness is can you pay attention to the sounds of words as distinct from their meanings? Given that, the next level is whether you understand that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of these little elements or speech gestures called phonemes, and that the letters represent those left to right?

However, the concern that I have is that many people who are using the term do not really understand the factor itself, and how much you have to do to bring that in. Just for example, kindergarten teachers now are told to start the development of phoneme awareness by working on rhyming with children. And rhyming requires some awareness of phonemes.

Well, if Smith is wrong, if context isn’t driving this whole thing, what is?” People were starting to question that in the late 1970’s and starting to ask the Well, what is? question. Then the field was more ripe than it was back in 1963 for the phonological awareness work.